Nasa releases close-up pictures of comet flying by from another star system | Nasa
NASA published close-up photos on Wednesday of the interstellar comet which is making a rapid tour of the solar system.
Discovered over the summer, the comet known as 3I/Atlas is only the third confirmed object to visit our corner of the cosmos from another star. It flew safely past Mars last month.
Three NASA spacecraft on and near the Red Planet zoomed in on the comet as it passed just 29 million miles away, revealing a fuzzy white spot. The European Space Agency’s two satellites around Mars also carried out observations.
Other NASA spacecraft will be on the lookout in the coming weeks, including the James Webb Space Telescope. At the same time, astronomers point their ground-based telescopes at the approaching comet, which is about 307 meters from Earth. Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project zoomed in from Italy on Wednesday.
The comet is visible from Earth in the pre-dawn sky using binoculars or a telescope.
“Everyone who controls a telescope wants to observe it because it’s a fascinating and rare opportunity,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, NASA’s acting director of astrophysics.
The comet will come closest to Earth at 269 million kilometers in mid-December. Then it will return to interstellar space, never to return.
ESA’s Jupiter-bound Juice probe has been training its cameras and science instruments on the comet all month, particularly after its closest pass to the sun. But scientists won’t get any of those observations until February, because Juice’s main antenna serves as a heat shield when it’s close to the sun, limiting the flow of data.
Named after the Chilean telescope that first spotted it, the comet is estimated to measure between 440 meters and 5.6 km in diameter. Observations indicate that the exceptionally fast comet could come from a star system older than ours, “which gives me goosebumps,” said Tom Statler, a NASA scientist.
“This means that 3I/Atlas is not just a window into another solar system, it is a window into a deep past and one so deep that it predates even the formation of our Earth and our sun,” Statler told reporters.
NASA officials were quick to dispel rumors that this friendly visitor from the solar system, as they called it, might be some kind of alien craft. They said that due to the federal government shutdown, they were unable to respond to all of the theories that have arisen in recent weeks.
The space agency is still searching for life beyond Earth, “but 3I/Atlas is a comet,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya.
