Although comet 3I/ATLAS has come and gone, it should stay an influential analysis topic for the foreseeable future. As the interstellar comet handed the solar and Earth in late 2025, a number of spacecraft studied its conduct and composition. Since then, a gradual stream of knowledge has been returning to Earth-based scientists, who’re making an attempt to interpret the mysterious nature of 3I/ATLAS.
The newest glimpse of 3I/ATLAS has simply arrived, revealing the comet’s trajectory only one week after it made its closest method to the solar on October 29-30, 2025. An picture taken by the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) exhibits the telltale options of 3I/ATLAS, together with its tail and coat of gasoline. Similar photos that at the moment are within the palms of ESA scientists might quickly make clear what made 3I/ATLAS completely different from typical comets.
Read More: Other ATLAS Comet Appears Fragmented After Close Encounter with The Sun
A Snapshot of Comet 3I/ATLAS
Comet 3I/ATLAS imaged from Juice — a mission on its method to discover Jupiter’s icy moons.
(Image Credit: ESA/Juice/JANUS/CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
Throughout the latter half of 2025, Comet 3I/ATLAS piqued the curiosity of scientists and most of the people alike. The comet’s journey impressed a whirlwind of research and theories that sought to reply many questions; everybody puzzled the place the interstellar customer got here from and desperately needed to know what it was doing in our Solar System.
Scientists have been fast to guarantee folks that 3I/ATLAS was no menace to Earth, confirming that it was only a comet, and nothing extra. They monitored the comet’s route till it will definitely made its closest method to Earth on December 19, 2025, at about 270 million km (168 million miles) from our planet.
Multiple spacecraft noticed and captured photos of 3I/ATLAS because it hurtled by house. The newest picture from Juice, taken on November 6, 2025, has helped ESA scientists perceive how the comet was transferring in relation to the solar.
At the highest left nook of the picture, two arrows point out the route through which the comet was transferring (blue) and the relative route of the solar (yellow), in accordance with a statement.
Poring Over Data From Juice
The ESA’s Juice spacecraft was launched in April 2023 on a mission to discover Jupiter and its three giant ocean-bearing moons (Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa). But as luck would have it, the spacecraft has additionally managed to collect key particulars on 3I/ATLAS.
The picture from November was taken by JANUS, a multicolor optical digital camera on Juice. At the time the picture was captured, Juice was about 66 million km (41 million miles) away from 3I/ATLAS.
The picture exhibits 3I/ATLAS enveloped in its coma, a brilliant cloud of gasoline and icy mud emitted by the comet’s nucleus. A tail extending away from the comet can be seen.
According to the ESA, JANUS took greater than 120 photos of 3I/ATLAS, which at the moment are being examined by scientists. The photos are joined by knowledge that Juice collected with 4 extra science devices: MAJIS (Moons and Jupiter Imaging Spectrometer), SWI (the Sub-millimeter Wave Instrument), PEP (Particle Environment Package), and UVS (a UV imaging spectrograph).
The Unresolved Secrets of 3I/ATLAS
Data collected by Juice was just lately transmitted again to Earth; the spacecraft had to make use of a smaller medium-gain antenna to ship it, since its important high-gain antenna was already serving as a warmth defend.
Research groups at ESA will analyze the Juice knowledge and pictures to grasp 3I/ATLAS and its options. So far, the comet’s conduct looks as if that of a traditional comet, in accordance with the ESA.
However, the composition of 3I/ATLAS is a special story; scientists beforehand discovered that the comet incorporates an abundance of nickel, however no iron, in accordance with a 2025 pre-print report within the Astrophysical Journal Letters. In addition, the carbon dioxide-to-water ratio in its coma is exceptionally excessive, in accordance with a separate pre-print report within the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Further research on these traits might make clear the place and the way 3I/ATLAS shaped.
More solutions will are available late March, when all the instrument groups on the ESA will convene to go over their findings.
Read More: New Images of Comet 3I/ATLAS Reveal “How Magical the Universe Could Be”
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