{"id":120231,"date":"2025-11-06T01:35:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T01:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/120231\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T01:35:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T01:35:12","slug":"chinas-mars-orbiter-observes-interstellar-object-3i-atlas-xinhua","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/120231\/","title":{"rendered":"China&#8217;s Mars orbiter observes interstellar object 3I\/ATLAS-Xinhua"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" controls=\"controls\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/202511061083ea9bab5f4196bfe0162272a5d578_XxjwshE000005_20251106_CBMFN0A001.jpg\"\/>Photo released on Jan. 1, 2022 by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) shows the group photo of the orbiter and Mars. (CNSA\/Handout via Xinhua)<\/p>\n<p>BEIJING, Nov. 6 (Xinhua) &#8212; The orbiter of China&#8217;s Mars mission Tianwen-1 has successfully observed an interstellar object, coded 3I\/ATLAS, using its high-resolution camera, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).<\/p>\n<p>During the observation, the spacecraft was about 30 million kilometers from 3I\/ATLAS, making it one of the closest observations by a probe of this interstellar object.<\/p>\n<p>Data received and processed by the ground application system showed clear cometary features in the images. Researchers created an animation from a series of images taken over 30 seconds, demonstrating the object&#8217;s movement through space. These observations are now being used for further scientific study of 3I\/ATLAS.<\/p>\n<p>This successful observation represents an important extended mission for Tianwen-1. The detection of such a faint celestial object serves as a valuable technical test for China&#8217;s Tianwen-2 mission, which was launched in May &#8212; aiming to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid and explore a main-belt comet, the CNSA said.\u00a0 \u25a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo released on Jan. 1, 2022 by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) shows the group photo of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[607,111,139,69,147,84706],"class_list":{"0":"post-120231","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-china","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-tianwen-1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}