Last month, mysterious interstellar object 3I\/ATLAS came within just 18 million miles of Mars during its unusual trajectory through our solar system.<\/p>\n
During its approach, NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to take high-resolution images of the rare visitor, which is widely suspected among experts to be a comet. But thanks to a bureaucratic nightmare triggered by the ongoing federal government shutdown<\/a>, which kicked off just days after the images were taken, scientists have yet to see them over a month later.<\/p>\n Last week, representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) sent a letter<\/a> to interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy, urging the space agency to release the images, which offer roughly three times the resolution<\/a> of the object compared to July images taken by NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope.<\/p>\n \u201cThis information is of great importance to advancing our understanding of interstellar visitors and their interaction with our solar system,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThe brightest pixel in these images will provide our most precise constraint on the object\u2019s size to date.\u201d<\/p>\n Duffy appears to have acknowledged her request \u2014 but the outcome isn\u2019t going to make astronomers happy.<\/p>\n \u201cJust had a good conversation with NASA regarding 3I\/ATLAS,\u201d she tweeted<\/a> on Wednesday. \u201cAs soon as the government reopens, they\u2019ll be releasing images\/data.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, due to bureaucratic reasons, they cannot until then,\u201d Luna wrote.<\/p>\n Fortunately, while we await the release of the images, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has been assisting Luna in her request, pointed out in a blog post<\/a> today that MRO wasn\u2019t the only spacecraft snapping pictures of the intriguing object. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) released images of the rock taken by its Tianwen-1 Mars Orbiter\u2019s High-Resolution Imaging Camera (HiRIC), which also came within just 18,000 miles of 3I\/ATLAS.<\/p>\n \u201cThe released HiRIC images show the nucleus and a surrounding coma with a diameter of several thousand kilometers,\u201d Loeb noted, referring to the fuzzy, glowing atmosphere of gas and dust that surrounds a comet\u2019s solid core.<\/p>\n Getting a more accurate, higher-resolution image of 3I\/ATLAS could allow us to better estimate the actual size of its nucleus. Per Loeb\u2019s previous calculations<\/a>, the object could be \u201canomalously massive,\u201d with a \u201csolid-density nucleus\u201d that \u201cmust be larger than [3.1] miles,\u201d and an estimated mass of more than \u201c33 billion tons.\u201d<\/p>\n Apart from being only the third confirmed interstellar object passing through the solar system, 3I\/ATLAS has also exhibited some surprising behavior, as Loeb has been painstakingly documenting<\/a>.<\/p>\n For instance, November 5 images taken by the R. Naves Observatory in Spain show that 3I\/ATLAS has no tail, which is highly unusual for a comet that only recently passed its closest point to the Sun, or perihelion.<\/p>\n \u201cBased on momentum conservation, I derived here that the mass fraction lost during the perihelion passage of 3I\/ATLAS is larger than 13 percent,\u201d Loeb wrote in a separate blog post<\/a>. \u201cFor a typical comet, this should have resulted in a massive coma with dust and gas that would have been pushed by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind to the shape of a typical cometary tail pointing away from the Sun.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo such tail is visible in the new images from November 5, 2025,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Whether the latest findings could support Loeb\u2019s far more controversial theory<\/a> that 3I\/ATLAS could be a\u00a0relic from an extraterrestrial civilization<\/a>\u00a0that was \u201csent towards the inner solar system by design,\u201d though, remains to be seen.<\/p>\n