- NASA released images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS passing through the solar system
- The agency confirmed 3I/ATLAS as a natural comet, dismissing alien technology theories
- Data from HiRISE and MAVEN added to previous observations by Hubble and James Webb
NASA has finally broken the silence and shared images of 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object passing through our solar system. The US-based space agency referred to it as an "interstellar comet" in its latest statements, and, in a way, debunked wild theories suggesting that the 3I/ATLAS appears to be an "alien" technology.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who was looking for more information, reacted to the images, quoting Sherlock Holmes: "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."
"I was not surprised. There was no big news. NASA repeated the official mantra that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until recently because of the government shutdown," Loeb said in a blog post on Medium.
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Loeb mentioned the image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on October 2, 2025. The comet was about 0.2 astronomical units (19 million miles) from the spacecraft, looking like a "fuzzy ball of light".
The scientist stated that the new data by HiRISE and a UV spectroscopic detection of hydrogen by MAVEN "adds slightly to what we already learned this summer about 3I/ATLAS from the Hubble, James Webb Space Telescope and SPHEREx space telescopes.
"NASA's representatives should have emphasized what we do not understand about 3I/ATLAS rather than insist that it is a familiar comet from a new birth environment," he said.
Also Read | Decoding Mysterious Anti-Tail And Tail Jets Emanating From Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS
"There was no mention of the 12 puzzles associated with 3I/ATLAS, including the anomaly that its mass is a million times larger than that of 1I/'Oumuamua and a thousand times larger than that of 2I/Borisov."
He said that one would expect to discover a million objects with a similar mass before finding 3I/ATLAS, "unless this rare package was intentionally targeting the inner solar system."
"NASA's officials should have at least acknowledged this unlikely fortune. In case 3I/ATLAS is a natural icy rock as they suggest, mother Nature was kinder to NASA than expected from a random delivery of rocks by at least a factor of 100,000 based on the two anomalies mentioned above."
He even claimed that images taken by some amateur astronomers were "far more exciting than the HiRISE image shared by NASA".
