Cataloguing the journey of comet 3I/ATLAS through the solar system. Because the object comes from outside our solar system, it is just passing through – so we use all the tools at our disposal to observe it before it disappears back into the cosmic dark. A host of NASA missions are coming together to observe this interstellar object, which was first discovered in summer 2025, before it leaves forever. While the comet poses no threat to Earth, NASA’s space telescopes help support the agency's ongoing mission to find, track, and better understand solar system objects.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from Oct. 18 to Nov. 5, 2025, with its WISPR (Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument. The spacecraft snapped around 10 images of the comet per day. During this period, Parker Solar Probe was speeding away from the Sun following its 25th solar flyby on Sept. 15. […]
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission observed the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on Nov. 6 from a distance of about 102 million miles (164 million kilometers). Captured over a period of seven hours, the data gathered by the spacecraft’s Europa Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS) instrument will help scientists determine the composition and distribution of elements in the comet’s coma […]
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS Nov. 30, with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument. At the time, the comet was about 178 million miles (286 million kilometers) from Earth. Hubble tracked the comet as it moved across the sky. As a result, background stars appear as streaks of light. Hubble previously observed […]
NASA’s Psyche observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS over the course of eight hours on Sept. 8 and 9, when the comet was about 33 million miles (53 million kilometers) from the spacecraft. Captured by the mission’s multispectral imager, these observations help astronomers refine the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS. Psyche’s multispectral imager instrument comprises a pair of identical […]
