NASA has announced that it will release images of 3I/ATLAS captured by several of its missions on November 19. The space agency had stopped sending out updates and making official releases for over a month because of the government shutdown. This meant a lack of data from the American space agency on only the third interstellar visitor. NASA will be making public all the images in a live event at 3 pm EST. “NASA will host a live event at 3 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Nov. 19, to share imagery of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS collected by a number of the agency’s missions,” it wrote in a release. The event will be held at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. It will be available to watch on NASA+, the NASA app, the agency’s website and YouTube channel, and Amazon Prime.
Officials present at the briefing will include NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division and Tom Statler, lead scientist for solar system small bodies. NASA went silent when astronomers across the world started asking questions about it. It stopped all updates on October 1, right around when 3I/ATLAS was supposed to make its closest approach to Mars. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was expected to get the best view of the alien comet because of its location. However, we are yet to see what it saw one and a half months ago. Harvard scientist Avi Loeb called on the space agency to release the images and not hold science hostage to politics. The wait will finally be over soon.
NASA says it was watching 3I/ATLAS all this time
“Assets within NASA’s science missions give the United States the unique capability to observe 3I/ATLAS almost the entire time it passes through our celestial neighbourhood,” the space agency further noted. It added that it had “complementary scientific instruments” to study it from different directions and gauge the comet’s behaviour. “These assets include both spacecraft across the solar system, as well as ground-based observatories.”
NASA’s silence triggered misinformation as people started further peddling alien theories, sharing AI-doctored images on social media platforms. However, with the American space agency now set to release the data it holds on 3I/ATLAS, along with several pictures gathered by various missions, there is hope that the picture on this mysterious visitor will become clearer.