Overview
- NOIRLab, NASA and ESA report that 3I/ATLAS shows no signs of artificial propulsion or maneuvers and behaves like a conventional comet.
- Spectroscopy, including VLT follow-up, detected familiar comet molecules such as hydrogen cyanide, methane, water and carbon monoxide.
- The object follows a hyperbolic path at roughly 60–61 km/s and will not return to the Solar System.
- NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office says the comet will not come closer than about 1.6 astronomical units from Earth, posing no threat.
- ESA’s ExoMars TGO and Mars Express captured extremely faint images near Mars, as a separate arXiv study proposes that cosmic-ray processing may have formed a CO2‑rich outer layer that obscures original material, a hypothesis still under evaluation.