Overview

• Hubble images reveal a sunward dust plume and faint tail, definitively identifying 3I/ATLAS as an active comet
• High-resolution data constrain the nucleus diameter between about 320 meters and 5.6 kilometers
• Measured at roughly 209,000 km/h inbound, 3I/ATLAS holds the record as the fastest interstellar object detected
• NASA states the object poses no threat to Earth and will reach perihelion inside Mars’s orbit in late October
• Observations by JWST, TESS, Swift, the Rubin Observatory and other facilities are underway as mission retargeting proposals remain under review