Overview

• Current orbital solutions place perihelion on October 29 at about 1.4 AU and the closest Earth approach near 1.8 AU, keeping the object far from the planet.
• Hubble imaging revised the nucleus size to an estimated 0.6–5.6 kilometers, and NASA’s SPHEREx detected carbon dioxide in the coma consistent with cometary outgassing.
• NASA officials say the object behaves like a typical comet and reiterate it poses no danger to Earth.
• NASA clarified that widely shared cylindrical photos are long‑exposure images of Mars’s moon Phobos rather than 3I/ATLAS.
• News reports note reduced public updates around the object’s pass near Mars, with the U.S. shutdown and a lack of Chinese releases contributing to confusion, while a separate Texas family helped recover a lost NASA experimental balloon.