Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS: Earth Flyby
Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19, 2025, at a distance of 1.8 astronomical units. This is about 900 light-seconds. Still, this deep exposure captures the comet from another star system as it gently swept across a faint background of stars in the constellation Leo about 4 days earlier, on the night of December 15. Though faint, colors emphasized in the image data, show off the comet's yellowish dust tail and bluish ion tail along with a greenish tinged coma. And even while scrutinized by arrays of telescopes and spacecraft from planet Earth, 3I ATLAS is headed out of the Solar System. It is presently moving outward along a hyperbolic trajectory at about 64 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, too fast to be bound the Sun's gravity.
The NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Chile discovered the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on July 1, 2025.
Comet 3I/ATLAS appears relatively normal when compared to Solar System comets, therefore providing more evidence that our Solar System is a somewhat typical one. For example, Comet 3I/ATLAS has a broadly similar chemical composition and ejected dust.
Learn more about Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS:
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/
Release Date: Dec. 26, 2025
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