#3iatlas

#3iatlas

It's fascinated scientists ever since it was first observed in early July. Now, NASA's Mars Perseverance rover has seemingly managed to snap images of the errant visitor as it made its flyby of the Red Planet. Two pictures, shared by the space agency over the weekend after being captured by Perseverance's Right Navigation camera (Navcam), show a singular streak contrasted against the emptiness of space around it.

At the time, astronomer Jerry Ehman spotted the highly unusual outburst in printed out records, annotating the major radio band fluctuation with the word "Wow!" in red pen, thereby giving it a memorable nickname: the "Wow! Signal." The incident has remained a mystery for decades, never spotted again in over 48 years, leaving plenty of questions in its wake. Where did it come from, and why did it only last for 72 seconds?

'During the total lunar eclipse, we captured a detailed image of Comet 3I/ATLAS from the dark skies of Namibia,' astronomer Michael Jäger shared.

To back up his far-fetched theory, Loeb has pointed out that 3I/ATLAS' highly unusual trajectory brings it suspiciously close to Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. In a new blog post, the astronomer pointed out that the object will come within just 1.67 million miles of Mars' path around the Sun, in what he characterized as a "remarkable fine-tuning" of the object's path.

"There were claims of a tail, but since 3I/ATLAS is accelerating and its current size is not much larger than the angular resolution of Earth-based telescopes, it is not easy to avoid fictitious elongation of the image as a result of the object's motion."