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The first images from Mars of the Manhattan-sized interstellar object 3I/ATLAS have been released as NASA has gone radio silent due to the government shutdown.
Glowing in the Martian sky, 3I/ATLAS was captured by a total of seven orbiters from several agencies as it made its closest pass on its path through the inner solar system — coming within 12 million miles of the Red Planet.
The European Space Agency released the first images of the mysterious interstellar object recorded by their ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on Tuesday.
The craft captured images with its Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System — with a tiny, fuzzy white dot which shows the center of the glowing coma of 3I/ATLAS.
CaSSIS was not able to distinguish the nucleus from the coma of the object because it was too far away and the ExoMars Orbiter has limited ability to observe far-off fliers, the ESA said.
“This was a very challenging observation for the instrument. The comet is around 10,000 to 100,000 times fainter than our usual target,” Nick Thomas, Principal Investigator of the CaSSIS camera explained.
The ESA is still waiting for the processing of images from the Mars Express orbiter.
NASA released puzzling, contextless images over the weekend that left many skywatchers scratching their heads.
The American space agency dropped two images recorded on Oct. 4 by the Perseverance rover which navigates across the rocky red terrain of Mars.
Those images were shared as the “Image of the Week” on NASA’s Mars website, but the unexpectedly cylindrical object was not explicitly labeled as 3I/ATLAS.
Harvard Astrophysicist Avie Loeb determined that the lengthy impression left on the film was due to the space agency overlaying hundreds of Navcam snaps of the object as it passed through the Martian sky over a ten minute period.
NASA’s sharing of images from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph onboard the MAVEN spacecraft have been halted due to the ongoing government shutdown.
Almost the entirety of the space agency’s communications department has been furloughed due to the funding lapse.
However, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens assured American space cadets, “The mission is still on.”
The space agency said that data, including images, from 3I/ATLAS’s Mars pass-by will be released once the government shutdown is resolved.
English (US)