https://x.com/NASAJPL/status/1940557360218755402
On July 1, 2025 the NASA-funded ATLAS survey telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile, picked up a comet on a path that isn’t bound to the Sun. Named 3I/ATLAS, it’s only the third interstellar object ever seen, after ʻOumuamua in 2017 and comet Borisov in 2019.
No threat: it will stay at least 1.6 AU (about 240 million km) from Earth. It reaches its closest point to the Sun around October 30, 2025, about 1.4 AU out, just inside Mars’s orbit. Archive images from before discovery go back to June 14.
It’s a free sample of another star system, and it’s flying through ours.
Source: x.com · Also: NASA Planetary Defense blog · Minor Planet Center MPEC 2025-N12