ChronChina beats US to releasing photos of strange comet by MarsAriana Garcia
Thu, November 6, 2025 at 7:30 PM EST
4 min read
Image of 3I/ATLAS taken by the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter of CNSA. (Cai Jinman & Zhang Wei, CNSA)China has outpaced the United States in releasing the first images of the rare interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it made its close approach to Mars.
On Oct. 3, the comet came within about 18 million miles of the Red Planet. Both China's Tianwen-1 Mars Orbiter and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured it. But while NASA's images remain locked away due to the ongoing U.S. government shutdown, China has already shared its photos with the world.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) released the Tiawen-1 images this week, showing the comet's bright nucleus surrounded by a vast coma stretching between 3,100 and 6,200 miles across. The photos were taken with the orbiter's High-Resolution Imaging Camera (HiRIC), which has been orbiting Mars since February 2021.
"This is the first attempt to photograph such a distant and relatively faint target (10,000 to 100,000 times darker than a target on the surface of Mars)," the CNSA said in a statement. "Through the collaborative research of the Tianwen-1 team, combined with the orbital characteristics, brightness characteristics, geometric dimensions, and scientific payload technical capabilities of the orbiter, the feasibility assessment of the observation mission."
CNSA added that "comet characteristics of the celestial body are obvious in the image, which is composed of the comet's core and its surrounding coma, with a diameter of thousands of kilometers…Through these observations, researchers are further conducting in-depth research on Atlas."
NASA's MRO also photographed 3I/ATLAS using its HiRISE camera, which has a 19.7-inch aperture capable of sharper images than Tianwen-1's 15.2 inch HiRIC. The MRO data reportedly offers about three times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope images from July 21. But the U.S. images haven't been released because of the federal government shutdown, now the longest in history since it began Oct. 1.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) said Wednesday she had a "good conversation" with NASA about releasing the comet images. Luna had written to Acting Administrator Sean Duffy on Oct. 31 urging the agency to make the data public despite the shutdown.
"As soon as the government reopens, they'll be releasing images/data," Luna wrote on X. "Unfortunately, due to bureaucratic reasons they cannot until then."
Harvard professor and astronomer Avi Loeb, who has also called on NASA to release the MRO images, wrote in his blog: "Here's hoping for better images from NASA's HiRISE in the coming days." Loeb has previously speculated that 3I/ATLAS could be an alien probe due to its unusual characteristics.
Post-perihelion image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, taken on Wednesday by the R. Naves Observatory. (R. Naves Observatory)Around Oct. 29-30, the comet reached perihelion, its closest point to the Sun. The R. Naves Observatory released new post-perihelion images Wednesday showing a faint sphere of light with no visible tail. Loeb called the appearance "surprising," noting that its coma looks "not very different in morphology" than it appeared in July Hubble images.
Image shows interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS after perihelion shared on Wednesday by the Virtual Telescope Project. (The Virtual Telescope Project)"Based on momentum conservation, I derived that the mass fraction lost during the perihelion passage of 3I/ATLAS is larger than 13%," Loeb wrote. "For a typical comet, this should have resulted in a massive coma with dust and gas that would have been pushed by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind to the shape of a typical cometary tail pointing away from the Sun."
Loeb now lists the lack of a cometary tail among 3I/ATLAS's many anomalies, along with its unusually massive nucleus, high speed, rapid brightening near perihelion and the fact that it has turned bluer than the Sun.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/china-beats-us-releasing-photos-003012965.html
Random quote
