Late last month, NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope tracked 3I\/ATLAS when it was approximately 178 million miles away from Earth. Hubble\u2019s instruments recorded the moving comet as a luminous point while the background stars appeared as streaks of light. NASA released the images on Thursday and said it intends to gather more data on 3I\/ATLAS in the coming months as the comet moves out of the solar system.<\/p>\n
The European Space Agency released new photos of 3I\/ATLAS the same day, adding to our understanding of the interstellar object\u2019s appearance, composition and behavior. The agency\u2019s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice \u2014 a spacecraft en route to Jupiter to study the planet and three of its large moons \u2014 gathered the data shortly before the spacecraft\u2019s closest approach to the comet on Nov. 4, when it flew within about 41 million miles.<\/p>\n
The photos from Juice showed the glowing halo of the comet\u2019s coma and revealed the possibility that it has two tails. The first, the comet\u2019s \u201cplasma tail,\u201d is made up of ionized or electrically charged gas and can be seen extending toward the top of the frame. The second, the comet\u2019s \u201cdust tail,\u201d is made up of gas, dust and other tiny solid particles; it stretches to the lower left of the frame.<\/p>\n
The European Space Agency expects to retrieve additional data from Juice\u2019s science instruments in February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Late last month, NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope tracked 3I\/ATLAS when it was approximately 178 million miles away from…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":202470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-436812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115692849740746741","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}