While the sky of Mars remains as silent as that of any uninhabited world, An image captured by the Perseverance rover on October 4 has sparked enthusiasm and speculation on Earth.
The photograph, taken by the rover’s right navigation camera (Navcam), reveals a peculiar light strip crossing the Martian sky. Although there is no official confirmation yet, Many experts believe that it could be the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.just discovered in July of this year: the third visitor from outside the solar system that we have detected from our cosmic corner.
US Government Shutdown Delays Official Confirmation
For now, both NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) remain silent. The reason does not respond to any galactic mystery, but to a rather earthly one: the partial shutdown of the US Government has left approximately 15,000 space agency workers – more than 80% of its staff – on forced pause, according to reports. Space.com. Thus, the publication of data and analysis remains temporarily in limbo.
However, the raw images are still available to the publicand that has allowed amateurs and independent astronomers to get to work.
One of them, Simeon Schmauß, claimed on the Bluesky social network to have detected the comet after stacking 20 images from the rover’s Mastcam-Z.
“I think Perseverance may have spotted the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from Mars last night! After stacking 20 Mastcam-Z images, I found a faint patch of light in the constellation Corona Borealis, close to the location where the comet was expected to be,” Schmauß shared.
For his part, Dr. Avi Loeb, from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, assured that the HiRISE camera of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, according to the information available, also took images of the comet on October 3, although they have not yet been published.
“The brightest pixel in the HiRISE image will provide the best constraint yet on the 3I/ATLAS area,” the astronomer wrote on his blog.
3I/ATLAS: a massive and mysterious interstellar visitor
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, only the third known visitor from outside our solar system, would be between 30 and 38 million kilometers from Mars during its closest approach, according to different calculations.
What makes this visitor especially interesting is its estimated size. According to previous estimates of the astronomer Avi Loeb, the rocky core of 3I/ATLAS would have an approximate diameter of 5.6 kilometers and a mass that could exceed 33,000 million tonsa figure much higher than that of the other two interstellar visitors, ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov, observed so far.
The peculiar cylindrical and striped shape of the object in the images has sparked speculation on social networks about its possible extraterrestrial origin. However, Loeb offers a less spectacular explanation.
“The stripe that appears in the Navcam image must be the result of stacking hundreds of images during a total time interval of about 10 minutes,” he explains on his blog. “3I/ATLAS would have looked like a circular blob in an individual snapshot,” he adds.
From the camera’s resolution, Loeb estimated that the visible fringe spanned about 50,000 kilometers, an apparent extent created by the comet’s motion during several minutes of exposure. As he explained, the image does not reflect its real size, but rather an optical effect derived from the capture method.
Space telescopes join the observation of the comet
Both NASA and ESA planned to observe the comet’s passage using various space assets. According to a previous report by Space.com, The European agency previously announced that it would use its Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft for this mission.
For its part, NASA had already used the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to capture stunning images of the comet. and study its composition. In addition, it planned to deploy a wide range of spacecraft for observation, including the exoplanet hunter TESS, the Swift gamma-ray observatory, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, among others.
In short, not all the images that circulate seem to be of the comet. Some objects detected in the time-lapses of Perseverance are, with high probability, Martian orbiters captured in motion, according to the analysis of IFL Science. Others simply don’t have enough resolution or context to confirm what they are. For now, everything remains in the realm of hypotheses..
But if it is confirmed that any of these images – especially the one detected by Schmauß, the most solid candidate so far – really correspond to 3I/ATLAS, we could be facing an unprecedented event: the first time that an interstellar object has been recorded from the surface of another world.
Meanwhile, professional and amateur astronomers continue to meticulously review images, awaiting the publication of the HiRISE data and hoping that NASA’s closure will not also end up putting this promising story on ice.
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