NASA Finally Releases 3I/Atlas Images

The images are out and 3I/Atlas is officially a comet, not an intelligent craft from deep space. It may have alien probes or imaging devices on it though. I'm only half joking.

The US government shutdown is mostly to blame for why these images were not released for over a month, despite being captured by Mars orbiting satellites in early October. But conspiracy theories ran rampant once the shutdown ended and the images still remained unreleased.

Today, NASA held a press conference where they put out all the images they have from a timeline of many months.

Full Nasa Photo Set & Details

NASA also put together a comprehensive & simplified site for viewing ALL the images, complete with a detailed breakdown. Do your own deep dive into the images released today here.

More On 3I/Atlas

First spotted on July 1, 2025, by the ATLAS survey in Chile, 3I/ATLAS immediately stood out. Its sharply hyperbolic orbit told astronomers it wasn’t one of ours; this thing came from somewhere else in the galaxy. Only the third confirmed interstellar object in history, it instantly became the focus of telescopes around the world.

But it didn’t behave the way everyone expected. Some early observers couldn’t find a traditional tail at all, while others recorded a faint coma and slight elongation—just enough to classify it as a comet. Then the real curveballs hit. Polarimetric measurements showed unusually strong negative polarization, something you normally see in far-out icy bodies, not active comets. And when JWST took a sniff, it found a coma dominated by carbon dioxide, with a chemical mix that doesn’t match most comets in our solar system.

Those peculiar readings sparked plenty of debate—ranging from exotic natural origins to fringe claims of artificial structure. Most experts disagree on those extremes, but they do agree on this: 3I/ATLAS is one of the strangest visitors we’ve ever had, and it’s leaving scientists with more questions than answers.