There is Nothing More Deceptive than an Obvious Fact: NASA’s Press Conference on 3I/ATLAS
On November 19, 2025, NASA broadcasted a press conference here in which new data on the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was shared for the first time after the U.S. government shutdown.
An hour earlier, I was asked by a reporter what I expect from the press conference and I replied: “I do not expect big news. NASA will repeat the official mantra that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until this week because of the government shutdown. Both are boring messages. The HiRISE image will probably show a fuzzy ball of light, like the Hubble image here. But I hope to be surprised.”
I was not surprised. There was no big news. NASA repeated the official mantra that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet and that they were unable to process the data until recently because of the government shutdown.
The image taken by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on October 3 and available here, shows a fuzzy ball of light. The image features a spatial resolution of 30 kilometers per pixel at 3I/ATLAS’ distance of about 30 million kilometers. Due to spacecraft jitter during the observation period, the light from 3I/ATLAS is smeared by several pixels. In the coming days I will analyze this data quantitatively to extract the most important information out of it.
The collection of other new images from other space telescopes is available here. The new data includes fuzzier images that that of HiRISE and a UV spectroscopic detection of hydrogen by MAVEN that adds slightly to what we already learned this summer about 3I/ATLAS from the Hubble (here), Webb (here) and SPHEREx (here) space telescopes.
NASA’s representatives should have emphasized what we do not understand about 3I/ATLAS rather than insist that it is a familiar comet from a new birth environment. They stated that 3I/ATLAS does what comets do, namely shed gas and dust and responds to gravity. But a spacecraft that collected dust and CO2, CO & H2O ices on its surface by traveling through the cold interstellar medium could have also developed an outer layer of dust mixed with ices that sublimate when illuminated by sunlight. We should not “judge a book by its cover,” because we all know about the Trojan Horse which appeared unthreatening to the guardians of the City of Troy. When monitoring an interstellar visitor, we should not fall prey to traditional thinking but scrutinize new interpretations. The public resonates with science as a learning experience, where the collection of evidence leads the way to new knowledge rather than reinforces variants on past knowledge.
Sherlock Holmes noted: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” He also observed: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” I wish NASA’s representatives shared this wisdom.
Imaginative scientists master the humility to learn something new from anomalies rather than display the arrogance of expertise. At the press conference, there was no mention of the 12 puzzles associated with 3I/ATLAS (as summarized most recently here), including the anomaly that its mass is a million times larger than that of 1I/`Oumuamua and a thousand times larger than that of 2I/Borisov. Given the limited reservoir of material in interstellar space, one would expect to discover a million objects with the mass of 1I/`Oumuamua or a thousand objects with the mass of 2I/Borisov before finding a package as massive as 3I/ATLAS, unless this rare package was intentionally targeting the inner solar system (as discussed in my first paper on 3I/ATLAS here). The unlikely (0.2%) alignment of the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS with the plane of the planets around the Sun (as discussed in my second paper on 3I/ATLAS here) made it an easy target for many NASA observatories. NASA’s officials should have at least acknowledged this unlikely fortune. In case 3I/ATLAS is a natural icy rock as they suggest, mother Nature was kinder to NASA than expected from a random delivery of rocks by at least a factor of 100,000 based on the two anomalies mentioned above.
The most interesting new insights about 3I/ATLAS were obtained in recent weeks. After the closest approach of 3I/ATLAS to the Sun on October 29, new images were taken by amateur astronomers (see discussions here, here, here and here). These images show tightly collimated jets pointing towards and away from the Sun and reaching distances of order a million kilometers. In retrospect, these amateur astronomer images are far more exciting than the HiRISE image shared by NASA’s officials.
In the coming weeks, larger ground-based telescopes as well as the Hubble and Webb telescopes will be able to characterize the jets of 3I/ATLAS by measuring their composition, speed and mass loading rate. These details will inform us without a doubt whether the jets are produced by natural pockets of ice that are warmed by sunlight or by technological thrusters. We should know the answer by the time 3I/ATLAS is closest to Earth on December 19, 2025, a gift of new interstellar knowledge for the holidays.
Three weeks ago, I recommended to NASA to check whether they see any evidence for new objects that either accompanied 3I/ATLAS or left it towards Mars and Earth. Related data from Mars rovers or orbiters or from Earth-based NASA satellites or Galileo Project observatories could reveal fragments from an iceberg that broke up or mini-probes released by a technological mothership.
Life is worth living if we allow for the unexpected to surprise us. Bureaucrats or unimaginative scientists want us to believe in the expected. But the rest of us know that the best is yet to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
