NASA will host a live event at 3 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Nov. 19, to present imagery of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS collected by multiple NASA missions.
The event will take place at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and will be streamed on NASA+, the NASA app, the agency’s website, YouTube, and Amazon Prime, News.Az reports, citing the agency.
Discovered on July 1 by the NASA-funded ATLAS observatory, 3I/ATLAS is only the third known object to enter our solar system from another part of the galaxy. The comet poses no threat to Earth, passing no closer than 170 million miles, and flew within 19 million miles of Mars in early October.
NASA assets, including spacecraft and ground-based observatories, allow scientists to observe 3I/ATLAS continuously and study its behavior from multiple perspectives. The live briefing will feature NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator Nicky Fox, Astrophysics Division Acting Director Shawn Domagal-Goldman, and solar system small bodies lead scientist Tom Statler.
Assets within NASA’s science missions give the United States the unique capability to observe 3I/ATLAS almost the entire time it passes through our celestial neighborhood, and study – with complementary scientific instruments and from different directions – how the comet behaves. These assets include both spacecraft across the solar system, as well as ground-based observatories.