The European Space Agency has published an image taken by the JUICE mission. It shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.
JUICE was launched in 2023 with the aim of studying Jupiter’s icy moons. Since the Ariane 5 rocket did not have enough power to send the spacecraft directly to its target, it was launched onto a trajectory that involved a series of gravitational maneuvers near Venus and Earth. Thanks to this circumstance, JUICE is still located in the inner part of the Solar System, which made it possible to photograph the interstellar comet.
The published image is dated November 6. It was taken just one week after 3I/ATLAS passed the perihelion of its orbit. At the time the photo was taken, JUICE was about 66 million km away from the interstellar traveler. In total, the spacecraft took 120 images of the comet. It took several months to transmit them to Earth because at that time the Sun was between JUICE and Earth. Because of this, the device had to use its main high-gain antenna as a heat shield and a weaker medium-gain antenna to send data to Earth at a slower speed.
The photograph clearly shows the bright cloud of dust and gas surrounding the comet’s nucleus, called the coma. It is followed by a long tail, in which separate streams of matter are visible.
The inset in the image shows the same data, but processed to highlight the coma structure. The arrows in the upper left corner indicate the direction of the comet’s motion (blue) and the relative direction of the Sun (yellow). Although 3I/ATLAS is a visitor from interstellar space, arriving from beyond the Solar System, its behavior is entirely consistent with what would be expected from a “normal” comet.
In addition to taking photographs, JUICE also studied the comet using its instruments. Scientists are currently working on analyzing the data collected by the European spacecraft.
According to ESA
