Posted on 10/07/2025 12:56:30 PM PDT by Red Badger
Recent images purportedly depicting the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS during its closest approach to Mars last week have erupted in controversy online, as many took to social media with theories about what the object’s unusual shape could mean about its nature and origins.
The new images obtained last week by NASA’s Perseverance rover appear to show 3I/ATLAS streaking through the Martian night sky as it passed through the field of view of the robotic explorer’s Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) from its position in Jezero Crater.
The recent imagery was originally uploaded to NASA’s multimedia page in raw format. Since that time, additional photos have been collected by the space agency, one of which was subsequently featured as NASA’s “Image of the Week” (Editor’s Note: Although the object in the image below was initially interpreted by many experts and news outlets to have been the comet 3I/ATLAS, another potentially more likely identification is the Martian moon Phobos, with confusion arising due to the lack of information currently made available by NASA amid the recent U.S. government shutdown).
Above: NASA “Image of the Week” for Week 242 (Sept. 28 – Oct. 4, 2025), featuring one of the Perseverance rover’s recent images (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech). Since that time, several amateur renderings featuring composites of the NASA images have also been shared online amid the current U.S. government shutdown, which has temporarily halted most of the operations of government agencies like NASA.
However, the odd appearance of the object in some of the images—particularly its elongated shape—has added to existing speculations that 3I/ATLAS could be something more complex than just an unusual comet.
“3I/ATLAS spotted again and this time, it doesn’t look like a comet,” wrote an X user operating under the name “Leo Orwelliano” in a post on Sunday, describing 3I/ATLAS as it appeared in the recent imagery as a “perfect glowing cylinder drifting across the Martian sky.”
“No dust plume. No fragmentation. Just… structure,” the posting read. “Do you realize this is happening right now at 68 kilometers per second? What are we really looking at here?”
NEW IMAGE FROM MARS:
3I/ATLAS spotted again and this time, it doesn’t look like a comet. A perfect glowing cylinder drifting across the Martian sky. No dust plume. No fragmentation. Just… structure.
Do you realize this is happening right now at 68 kilometers per second?
What… pic.twitter.com/KKW3pekYmX— Leo Orwelliano 👁️🗨️ (@orwelliano90) October 6, 2025
Amid similar postings about 3I/ATLAS’s supposed elongated shape, some users also made comparisons between the object appearing in the recent Perseverance images and an example of ancient cave art depicting a long, dark, elliptical shape that superficially resembles the recent NASA photos.
“From cave walls to telescopes, our eyes never left the stars,” one X user, Camila Dias, wrote in a post over the weekend.
“3I/ATLAS is the echo of an ancient promise,” the post added.
Although many have interpreted the apparent elongated shape of the object shown in the Perseverance images as further evidence supporting speculations that 3I/ATLAS could be a form of extraterrestrial technology, in this case, there is a much simpler explanation for its appearance.
What the Perseverance images really show is an artifact caused by the motion of the object (which may actually be the Martian moon Phobos), rather than any accurate depiction of the shape and structure of 3I/ATLAS. At the time the images were obtained by Perseverance’s Right Navcam, which occurred at 21:33:39 Martian local solar time on October 4, 3I/ATLAS was about 38 million kilometers away. At that distance, it would have been impossible for any clear details about its shape or appearance to be discernible in the Navcam images.
Notably, Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, who has remained open to the possibility that 3I/ATLAS could be evidence of extraterrestrial technology and has written commentaries on such speculations on his Medium page, also confirmed that the object’s appearance in the recent Perseverance images was an artifact resulting from composite imagery.
Loeb argues that since the Navcam’s angular resolution of 0.33 milliradians (68 arcseconds) per pixel translates to about 12,500 kilometers per pixel at 3I/ATLAS’s calculated distance from Mars, the “streak” appearing in the recent NASA images could be estimated to be close to 50,000 kilometers long. That tremendous length is problematic, since it greatly exceeds the object’s actual estimated diameter of around 46 kilometers, based on previous measurements obtained by NASA’s SPHEREx mission.
As Loeb concludes, “the stripe in the Navcam image must have resulted from stacking hundreds of Navcam images over a total time interval of about 10 minutes.”
“3I/ATLAS would have looked like a circular spot for an individual snapshot, which has a maximum exposure time of 3.28 seconds for Navcam,” Loeb wrote on his Medium page. “In a single frame, the motion of 3I/ATLAS on the Martian sky would have smeared its image by merely 300 kilometers, only ~3% of the much larger smearing by 12,500 kilometers associated with the limited angular resolution of Navcam.”
However, following the appearance of alternative interpretations that the Right Navcam images may depict the Martian moon Phobos rather than 3I/ATLAS, Loeb offered additional perspectives in an email to The Debrief, noting that the analysis had been “based on the assumption that the Navcam images are of 3I/ATLAS,” noting that this information “was not specified explicitly on the NASA website.”
“If the Navcam images represent single snapshots with an exposure time below 3.28 seconds, then the brightness and angular length of the observed source imply that it is not 3I/ATLAS,” Loeb told The Debrief in an email. “In that case, the source might be much closer to the camera—capable of being smeared into an elongated image with a smaller spatial size and a smaller speed. An example could be the Martian moon Phobos, which occupies an angular diameter of 2.4 milli-radians in the Martian sky and should be resolved by Navcam’s pixel size of 0.33 milli-radians.”
“Phobos crosses its own diameter over a period of about 10 seconds, so to get the elongated image in its case, the exposure time should be of the order 40 seconds,” Loeb added. “The second Martian moon, Deimos, occupies an angular diameter of 0.5 milli-radians and crosses its own diameter in about 9 seconds, requiring a similar number of snapshots to yield the reported image,” he said.
The recent images captured by Perseverance aren’t the first time that composite imagery has caused objects in space to look a little strange. In fact, a similar combined succession of photos obtained earlier this year by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope show the movement of 3I/ATLAS over a short span of time, resulting in a peculiar-looking dotted line.
A composite image showing the movement of 3I/ATLAS, as seen by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (Credit: ESO/O. Hainaut) Additionally, artifacts appearing in NASA imagery caused by the relative motion between objects have caused similar misinterpretations in the past. For example, last March, a series of photos captured by the narrow-angle camera aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) revealed what looked like an elongated object streaking above the Moon’s surface.
However, the images were actually just the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), which even despite the short 0.338 millisecond exposure time of the LRO’s narrow-angle camera, appeared nearly ten times its actual size in the NASA images.
Above: The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) seen passing below NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at speeds which caused the Korean spacecraft to appear nearly ten times its actual size (Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University) So, in short, no imagery currently obtained of 3I/ATLAS actually depicts it as resembling a massive cigar-shaped object. While it is certainly true that the interstellar visitor possesses a number of unusual traits, the abundance of data astronomers have collected about it at this time all seems to point to the reality that 3I/ATLAS is simply a comet.
Although the current U.S. government shutdown has impeded the release of new imagery NASA likely obtained during 3I/ATLAS’s recent Martian flyby, photos captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) HiRISE camera should be released any day now, potentially offering us one of the clearest views of the object that astronomers have seen to date.
This article was updated on October 7, 2025, at 2:51 PM ET.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
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Your daily dose...................
The simplest explanation for its shape is that it doesn’t have the gravity to pull it into a spherical shape.
Remember the Larson cartoon where the guy wants to be excused from class because his brain is full?
The Guardians..................
Critics of Ancient Aliens would say “From what I see it looks like a sphere, like other asteroids.”
They also said the laser chiseled quality sharp edges of heavy blocks fitted together in ancient sites were from our ancestors using “sharpened chicken bones” to create them.
DARPA PSYOP
It’s RAMA
Oops, wrong movie.
The Firstborn...............
The Cleveland Guardians?
How I hate that name. I call them the Cleveland Regulators.
“The simplest explanation for its shape is that it doesn’t have the gravity to pull it into a spherical shape.”
Reading the article makes you smarter.
LOL, no I was thinking of the Green Lantern movie!................
🐱🚀
"Never give up! Never surrender!"
Time will tell if the image is simply a result of reconstruction, but it doesn’t bother me if it is actually an oblong. It wouldn’t be the first time that a planetary bodywas an oblong. I think one of Mar’s moons has an oblong shape to it, if I ‘m not mistaken.
How about the Cleveland 351’s?
It's a comet.
The simplest explanation is reported images of an elongated object are nothing but a long exposure. It other words a hoax perpetrated by alien-ufo enthusiasts who have to fake evidence for things that don't exist.
It's a comet.
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