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The annotated and raw version of the preliminary image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, taken on November 2, 2025 by the navigation camera onboard the Juice spacecraft. (Image credit: ESA)

As it arrived to perihelion at a distance of 202.9 million kilometers from the Sun on October 29, 2025, the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS was hidden behind the Sun from observatories located on Earth. Nevertheless, a week later 3I/ATLAS came close to ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) which used five of its science instruments to observe our interstellar visitor. The instruments collected data on the composition and shape of the plume of gas and dust around 3I/ATLAS. The data will be transmitted to Earth in February, because Juice is currently using its main high-gain antenna as a heat shield to protect itself from the Sun, leaving its smaller medium-gain antenna to send data at a much lower rate.

In addition to using these instruments, Juice imaged 3I/ATLAS with its onboard Navigation Camera (NavCam), designed to help Juice navigate through the icy moons of Jupiter after its arrival to their vicinity in July 2031. Today, ESA released here a preliminary image after downloading a quarter of a single NavCam image.

The image displays a glowing halo of gas and dust (coma) surrounding 3I/ATLAS

with a hint of two tails.

The image was taken on November 2, 2025, during Juice’s first observing run of 3I/ATLAS. It was two days before Juice’s closest approach to 3I/ATLAS, which took place on November 4, 2025 at a distance of about 66 million km.

The data from Juice’s five scientific instruments will be released on February 18 and 20, 2026. It will include images from JANUS — Juice’s high-resolution optical camera — as well as spectrometry data from MAJIS and UVS, composition data from SWI, and particle data from PEP.

We all wait eagerly for the expected arrival of this data, a month before the closest approach of 3I/ATLAS to Jupiter on March 16, 2025. The fact that 3I/ATLAS will arrive at Jupiter in March 2026 whereas Juice will only get there in July 2031 after their rendezvous in November 2025, illustrates how much faster is this interstellar visitor compared to a human-made spacecraft.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

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.

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