Scientists in Boulder are using existing NASA spacecraft to track a rare interstellar comet called 31/ATLAS as it travels through Earth’s solar system.
Comet 3I/ATLAS was first observed on July 1 and is only the third known object thatap been discovered to enter Earth’s solar system from another solar system, . The comet poses no threat to humanity, and the closest it will get to Earth is about 170 million miles.
The comet sparked some alien theories after it was discovered, including that the comet was actually an alien spacecraft. Those theories have been debunked — 3I/ATLAS is definitely a standard comet, .
Since then, teams of Boulder scientists at the Southwest Research Institute and at the University of Colorado Boulder have tracked the cometap movements in an attempt to learn more about it. Their work is part of a to gather observations of the comet with existing spacecraft and equipment.
“We’re actually learning about other solar systems because we’re seeing how different these comets are from our local comets and what differences they might’ve had during formation,” Boulder Southwest Research Institute Senior Research Analyst Simon Porter said.
The team from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder used data from NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere spacecraft, known as the PUNCH spacecraft, to track the comet for about two months. The PUNCH spacecraft consists of four suitcase-sized satellites that observe the sun and its environment. PUNCH was never intended to study comets, but it played an important role in observing 3I/ATLAS, including when its path took it behind the Sun, making the comet temporarily unable to be observed from Earth.
The PUNCH spacecraft looks out toward the sun all the time, collecting data continuously. This allowed the research team to have data on nearly every minute of the cometap passage through the spacecraftap field of view.
“It allows us to visualize everything thatap going on in the inner solar system, and it also allows us to see, as it turns out, comets,” PUNCH mission Principal Investigator Craig DeForest said.
And, the PUNCH mission is being operated directly out of downtown Boulder.
“We are probing the secrets of the universe from the Pearl Street Mall,” DeForest said.
The team will analyze the data to see if they can pick up any changes in brightness over time, any indication of how often the comet rotates and any light polarization properties, or how the light reacts when it interacts with the comet.
“The way that the dust coming off the nucleus of a comet polarizes reflected light from the sun can tell you a little bit about the nature of that dust and the nature of the comet,” Southwest Research Institute Staff Scientist Kevin Walsh said.
At CU Boulder, a separate team of researchers captured 10 days of comet images in September and October using NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or the , which is orbiting Mars. A team at Lockheed Martin in Colorado, which operates MAVEN, positioned the spacecraft so that it was pointing in the cometap direction, according to a release.
“There was a lot of adrenaline when the data came down and we saw what we’d captured,” Justin Deighan, a research scientist at LASP and deputy principal investigator for MAVEN, said in the release. “Every measurement we can make of this comet is precious and helps to open up new understanding of interstellar objects.”
The MAVEN team is also still analyzing its data, which could include discoveries about what the comet is made of.
