NASA has released an image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS captured by one of its spacecraft on its way to Jupiter.
The Europa Clipper spacecraft launched in October 2024 and is on its way to study Europa, one of Jupiter's largest moons.
More on 3I/ATLAS
Europa is an icy, frozen world, but it has an ocean of liquid water beneath its surface. And that makes it one of the best places in the Solar System to look for signs of life beyond Earth.
While it won't reach the Jupiter system until 2030, Europa Clipper's instruments are very much active, and NASA scientists took the opportunity to point its camera at comet 3I/ATLAS, to give scientists a unique view of this strange interstellar visitor.
3I/ATLAS – the story so far
Comet 3I/ATLAS was discovered on 1 July 2025 and quickly became one of the biggest space science discoveries of 2025.
Unlike the vast majority of comets that humanity has discovered and observed, 3I/ATLAS didn't originate within our Solar System.
It formed far beyond our Solar System and has likely been travelling through deep space for about 7 billion years, making it the oldest comet we've ever seen. It's even older than the Sun.
Since it was discovered, astronomers have been pointing humanity's best telescopes at the coment, in order to learn as much as we can before it exits our Solar System and is gone from our view forever.
Europa Clipper's view
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission caught its view of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on 6 November 2025 from a distance of about 164 million km (102 million miles) away.
The image we see here was captured over a period of seven hours, NASA says, by the spacecraft’s Europa Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS) instrument.
NASA says this data will help scientists learn more about the composition and distribution of elements in the comet’s coma, which is the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the comet's head.
Comets are essentially frozen bodies of ice and dust, and as they approach the Sun, they heat up, causing those ices to evaporate and produce a fuzzy coma and a long tail streaking behind.
Europa Clipper's Europa-UVS instrument is designed to scan the sky in ultraviolet light, which it then separates into different wavelengths to give scientists data they can use to decipher the chemical makeup of the observed object.
When the spacecraft does finally make it to Europa, it will use this instrument to study the composition and structure of Europa’s atmosphere and surface.
One other goal will be searching for plumes of water erupting through the moon's icy shell, from its subsurface ocean below.
That should enable scientists to learn more about the chemical composition of Europa's ocean, and whether it does – or could – contain signs of life.
In the case of Europa Clipper's 3I/ATLAS image, the mission team stacked multiple images together and produced an image that's visible to the human eye.
The image follows a previous image captured by another spacecraft on its way to Jupiter.
The European Space Agency's Juice spacecraft is travelling to the Jupiter system to study the planet's icy moons in the search for signs of life.
Juice captured an image of 3I/ATLAS that was released at the start of December 2025.
While no dedicated mission to observe and study 3I/ATLAS has been possible, what's clear is that space scientists are adapt at utilising our many ground-based and space-based telescopes – and space missions – to capture incredible data on fleeting, transient objects that are briefly wandering through our cosmic backyard.
