Paris, March 5, 2026, 08:33 CET
- ESA has released a new image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS captured by its Jupiter-bound JUICE spacecraft
- JUICE’s JANUS camera took more than 120 images of the comet during a November 2025 observing run
- Scientists are working through delayed-downlinked data from multiple instruments, with a joint review planned for late March
The European Space Agency has released a new image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, captured by its Jupiter-bound Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft, showing a bright gas halo and a long tail. Juice’s JANUS science camera took the frame on Nov. 6, 2025 from about 66 million km (41 million miles) away, and ESA said the instrument recorded more than 120 images during the observing run. 1
3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object seen passing through the solar system, after 1I/‘Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. It was first spotted on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile, and ESA says it reached roughly 250,000 km/h at its closest pass to the Sun. The comet never came close to Earth — its nearest approach was about 270 million km — but scientists prize it because it carries material formed around another star. 2
Juice’s comet campaign was an extra job for a spacecraft built to study Jupiter’s icy moons. After the observations, the probe moved to the far side of the Sun from Earth and used its main high-gain antenna as a heat shield, forcing teams to send data home at a lower rate on a smaller antenna, ESA said. The bulk of the 3I/ATLAS dataset arrived in late February, and instrument teams plan to meet in late March to compare what the cameras, spectrometers and particle sensors saw. 3
In the JANUS image, the comet’s tiny nucleus is not visible, but its coma — a cloud of gas and dust released as sunlight warms the surface — stands out as an egg-shaped glow. The tail fans out behind it, with finer streaks that researchers will check for jets and filaments driven by outgassing.
JANUS worked alongside other Juice instruments during the observing run. Two of them, MAJIS and UVS, collect spectrometry data — they split light into its colours to look for chemical fingerprints — while SWI targets composition at sub-millimetre wavelengths and PEP measures charged particles.
ESA is folding the new Juice imagery into a broader observing campaign that has used both ground telescopes and space observatories. The agency says the comet has also been monitored by the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope as it swept through the inner solar system. 4
Getting clean data on 3I/ATLAS has not been straightforward because the target is faint and fast. “The comet is around 10,000 to 100,000 times fainter than our usual target,” Nick Thomas, principal investigator for ExoMars’ CaSSIS camera, said in an earlier ESA update on comet observations. 5
Juice launched in 2023 and is heading for Jupiter, where it will study moons such as Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Those worlds draw interest because some are thought to hide oceans beneath ice, raising questions about whether they could support life.
But the new comet image is only a first slice of a bigger dataset, and quick-look processing can mislead. The teams still need to calibrate the data, untangle viewing geometry and decide which structures are real and which are noise or artefacts.
ESA has signalled that more results will follow once the instrument teams finish their first pass and swap findings in late March. For now, the interstellar visitor is already on its way out, leaving scientists to do the slow part on Earth.
