Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS safely passes Earth, heads toward Jupiter

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS that has baffled scientists since its discovery in July has finally passed Earth on Friday, December 19, 2025, as it races through our solar system.

The mysterious comet is now moving towards Jupiter where it will make a close flyby at a distance of around 33 million miles of the planet on March 16, 2026.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) designates a comet as a potentially hazardous object (PHO) if it comes within 4.6 million miles on a planet’s orbit, meaning scientists do not expect a collision with Jupiter.

3I/ATLAS flew around 170 million miles away from Earth’s orbit amid, putting an end to conspiracy theories and speculation that it might be an alien spacecraft coming to invade the Earth.

The space rock is expected to pass close to Neptune in 2028 and then Pluto in April 2029, before racing out of our solar system in the mid 2030s.

It was originally discovered in July 2025 by the NASA-funded ATLAS telescope in Chile and since then the comet has kept space experts on their heels by showing mysterious behaviour.

The space rock, which originated from another solar system, is humanity's third-known interstellar visitor as previously NASA tracked 1I Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I Borisov in 2019.

In a separate development, NASA has been unable to establish contact with its Mars spacecraft since 3I/ATLAS made a close flyby to the red planet. MAVEN went offline on December 4, 2025, for the first time since it started orbiting Mars in 2014.