Government shutdown fuels more wild theories about mysterious solar system object – Jalopnik

What a coincidence! The mysterious interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS is hurtling through the solar system at the exact same time the US government has shut down. This means that NASA does not update its websitebut also that Avi Loeb – a Harvard astrophysicist who has become somewhat infamous for speculating that 3I/ATLAS and other interstellar visitors might be alien probes – might get a few nerves.

From one of Loeb’s latest Medium posts:

In recent days, I was asked by several fans about the apparent media blackout surrounding the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS after its flyby of Mars on October 3, 2025. In response, I explained that NASA is affected by the US government shutdown and that large research teams often take days to weeks before releasing scientific reports. Long delays are not a sign of extraterrestrial alien intelligence, but rather of terrestrial human stupidity.

In the same post, Loeb discusses the many human spacecraft, probes and instruments that could analyze 3I/ATLAS. In the meantime, images of the object have been received, and that is what happened predictably spawned wild theories about what is most likely a comet.

Believe it or not, a navigation camera mounted on the Mars Perseverance rover apparently captured images of 3I/ATLAS as it passed through the Martian sky, 23 million miles from the red planet. (Perseverance has been there since 2021.) The resulting image was characterized by some observers online as a line or line. Others, however, interpreted it as a glowing cylinder that may be evidence of intelligent alien design, and more fodder for an internet that has seized on Loeb’s comments about 3I/ATLAS’s various anomalies to claim the object was sent here by them study us.

Loeb wrote that he was contacted by one of the most in Congress avid conspiracy theorists, Rep. Anna Paulina Lunaabout this, and he did the calculations and explained what was really going on with the photo:

[T]The band in the Navcam image must be the result of stacking hundreds of Navcam images over a total time interval of about 10 minutes. 3I/ATLAS would have looked like a circular spot for an individual snapshot…. Stacking hundreds of images improved the apparent brightness of 3I/ATLAS in the final image.

Loeb mentions more than a dozen orbiters, spectrometers and Mars-based cameras that could provide images and data from 3I/ATLAS, which was first spotted in July and is only the third interstellar object we’ve identified to enter the solar system. (Oumuamua, the previous visitor, was the start of Loeb’s theories about these things being alien spacecraft). We should therefore have enough data at some point, and we will make another attempt to study 3I/ATLAS as it flies to Jupiter in November, after which it will leave our galactic neighborhood forever.

Will the government be reopened next month? Who knows, but its closure has been an interesting wrinkle in the 3I/ATLAS saga. I’m personally surprised that someone hasn’t declared out loud, X-Files style, that the aliens secretly controlling Washington secretly engineered the lockdown so their friends could speed through the solar system with the QT while humanity took a politically induced break. Oh wait! Someone did! On the more rational side, however, the 3I/ATLAS visit was a great opportunity to see how science is really done. Loeb and his colleagues really showed their workand as a result we are all better informed.