The European Space Agency (ESA) has used images taken by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter while interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was hidden from earthly observers by the Sun to refine calculations of the comet’s orbit. The work not only improves our understanding of the visitor, but could improve predictions of objects on a potential collision course with Earth. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Even with many of the world’s largest telescopes focused on it, astronomers struggled to calculate 3I/ATLAS’s position and movements precisely after it was discovered on July 1 . It’s simply not that easy to measure something so small and moving so fast at such a great distance.

To make things worse, the path was not perfectly predic

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