The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Wednesday (November 19) released new images of Comet 3I/Atlas, an interstellar object that astronomers have determined is billions of years old.

The new images come from a wide range of NASA missions, including planetary science missions such as the Perseverance Mars rover and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, the asteroid missions Psyche and Lucy and the sun-studying spacecraft Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH).

Comet 3I/Atlas was first spotted on July 1 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile. At the time, it was about 670 million km from the Sun. On December 19, the object will fly closest to Earth at 170 million miles,

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