The Astronomy Thread

So the MAVEN spacecraft - the one that took the closest image of 3I/Atlas - has rather suddenly gone missing.

On October 9, 2025, the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft took a low-resolution image of the new interstellar object 3I/ATLAS from a distance of 56 million kilometers. This image, captured by its Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph, revealed the presence of hydrogen atoms in the vicinity of 3I/ATLAS.

On December 6, 2025, NASA reported here that MAVEN lost communication with ground stations on Earth (see also the discussion with Rob Finnerty on Newsmax here). Telemetry from MAVEN showed that all of its systems were working normally the last time it entered its orbit behind Mars but subsequently NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.

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I'm sure its just a coincidence but surely even skeptics have to be looking at the list of coincidences at this point and going hmmmm...

Yeah so many weird co-incidences, probably just a strange comet from a far off, far before place, yet there's doubt. This one is a bit more far out too -

This guy seems like a kook - he has some serious scientific credentials, Phd from Caltech and whatnot, but he says some far out shit. Anyways - this comparison he's making below is just the facts. The image on the left was a supposed leak from a secret military telescope some months ago. At the time I looked at it and was like, yeah wtf is that, its fake. And yet, the image on the right was taken recently by an amateur astronomer. A lot of amateur astronomers are imaging this thing, showing the multiple tails, anti-tail towards the sun etc, and are like wtf is this? They really do look similar.... The "fake" came out before amateur astronomers were seeing much of anything with it - if it was faked, I don't think the fakers had much reference for what we were going to see when it was closer.

So Atlas continues its journey away from Earth, uneventfully.



Vladimir Putin had this to say, when a reporter asked:

Putin said:

Putin: Is your name Christina? I’ll tell you, but it must remain exclusively between us. This is classified information. It’s our secret weapon, but we will only use it in the most extreme case because we are against deploying weapons in space. Seriously though, it’s a comet. Our scientists are aware of what is happening. Moreover, this is a comet from another star, so it behaves differently from comets of our galactic origin. It has a different shell and as it approaches closer to the Sun, slightly different processes occur on its surface, including in the field tail of this rocket. Things look different there, but it’s quite large. I think somewhere between 2 to 6 kilometers. Look, the moon is 400,000 kilometers away from us. And the object you are talking about is hundreds of millions of kilometers away. I don’t think it poses any threat to us. We’ll let it go to Jupiter. And at the beginning of next year, the comet will leave the solar system.”

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Imagine living in a country where the leader speaks with such humor and intelligence, quoting specific figures, leaving both the reporter and the audience better informed after the exchange.