Michele Bannister

Grainy space image, with white dots on a dark background. At the centre of the image is a larger, bright white blob with a faint white line stretching towards the top of the frame.

Grainy space image, with white dots on a dark background. At the centre of the image is a larger, bright white blob with a faint white line stretching towards the top of the frame. Key elements of the image are labelled: coma, plasma tail, potential dust tail. An inset shows the location of the Sun, Juice and comet 3I/ATLAS during the observation.

☄️ Our #ESAJuice team couldn't wait until February, when they will receive data on #3IATLAS from the mission's science instruments.

So they downloaded just a quarter of an image from its navigation camera to get a surprise sneak preview.

More info and annotations 👉 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...
🔭 🧪

Meteorite recovery, even in difficult and remote terrain, is now fast and scales well (find.gfo.rocks). Can't wait to see the analysis of this meteorite, and the many more to come; as we are slowly mapping the composition of the main asteroid belt. 9/9

How to distinguish a meteorite from gum nuts: a very Australian planetary science problem 🧪🔭🧵

3/4. En esta imagen se muestra el mismo campo estelar del Cometa C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) sin limpiar.

En solo 15 minutos de adquisición, contamos 1659 trazas de satélites (unos 400 individuales).

Sobran las palabras para describir la contaminación del espacio cercano.

Ramses: ESA’s mission to rendezvous with asteroid Apophis

Check out the new trailer for @esa.int's proposed Ramses mission! 🍿📽️

Ramses would escort the cruise-ship-sized asteroid Apophis through its safe but exceptionally rare flyby of Earth in 2029: www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

ESA Member States commit to largest contributions at Ministerial The largest contributions in the history of the European Space Agency, €22.1 bn, have been approved at its Council meeting at Ministerial level in Bremen, ...

ESA's RAMSES mission is funded ! We are going to visit asteroid Apophis in 2029 :D
www.esa.int/About_Us/Cor...

#planetaryscience

3I has been a thought-provoking practice run in a number of ways... How exciting would it be if we get to point CoCa at an ISO!

I had a clippings file of amazing articles as a teenager. Some really inspiring ones there

Piped sounds of the bush do not, in fact, improve the ambience of a hospital, since it just seems to accentuate the wistfulness of being somewhere other then a hospital

Happy birthday! Celebrate properly🎈

A cratered and fractured terrain. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

A very close view of the craters that cover the surface of Saturn’s icy moon Rhea. NASA’s Cassini mission made this flyby in January 2011, passing within 76 kilometers (47 miles) at a speed of 8 km/sec (18,000 mph). This image had a resolution up to 22.6 meters per pixel towards the closer terrain.

A pale green vase with pink, white and purple flowers

The carnations are coming in 🌱🇳🇿

Now outbound after its perihelion or closest approach to the Sun on October 29, Comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third known interstellar object to pass through our fair Solar System. Its greenish coma and faint tails are seen against a background of stars in the constellation Virgo in this view from planet Earth, recorded with a small telescope on November 14. But this interstellar interloper is the subject of an on-going, unprecedented Solar System-wide observing campaign involving spacecraft and space telescopes from Earth orbit to the surface of Mars and beyond. And while the comet from another star-system has recently grown brighter, you'll still need a telescope if you want to see 3I/ATLAS from planet Earth. It's now above the horizon in November morning skies and will make its closest approach to Earth, a comfortable 270 million kilometers distant, around December 19.

🔭 3I/ATLAS: A View from Planet Earth

Image Credit & Copyright: Rolando Ligustri

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25112...

Behold the elegant leap of the thresher shark, such a tale in the tail

*looks at streams of interstellar objects wrapping the Galaxy*
*looks back at sharks*

HiRISE Image of Exocomet 3I/ATLAS!

On 2 October 2025, MRO turned away from Mars to image 3I/ATLAS, only the third interstellar object ever observed passing through our solar system!

https://www.uahirise.org/releases/3i-atlas/

Here are the #I/ATLAS releases from varied NASA/ESA missions. Having worked with such telescope & spacecraft data for 40 years, my perspective is: no surprises. It's a comet; its differences from Solar System comets are intriguing but every comet is different! science.nasa.gov/solar-system...

Remember that lovely aurora last week?

Well...um...this is what Euclid saw... 😱

🧵

a screenshot of the title and author list of the following ATel: https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=17500 NH2 dominated spectra of Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) ATel #17500; Shashikiran Ganesh (PRL), Aravind Krishnakumar (Univ. Liege), Goldy Ahuja (PRL, IITGN), Emmanuel Jehin(Univ. Liege), Arvind B.(PRL, IITGN), D. K. Sahu (IIA), T. Sivarani (IIA) on 18 Nov 2025; 14:05 UT Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Comets Credential Certification: Shashikiran Ganesh (shashi@prl.res.in)

huge news for all of you comet composition nerds out there: according to this new ATel by Ganesh et al., C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) is another NH2-dominated comet like Machholz (!) or Yanaka (!!)

A garden bed filled with frothy white orlaya, with a foreground of blue cornflowers. Scarlet poppies and a few stems of colourful perennials interleave

Summer is a' coming in. The pollinators are delighted #bloomscrolling 🌱🇳🇿

3 years ago, NASA crashed the DART spacecraft into an asteroid at 22,000 kilometers per hour. The event changed the asteroid's orbit and tilt & sent it tumbling.

A nearby cubesat captured these remarkable images of the asteroid immediately after the impact. 🧪🔭

aasnova.org/2025/11/03/s...

NASA to Share Comet 3I/ATLAS Images From Spacecraft, Telescopes - NASA NASA will host a live event at 3 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Nov. 19, to share imagery of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS collected by a number of the agency’s

It is a very interesting dot.

"NASA to Share Comet 3I/ATLAS Images From Spacecraft, Telescopes"

www.nasa.gov/news-release...

(Again, raw images of 3I from NASA spaceccraft have been available - these are the processed images with expert commentary.)

And here's the real downer... AST SpaceMobile plans to launch a few hundred satellites that are as bright as Saturn when sunlit. So. A lot more research images will look like this in the near future.

Thanks, direct-to-cell gigantic satellites.

Yea, the stellar field is a lot easier to work with now!

#OPAG - #3I/ATLAS Observations from Europa Clipper, Executed a calibration for the UVS Instrument.

Or that ALMA also observed it through conjunction.

I like how at this point we'd need the spacecraft operators of three very different communities to manage to conspire (China, ESA, US). Yeah, nah

The image shows a piece of Mars from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: these are martian dunes, from a region dubbed Kolhar. A mottled terrain of beige and gray is overlain with very dark gray dust deposits. This patterned landscape was sculpted by aeolian (wind-blown) processes. The image was taken on 25 September 2025, and addresses the science theme of "seasonal processes." Source: https://www.uahirise.org/ESP_089803_2650

Now that the US gov is open, 3I/ATLAS images from the Mars-orbiting HiRISE camera will soon be out. My money is on them looking just like regular cometary images. If that disappoints you, scan the HiRISE catalog for spectacular Mars images like this one uahirise.org/catalog/

Indeed, two decades ago now

There's a small region in the back of the eye loaded with cone cells, which do colour and sharp vision but not in low light. Makes a blind spot. In contrast the rod cells out round the rest of the back of the eye are very sensitive to small brightness variations (and movement). Eyes are nifty