It is a rare event for the solar system to receive a visitor from the vast, lonely void of interstellar space, and even rarer to catch it on camera. Yet, at the beginning of October, the cosmic stage was set for exactly such an encounter.
Three of NASA's seasoned Mars explorers turned their gaze away from the Red Planet to capture observations of 3I/ATLAS, marking only the third time an interstellar object has been discovered within our celestial neighbourhood.
