While it poses no threat to Earth and will get no closer than 170 million miles to Earth, the comet flew within 19 million miles of Mars in early October.

We still could not resolve the nucleus even with the highest resolution images we will get.

Participants in this live event will include:

– NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
– Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate
– Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division
– Tom Statler, lead scientist for solar system small bodies

Spacecraft across the solar system, as well as ground-based observatories, have been able to observe 3I/ATLAS as it passes through our celestial neighborhood and study how the comet behaves.

In December, the comet will be ~9–10 times farther away from us (and from Earth-orbiting telescopes like Hubble or JWST) than it was from Mars/HiRISE in October. We will have more powerful scopes to look at it. December observations will give us great wide-field views of the tail and activity from a different perspective (and the comet will be post-perihelion and potentially more active), but they will not surpass the spatial detail achieved when it went past Mars.

Large ground-based earth telescopes (VLT, Gemini, Keck, future Rubin Observatory, etc.) with adaptive optics → Could reach ~100–300 km/pixel if we get ideal weather and other excellent seeing conditions.