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Earlier this year, astronomers spotted a mysterious interstellar visitor, widely believed to be a comet, screaming into our solar system.
With the help of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers recently got a closer look at the object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, that revealed an unexpectedly high ratio of carbon dioxide to water for a comet, as well as a highly irradiated ice core.
Ever since astronomers spotted the object, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has suggested the tantalizing possibility that it could be a relic from an extraterrestrial civilization that was "sent towards the inner solar system by design."
To back up his far-fetched theory, Loeb has pointed out that 3I/ATLAS' highly unusual trajectory brings it suspiciously close to Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. In a new blog post, the astronomer pointed out that the object will come within just 1.67 million miles of Mars' path around the Sun, in what he characterized as a "remarkable fine-tuning" of the object's path.
To Loeb, it's an exceedingly rare and exciting opportunity to directly observe it using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) — but whether we'll come up with a plan in time for a "blind date" between 3I/ATLAS and the Red Planet remains to be seen.
It's theoretically possible that we could see an even more dramatic interaction between the object and Mars; in a new paper, Loeb and his colleague Adam Hibberd found that just a small nudge — an "orbit correction by [6.2–9.3 miles] per second during the month of September 2025" — could cause the mysterious object to collide with the Red Planet itself.
However, the "ejection of icy fragments from the surface of a natural comet" could only account for a fraction of such a correction.
In other words, if "materials from 3I/ATLAS" were indeed to arrive at Mars in October, it would be a "potential signature of technology."
And aside from 3I/ATLAS itself, Loeb argued that NASA's MRO should look for possible "precursor objects" that could themselves rendezvous with Mars. Any such objects would simply be too small to be detected by any near-Earth telescopes.
More on the object: The James Webb Just Found Something Extremely Bizarre About the Mysterious Object Headed Into Our Inner Solar System
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