memoment editorial

(Image Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist)
Welcome to this edition of The Intelligence Brief… This week, the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) launched a new global campaign to monitor 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar comet that entered our solar system earlier this year. In our analysis, we’ll examine 1) how the campaign’s true scientific goals have been overshadowed by online speculation about a “planetary defense” initiative, 2) why NASA’s ongoing shutdown has left the agency unable to participate in this rare research opportunity, 3) why astronomers say collecting accurate astrometry on 3I/ATLAS is critical to ensuring this interstellar visitor doesn’t become one of science’s greatest missed opportunities, and 4) why, despite the misinformation surrounding 3I/ATLAS, discussion about the possible discovery of technosignatures or hypothetical “black swan” events should not be dismissed outright.
Quote of the Week
“Europa Clipper has a rare opportunity to sample an interstellar object’s tail.”
– Samuel Grant and Geraint Jones
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RECENT NEWS from The Debrief

A New Campaign to Monitor 3I/ATLAS
This week, the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) announced a new campaign that will target 3I/ATLAS, the unusual interstellar comet that was first detected in our solar system back in July.
The campaign, which will begin in late November and run through January 27, 2026, is focused on improving the collection of “accurate astrometry” of comets, according to an Editorial Notice issued in an electronic circular issued by the Minor Planet Center on October 21, 2025.
Using 3I/ATLAS as a target for a campaign to improve our data-gathering about objects moving through our solar system makes a lot of sense, since the rare interstellar comet has dominated the attention of many astronomers in recent months. Additionally, the object displays unusual characteristics, raising significant new questions about the kinds of behaviors we can expect from comets and other objects that originate beyond our solar system.
Unfortunately, the IAWN’s most obvious reasons for wanting to monitor the movement of an interstellar visitor passing through our planetary neighborhood seem to have been overlooked by many news sites, which instead began airing speculations about the enactment of a new “planetary defense” initiative by NASA, feeding into the ongoing hype and misinformation that has surrounded 3I/ATLAS now for several weeks.
A Planetary Defense Initiative, or Just Misinformation?
Following the release of the IAWN’s bulletin, several websites have reported that NASA is now involved in what some characterize as a “planetary defense” initiative involving the object, with others citing the “activation” of a new “training drill” related to 3I/ATLAS.
What most of these sensational news reports fail to recognize, however, is that NASA had far less to do with the launch of the recent campaign than usual, and for a couple of reasons. Primarily, the IAWN is an international collaboration of organizations and astronomers that, according to its website, has been “recommended by United Nations resolution” and whose combined efforts “work to detect, monitor, and characterize potentially hazardous asteroids and Near-Earth Objects (NEOs).”
To be clear, that isn’t to say that NASA doesn’t play a significant role in IAWN’s activities. “NASA’s involvement was essential to the formation of IAWN,” reads an article at the space agency’s website from January 2024. The article notes that NASA’s current role involves “coordinating IAWN, which includes convening the semi-annual meetings of the steering committee and signatories as well as leading the periodic campaigns to exercise the astronomical and modeling capabilities of the worldwide network.”
However, it would have been difficult for NASA, of all agencies, to launch such a planetary defense initiative right now, given that the ongoing U.S. government shutdown halted the space agency’s operations on October 1, 2025. For several weeks now, NASA hasn’t even updated its websites, and so reconciling its inactivity with the idea that it could have launched an international planetary defense effort amid the shutdown would indeed be problematic.
Nonetheless, the current lapse in federal government funding highlights another significant concern related to 3I/ATLAS—one that more websites should focus on rather than misinformation: NASA’s inopportune hiatus during one of the most significant space-related developments in recent memory.
3I/ATLAS: A Missed Opportunity?
Arguably, the most concerning thing about 3I/ATLAS is not whether it could be alien technology (this seems unlikely based on the current evidence, but more on that later) or whether it represents a threat to Earth (there is currently no evidence supporting this).
No, the real concern involves NASA’s current inability to collect potentially useful data about the rare interstellar visitor.
Just two days after the beginning of the most recent U.S. government shutdown, which is already now the second longest in history, 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Mars. At that time, no camera anywhere on the Red Planet was better equipped to capture high-resolution imagery of the object as it passed than the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Yet, frustratingly, it remains unclear if HiRISE imagery of the object was successfully obtained, let alone whether we’ll be seeing it any time soon.
Additionally, a recent study by European Space Agency scientists Samuel Grant and Geraint Jones suggests that while 3I/ATLAS will remain far out of reach of Earthly space probes, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission could potentially find itself passing through the “ion tail” carried away from the object by the solar wind following its trip around the Sun.
Of course, detecting any of these interstellar ions—a scientific first, and a significant one, no doubt—would require the Europa Clipper’s scientific instruments to be activated. That prospect is seeming increasingly unlikely, as the potential encounter between the spacecraft and the projected location of the comet’s ion tail looms nearer by the day, yet still with no immediate signs of the U.S. government resuming operations.
A “Black Swan” Event?
Finally, while most of the issues addressed up to this point relate to 3I/ATLAS’s identity as an interstellar comet, this should not be taken as a complete dismissal of some of the reasons experts have put forward for why studying the object has relevance to planetary defense, and even the potential discovery of extraterrestrial technologies.

In an August 2025 paper titled “Technosignature Searches of Interstellar Objects,” the authors stated that the “rapidly growing suite of observations for 3I/ATLAS strongly supports the conclusion that it is a comet,” though adding that their paper nonetheless aimed “to motivate the systematic study of these objects for possible technosignatures” in the unlikely event that they could be transporting alien technologies.
Similarly, Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb has championed the controversial position that the anomalies 3I/ATLAS displays should, at the very least, warrant consideration in the study of such objects, which Loeb argues “could pose a threat to humanity if they happen to carry alien technology.”
“Black swan events with small probabilities must be considered seriously if their implications to the future of humanity are large,” Loeb recently wrote in a post on his Medium page.
For now, given the data at hand, arguably one of the greatest concerns we should have about 3I/ATLAS remains that, as one of the rarest and most fascinating scientific discoveries in recent memory has been traversing our solar system, NASA has been unable to act on it due to the current lack of federal funding. Add to that, of course, the countless NASA employees, as well as those in various other U.S. government agencies, who, along with their families, are being impacted during this period while going without pay.
With any luck, the IAWN’s campaign to collect “accurate astrometry” about 3I/ATLAS will be successful. Right now, if we don’t want 3I/ATLAS to become one of recent history’s greatest missed opportunities, it seems we’ll need all the data we can get.
That concludes this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief. You can read past editions of our newsletter at our website, or if you found this installment online, don’t forget to subscribe and get future email editions from us here. Also, if you have a tip or other information you’d like to send along directly to me, you can email me at micah [@] thedebrief [dot] org, or reach me on X: @MicahHanks.

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An international team of researchers led by scientists from Penn State University has announced the detection of a ‘super Earth’ rocky exoplanet orbiting within its star’s habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface, less than 20 light-years from Earth.
The research team behind the discovery said the new planet, dubbed GJ 251 c, has a habitable-zone orbit, a rocky composition, and a relatively close proximity to Earth, making it a prime target for searching for signs of life.
Dr. Suvrath Mahadevan, the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy at Penn State and co-author of the paper detailing the potentially historic discovery, told The Debrief in an email how finding a potentially habitable, rocky exoplanet in our cosmological backyard offers an unprecedented opportunity to search for life beyond Earth.
“We have a new, potentially rocky planet in the Habitable Zone of a quite nearby star!” the professor said. “One that is close enough that we have a chance of actually seeing the planet light separate from the starlight in the coming decade.”
For comparison, the Trappist-1 multi-planet system, which contains several rocky exoplanets that may lie within the star’s habitable zone and is considered a prime target for astrobiologists to search for signs of life, is just over 40 light-years from Earth. GJ 251 c is only half the distance.
Funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Heising-Simons Foundation helped the researchers analyze over 20 years of observational data from the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HZPF). The observatory was custom-designed by Penn State researchers to search for planets that might host life.
The Penn State-led Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF) provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby stars. Pictured: The HPF instrument during installation in its clean-room enclosure in the Hobby Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory. Image Credit: Guðmundur Stefánssonn/Penn State.
Unlike planets found when they pass between Earth and their host star, causing the light to dim, called the transit method, GJ 251 c was found by the HZPF by detecting a subtle “wobble in the host star GJ 251. This wobble is caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.
“We call it the Habitable Zone Planet Finder, because we are looking for worlds that are at the right distance from their star that liquid water could exist on their surface. This has been the central goal of that survey,” Mahadevan said in a statement announcing the team’s research. “This discovery represents one of the best candidates in the search for atmospheric signature of life elsewhere in the next five to ten years.”
Approximately four times Earth’s size, GJ 251 c is close enough for the research team to say that several planned observatories could directly image its light within the next decade. Directly measuring the light from a planet in its star’s habitable zone could reveal chemical “biosignatures” in its atmosphere, which may reveal biological activity on the planet. If confirmed, such a detection could represent the first discovery of extraterrestrial life.
While Professor Mahadevan cautioned that any image captured by next-generation telescopes would be only “a spot of light,” the data carried within that light would likely clarify whether the planet currently maintains an atmosphere. The professor said the ability to directly image the planet this close to Earth could also allow astronomers to search any atmosphere for “possible biosignatures.”
“The planet lies within the Habitable Zone of its host star, i.e., in the region around the star where liquid water could exist on a planet, given suitable atmospheric properties,” Dr. Mahadevan told The Debrief. “This, coupled with the proximity of the host star, and the fact that our future ground-based telescopes have a good chance of being able to detect the light from this planet, makes it a good place to search for atmospheric biosignatures.”
When asked what type of chemical signature or signatures from GJ 251 c’s atmosphere would constitute signs of biological activity, the professor noted that what exactly does, or does not, constitute an actual biosignature “is a very active area of research.”
“On Earth, the simultaneous presence of oxygen and Methane in the atmosphere is a biosignature, since those exist together only due to the presence of life on our planet,” Dr. Mahadevan told The Debrief. “However, it is only in context with what the atmosphere of GJ 251c is made of that one could discuss ‘what is a biosignature?’ and what could be caused by abiotic processes.”
Before that step, the professor said astronomers would need to “unambiguously detect” the presence of an atmosphere around GJ 251 c. Unfortunately, current observatories do not have the necessary capabilities to measure and characterize the atmosphere of a habitable-zone exoplanet today.
“We are at the cutting edge of technology and analysis methods with this system,” explained Corey Beard, corresponding author on the paper who conducted the research while earning a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of California, Irvine. “We need the next generation of telescopes to directly image this candidate, but what we also need is community investment.”

When asked which planned observatories may offer that capability, Dr. Mahadevan noted three ground-based observatories that could be completed within the next decade. Of the three “next-generation” ground-based telescopes in the 30m class, Beard told The Debrief that the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is “likely to be the best suited for observations of this planet” since it will be in the Earth’s northern hemisphere.
The researcher also noted that the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which will feature a primary mirror of about 39 meters, could directly measure the light from GJ 251 c. However, due to their locations in the southern hemisphere, Mahadevan said these observatories would be observing the planet “at high airmass.” This means that, unlike the TMT in the northern hemisphere, these two observatories would have to try to image GJ 251 c through significantly more of the Earth’s atmosphere, which would add unnecessary interference to any data.
When asked about space-based observatories, Dr. Mahadevan noted that the proposed LIFE mission will be equipped with an interferometer at “thermal wavelengths” that should also be able to directly observe GJ 251 c and any potential atmosphere.
Scientists often note that a better understanding of a planet’s atmosphere should offer a better understanding of its surface chemistry. This type of data could help future observers distinguish which chemical signatures are from naturally occurring processes and which might represent biological activity from life beyond Earth.
“While we can’t yet confirm the presence of an atmosphere or life on GJ 251 c, the planet represents a promising target for future exploration,” Mahadevan said. “We made an exciting discovery, but there’s still much more to learn about this planet.”
The study “Discovery of a nearby Habitable Zone Super-Earth Candidate Amenable to Direct Imaging” was published in The Astronomical Journal.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.