FROM DAILY MAIL: NASA’s big reveal of the mysterious interstellar object has been slammed as a joke, with many claiming the space agency is covering up what they really know.
The newest images of the visitor, known as 3I/ATLAS, were released by the space agency on Wednesday.
NASA’s HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was expected to provide one of the best images of 3I/ATLAS to date, since it was able to view the object from just 19 million miles away.
However, the image shown on Wednesday was a fuzzy, black-and-white picture that did not have any definition.
Moreover, NASA refuted any claims that the object, which had made unexpected maneuvers that dumbfounded experts, is anything other than a large space rock.
At a press conference, Amit Kshatriya, the agency’s associate administrator, declared, “3I/ATLAS is a comet.’
Social media erupted as users expressed uncertainty and accused the space agency of a cover-up.
“What a waste of time! NASA is lying so bad. They are all so scripted. The gaslighting is off the charts,’ an X user posted on the platform
“You have lost all credibility with this blurry hogwash photo,” wrote another. “Anyone over there who cares about Earth should dump the entire unedited image archive to Wikileaks.”
“It was a foggy London day when the NASA Mars orbiter took this photo haha,” another user posted.
The space agency strongly rejected suggestions that comet 3I/ATLAS was exhibiting any behavior inconsistent with a natural interstellar object.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb had previously highlighted at least 11 unexplained anomalies, among them a cometary tail oriented in the wrong direction, the object shifting to a distinct blue color as it approached the Sun, and non-gravitational accelerations that altered its trajectory without visible outgassing. But NASA scientists say these apparent irregularities are most likely explained by the comet’s origin in a distant alien solar system with a radically different chemical composition from anything in our own, making direct comparisons to familiar comets unreliable.
“We certainly haven’t seen any technosignatures [technological traces of intelligent life] or anything from it that would lead us to believe it was anything other than a comet,” said Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate. “It’s gonna look different because it didn’t come from our solar system.”
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