๐ญ China's Mars Orbiter Photographed Only the 3rd Known Interstellar Visitor to Our Solar System
China's Tianwen-1, orbiting Mars for nearly five years, recently captured images of 3I/ATLAS โ only the third object ever confirmed to have traveled here from another star system. The orbiter photographed the comet's glowing coma and tail from about 29 million kilometers away, and from a unique vantage point outside Earth's orbital plane that no Earth-based telescope could match. This was also China's first-ever deep-space observation of an astronomical object beyond the solar system. What do you think we could learn from studying material that formed around a completely different star?