Comet or alien probe? NASA Rover image of 3I/ATLAS above Mars deepens mystery

The new images of interstellar 3I/ATLAS were captured by NASA Perseverance Rover on October 4, 2025 as the mysterious object flew past Martian surface.

Since its discovery on July 1, various theories have been making rounds about its origins, whether it is a comet or an alien probe. The newly-released snap, instead of solving the enigma, has further deepened the mystery by declaring the interstellar object a massive cylindrical shape.

The object appears to be a long, thin, and green-coloured stripe, showing four times longer than its width and adopting the shape of giant and long cylinders.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who has been the proponent of an object being an alien craft, analyzed the rover’s photos by calculating its camera setting, distance, and speed.

According to Loeb’s analysis, 3I/ATLAS shown in the images is not actually a cylindrical object. The strip is a smear created because of the rover’s camera over-stretching in taking the pictures as the object was moving rapidly across Mars.

He further explained that the apparent cylindrical shape of 3I/ATLAS also appeared by stacking hundreds of interstellar objects over a short period of about 10 minutes.

According to the rover's camera settings, the stripe’s presumed length is estimated to be 31,000 miles long.

On the other hand, the actual size of 3I/ATLAS suggested by professor Loeb and other telescopes including the Hubble Space telescope, is around 46 kilometers or 28 miles wide, which is thousand times longer than the interstellar object itself.

Dr Horace Drew, a retired senior researcher at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) explained that the green glow emitted from the object could be due to the spacecraft's nickel coating.

As per Drew observations, “it is not a comet,” declared on a post on X.

According to Loeb, he is awaiting for another image taken by a different but high resolution Mars camera, called HiRISE, which could shed light more clearly on the nature of 3I/ATLAS.

Unlike Avi Loeb’s claims, other scientists consider the interstellar object a comet, racing through our solar system and en-route to Earth.