How Manhattan-size comet 31/ATLAS could help save the world

The fate of the world could rest on ATLAS’ shoulders.

Contrary to allegations that 31/ATLAS is potentially hostile alien tech, the Manhattan-sized comet could provide potentially Earth-saving intel.

Researchers claim that a NASA-backed campaign to track the interstellar object zipping through our solar system could help us monitor other hazardous objects in the future.

From November 27, 2025, through January 27, 2026 — when the 31/ATLAS is slated to depart our solar system — the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) will be conducting a “comet campaign” to refine methods for pinpointing its location, Space.com reported.

Along with predicting the orbit, the so-called worldwide coalition of space experts will “hold a workshop on techniques to correctly measure comet astrometry — a transformation without a change to a figure’s shape or size, such as rotation or reflection. This will reportedly help form the blueprint for how we monitor comets and other or other asteroids that may pose a threat to our planet.

The organization noted that comets are hard to observe due to their tails and, because their tails and comas (a cloudlike atmosphere of gas and dust that encompasses its solid nucleus as it approaches the Sun).

This makes it hard to estimate their brightness, in turn impeding trajectory predictions, which allow us to know how close the comet will get to Earth.

Thankfully, the comet will reportedly come nowhere near us, but its proximity — roughly 1.8 sun-Earth distances — makes 31/ATLAS visible to telescopes. IAWN is even urging citizen scientists to join the efforts, provided they register no later than November 7.

While tracking comets and asteroids is a high priority given the potential danger, NASA’s official position is that 31/ATLAS does not pose a threat to Earth.

This runs contrary to theories spouted by Dr. Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist whose been tracking the interstellar object since its July discovery.

Loeb believed that 31/ATLAS, which is the third interstellar object to enter our solar system, could be extraterrestrial in origin after exhibiting a host of characteristics that seemed to defy typical comet behavior.

These included an anti-tail — a jet of particles that points toward the sun instead of away from it as is standard — and that the fact that it was spouting a plume of four grams of nickel per second with no evidence of iron, a phenomenon unheard of in comets.

Loeb also expressed concern over ATLAS’s non-gravitational acceleration and anomalous trajectory that will bring it suspiciously close to Jupiter, Venus and Mars, possibly suggesting that it was a potentially hostile alien probe that was sent to conduct reconnaissance on Earth.

“The hypothesis in question is that [31/ATLAS] is a technological artifact, and furthermore has active intelligence,” he postulated in a far-fetched paper published in July. “If this is the case, then two possibilities follow. First, that its intentions are entirely benign and second, they are malign.”