In July 2025, astronomers announced a Manhattan-sized object moving rapidly through our solar system. Named “3I/Atlas,” it’s only the third interstellar object we’ve been able to observe (thus its name 3I/). Harvard professor Avi Loeb made headlines when he theorized it could potentially be an alien spaceship. Scientists scrambled to point the cameras from NASA’s Mars orbiter and ESA’s ExoMars orbiter at the mysterious object before it passed close to the Red Planet on October 3. Now, four days after the flyby, many are asking, “Where are the real images?”

For the latest updates on 3I/Atlas before its Mars flyby, you can hear Avi Loeb interviewed on NBC on October 3:

While the European Space Agency has published its preliminary photos—grainy images of a white dot flying past ExoMars—NASA’s been silent. Instead, the NASA website announced, “NASA is currently closed due to a lapse in government funding.”

Neal Girandola and Andrew Triana run the “Mostly True Alien Stories” podcast. The podcast’s TikTok channel explains, “We just got our closest look yet as it passed by Mars, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reportedly captured new data. But with NASA caught up in the government shutdown, nothing official has been released.”

While the rest of us wait, several hobbyist astronomers have mounted some incredibly creative investigations into the object in outer space. They’ve given us two viral images. The first appears to show a long tube flying over Mars. The second shows the same object head-on, and it has asymmetrical, fin-like protrusions on its sides. But experts are not convinced they’re accurate.

Is 3I/Atlas an alien spaceship shaped like a cylindrical rocket?

While NASA doesn’t broadcast its Mars orbiters’ data as a live feed, you can watch the Perseverance rover crawl across the red planet’s surface in real time—and it has cameras pointed skyward. “Stephen Burns and Simeon Shmohm have been digging through raw Perseverance rover data. Burns stitched together a nine-minute time-lapse showing a bright object racing across the sky. Shmohm stacked 20 images to boost faint details and spotted a smudge right where 3I/Atlas was predicted to be.”

To an untrained eye (like mine), it looks like Perseverance filmed a cylindrical object flying over Mars. Something that was, say, rocket-ship-shaped. That makes my “alien spaceship” spidey senses tingle.

This shape is especially intriguing because one of the two other interstellar objects we’ve observed—1I/Oumuamua—was also up to 10 times as long as it was wide, according to NASA. But even Professor Loeb warns that the truth about 3I/Atlas’ shape may be more nuanced.

“The elongated cylinder could be caused by smearing due to a long exposure time of the camera as the source moves across the Martian sky.” Translation: at 140,000 mph, 3I/Atlas may be moving far too fast for the stationary little rover’s camera to capture, and the resulting blur looks like a long cylinder.

Does 3I/Atlas have fins?

Tiago is an amateur astronomer located in Portugal. For over a decade, he’s been sharing his findings on his YouTube channel, Dobsonian Power. In the video embedded below, he reveals images he recently captured of 3I/Atlas from Earth.

Tiago used his massive, 15.2-magnitude home telescope to film the object. This wasn’t an image of the profile of the object, like Perseverance captured, but an image of the object facing in our general direction. It’s obviously not facing directly at us, because 3I/Atlas won’t pass anywhere near Earth. But it is flying toward the inner solar system.

The resulting images were too blurry to zoom in on 3I/Atlas. But Tiago was able to use AI to enhance the few pixels he captured and pointed out that a dark object silhouetted against 3I/Atlas’ bright halo had bizarre protrusions on multiple sides—almost like fins.

Even though Tiago has a fantastic setup for an amateur astronomer, his images are obviously an order of magnitude away from what NASA and the ESA capture. As intriguing as his preliminary findings are, they just highlight how much we still have to learn about interstellar objects. Hopefully, we get a full professional analysis of the images NASA and the ESA captured of 3I/Atlas as it flew by Mars—and soon.

You can see Dobsonian Power’s latest video on this object embedded below: