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MAST Staff - 2026 Jan 29TESS Special Observations of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS
In July 2025, a new interstellar comet named 3I/ATLAS was discovered by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. This comet is currently on its way out of the solar system, speeding a velocity of around 130,000 miles (209,000 kilometers) per hour. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has become the latest telescope to observe 3I/ATLAS in a series of special observations denoted "Sector 1751" that took place between January 15-January 22.
More information can be found in these updates from the TESS Mission Office:
Other NASA missions that have observed 3I/ATLAS include the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. The full NASA image gallery for 3I/ATLAS is available here.
Data Access
Data from Sector 1751 is available at MAST in several collections:
The TESS Mission Calibrated FFIs for Sector 1751 are available through the TESS FFI Bulk Downloads page and searchable in the MAST Portal and astroquery.MAST. The comet's trajectory is in Camera 2, CCD 3. Target Pixel Files, Light Curves, and Data Validation files from Sector 1751 will be available in mid February.
Quick-look TESS FFIs from TICA are now available from Sector 1751. The comet's trajectory is in Camera 2, CCD 3.
FFI Cubes from Sector 1751 data have been archived and available for use with the TESScut Application. Use the "Moving Target" mode and target name "3I" or "C/2025 N1" to generate a cutout centered on 3I/ATLAS with Sector 1751 data.
The TESS mission team has created a collection of data cubes centered on the comet to assist the community in making use of this unique dataset. These will be archived at MAST in the near future as an HLSP collection, but are currently available in this Zenodo repository with accompanying notebook tutorials in this GitHub repository.
Visit the TESS Holdings Available at MAST webpage for the current status of TESS mission data.
