An editorial notice by the Minor Planet Center (accessible here) announced that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, has just been targeted in a new campaign initiated by a United Nations-endorsed group focused on the defense of Earth against space objects.
The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) is a worldwide planetary defense collaboration of organizations and individual astronomers who collectively work to detect, monitor, and characterize potentially hazardous asteroids and Near-Earth Objects. 3I/ATLAS is the first interstellar object targeted by its campaigns.
On the date of the solar conjunction of 3I/ATLAS relative to Earth, October 21, 2025, IAWN made the following announcement:
“Comets present unique challenges for accurate astrometric measurements and orbit predictions. Cometary bodies are extended with morphological features (comae and tails) that can systematically pull their centroid measurements off their central brightness peak, presenting challenges to estimate comet trajectories.
The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) announces a comet campaign from November 27, 2025, through January 27, 2026 to introduce methods for improving astrometry from comet observations. The campaign will target comet 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) to exercise the capability of the observing community to extract accurate astrometry. To prepare for the campaign, we will hold a workshop on techniques to correctly measure comet astrometry.
Registration is required by November 7th (here) for the workshop and only those participants that attend the workshop can participate in the campaign.”
Interestingly, this announcement follows a White Paper that I submitted on September 30, 2025 to the United Nations in collaboration with Omer Eldadi and Gershon Tenenbaum (accessible here and here). This White Paper advocated for coordinating global scientific research to maximize observational coverage and ensure optimal scientific monitoring of interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS, which could pose a threat to humanity if they happen to carry alien technology. Black swan events with small probabilities must be considered seriously if their implications to the future of humanity are large.
As of now, 3I/ATLAS displayed 8 surprising qualities that earned it a rank of 4 out of 10 on the Loeb scale (quantified here and here) of a possible technological origin:
1. Its trajectory is aligned to within 5 degrees with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun, with a likelihood of 0.2% (see here).
2. During July and August 2025, it displayed a sunward jet (anti-tail) that is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective, unlike familiar comets (see here).
