The ATLAS (short for Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) is a NASA-funded program developed by the University of Hawaii. It incorporates data from four ground-based telescopes, two in Hawaii, one in Chile, and one in South Africa, to scan the entire sky twice a night, looking for asteroids and other impactors.

NASA has discovered the third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system, but the icy snowball object poses no threat to Earth.

The recently discovered interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS may be one of the oldest comets ever seen by humanity. The object was already exciting to astronomers as only the third space object seen entering the solar system from beyond its limits,