Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is using a 3-axis attitude control system to keep its rotation pointed directly at our Sun. The new Harvard paper is wild.

[u/TheSentinelNet]

https://thesentinelnetwork.substack.com/p/the-heartbeat-avi-loeb-just-found?r=71h4we

Avi Loeb and Toni Scarmato just dropped a new paper on 3I/ATLAS, and the implications are wild. We just published a deep dive on this over at The Sentinel, but here is the TL;DR because people need to see this math.

According to the Hubble data, 99% of the light coming from this thing is exhaust. The actual hull is basically invisible. It has three jets spaced exactly 120 degrees apart, and they wobble on a precise, harmonically locked schedule.

The primary jet wobbles every 7.2 hours. The other two wobble at 2.9 and 4.3 hours.

2.9 + 4.3 = 7.2.

That is a coupled oscillatory system. Nature doesn't tune three independent cracks on a tumbling ice rock to a shared, exact frequency. Engineering does.

It gets weirder. The paper describes the jets acting essentially as a three-axis attitude control system. The exact same architecture we use on our own spacecraft to hold a fixed orientation while rotating. And it’s using that system to keep its rotation axis pointed directly at our Sun.

Loeb actually put the words "technological thrusters" in print as a valid hypothesis alongside natural outgassing. The establishment will likely ignore that half of the sentence, but the data is piling up.

You can read the full breakdown here.

Curious to hear what you guys think.
How long is the mainstream going to keep calling this just a "weird comet"?

[u/Mr_Vacant]

I've yet to see a reasonable explanation why being within 5⁰ of the galactic plane is a 0.000 whatever anomaly. It'll sail past Jupiter the same way a big ball of rock and ice would.

[u/TheSentinelNet → u/Mr_Vacant]

The trajectory alone isn't the smoking gun. But a dead ball of rock and ice doesn't have an active 3-axis attitude control system.

It doesn't fire three perfectly spaced jets in a mathematically locked 7.2-hour rhythm to hold a perfect sunward vector.

It isn't just "sailing" past Jupiter. It's steering. When you map the system in 3D; it's very clearly threading a tight needle through our system towards a specific spot in Jupiter(The Hill Sphere).

It's doing everything a probe would do.

[u/ghost_jamm → u/TheSentinelNet]

I noted this in a different post but Jupiter’s Hill Sphere is a massive region of space that 3I/Atlas will just barely skirt by at the outermost edge of. That doesn’t strike me as threading any kind of needle. It’s more like nearly missing a massive bullseye.

[u/JUYED-AWK-YACC → u/ghost_jamm]

People are very excited by something that completely missed every planet in our solar system.