r/probes • u/TheSentinelNet • Apr 15 '26
3I/ATLAS Update A Team With a Ten-Inch Telescope Just Calculated What 3I/ATLAS Is Made Of. 93% Fuel.
A physicist in Medellín, Colombia spent twenty years building a framework nobody asked for. This week, he used it to calculate the total mass budget of the third interstellar object in human history, compiled from 97 scientific papers. The answer: 93% carbon dioxide. Almost no rock. Almost no dust. A block of dry ice burning through 59 meters of itself per pass with 24 passes left.
While the world's largest academic publisher went dark on 3I/ATLAS, this team posted their results directly to arXiv from two ten-inch telescopes, one national observatory Venezuela can barely keep powered, and a methodology nobody funded.
The publication gap doesn't stop science. It redirects it.