During my recent podcast interview with Joe Rogan (accessible here), I had mentioned the unfortunate circumstances, under which NASA had not released for four weeks the images collected by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images were taken on October 2–3, 2025, when the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS passed within 30 million kilometers from Mars. The images are extremely valuable scientifically because they possess a spatial resolution of 30 kilometers per pixel, about 3 times better than the spatial resolution achieved in the best publicly available image from the Hubble Space Telescope, taken on July 21, 2025 (accessible here and analyzed here). Whereas the Hubble image was taken from an edge-on perspective since Earth and the Sun were separated by only ~10 degrees relative to distant 3I/ATLAS, the HiRISE image offers a sideways perspective, valuable in decoding the mass loss geometry and glow around as it approached the Sun.
The delay in the data release was argued to be the result of the government shutdown on October 1, 2025. Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists suggested that it may have to do with evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence in the HiRISE images. When asked about it, I suggested that the delay is probably not a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence but rather of terrestrial stupidity. We should not hold science hostage to the shutdown politics of the day. The scientific community would have greatly benefited from the dissemination of this time-sensitive data as astronomers plan follow-up observations in the coming months.
Joe Rogan suggested that I contact the interim NASA administrator, Sean Duffy. The following day, I corresponded with congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna regarding a related formal request from NASA. Following our exchange, Representative Luna wrote a brilliant letter to NASA’s acting administrator Duffy.
We all owe a debt of deep gratitude for the visionary support displayed by Representative Luna to frontier science through her letter, attached below.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
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