Ranging Needed on 3I/Atlas

 

Today Avi Loeb has reproduced some spectacular new photographs of 3I/Atlas; you can see one of them above. At the same time its unusual properties continue to pile up. There are now officially twelve anomalies. The most recent is the nature of the tails; they are not reacting to 3I's supposed rotation. This rotation was gauged pre-perihelion at 16.6 hours. There are only a few possibilities listed by Avi and the most likely is that the tails are the product of some kind of technology; thrusters a bit like human rockets. Personally what would really surprise me is if 3I did something normal! Source: https://medium.com/@avi-loeb/magnificent-images-of-jets-around-3i-atlas-e4ad8acc723c. It has occurred to me that maybe now is a good time for us to corroborate the distance between the earth and 3I/Atlas. Astronomers employ three different methods to work out how far away a heavenly body is. The first is used for distant stars and galaxies and it involves measuring how bright objects look which are known to have a "standard candle", a fixed absolute brightness level. The second is parallax, seeing how something's position shifts relative to more distant objects by taking measurements at different times of the year. The earth's rotation gives us a stereoscopic view of the universe. This works on planets and closer stars. The third method can only be used for asteroids and comets very close to the earth and that is radar ranging. This works the same as it does on earth with military or aviation primary radar, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2024/05/mh370-portal.html. Is 3I close enough for radar ranging, and if so has anybody done it? This may sound like an odd question, but I think it's worth carrying out this test just in case the object is actively manoeuvring to hide its true distance from the earth with forced perspective. This is an optical illusion that can be induced deliberately or can happen spontaneously. Artificial forced perspective is used in movie special effects, for example to make the hobbits and humans seem to be their true relative sizes in the Lord of The Rings films when the actors playing them are all ordinary sized people, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB8db3PMZ9s. The effect can occur naturally by accident when filming something moving from another moving position. This is what causes the strange incidence of aeroplanes standing still in the sky. They're often blamed on "glitches in reality", but they are in fact simply a moment of perfectly balanced forced perspective, see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1MRaHjwfSM. Why would 3I/Atlas do this? Well, possibly so it could move closer to the earth without us noticing, or at least delaying the time when we are aware of its approach for as long as possible. If this is its current activity it might explain some of the other anomalies, like its rapidly increasing pulses of brightness. Therefore, I do recommend that astronomers do some radar ranging tests on 3I/Atlas until we are certain that it is indeed exiting the inner solar system as it is predicted to do.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2025/07/interstellar-object-portal.html.