The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS will likely remain invisible from Earth until at least mid-November.

The interstellar wanderer 3I/ATLAS continues to remain invisible to observation from Earth. In the second half of September, the comet approached the Sun so closely that it was completely drowned in its rays. Currently, the object is projected in the sky at a minimal distance from the solar disk and, in fact, is not a night object, but a daytime object: it is located in the sky near the Sun during daylight hours. Sometimes such objects can be observed at dawn or sunset, when the solar disk is below the horizon, and a nearby object can be captured in the sky for a few minutes, but in this case this is impossible. The distance to the comet currently exceeds 200 million km, and the body is too faint to become visible against the backdrop of the dawn or sunset sky glow.

Preliminary, it will be possible to see the "interstellar ship" again no earlier than mid-November, when it moves away from the Sun to an angular distance at which its surface brightness becomes equal to the brightness of scattered sunlight at this distance. However, the question of what the brightness and, in general, the state of the comet itself will be by that time remains open.

The only instrument capable of seeing an object near the Sun, the LASCO space coronagraph, specially designed for the ultra-sensitive registration of faint structures near the solar disk, does not see the comet (in the open data, the object is not observed in the calculated position of the body, probably due to the weakness of the radiation).

In all likelihood, the body could be seen by the European spacecraft ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Mars Express, which are located near Mars, that is, much closer to the comet. Both spacecraft, in early October, indeed provided such images, which, as far as can be judged, are currently the last widely available images of the object. However, new data from these satellites has not yet been received. It should be noted that the data access policy of the European Space Agency in many cases provides for access restrictions for periods of six months or more. Some media outlets have reported that data from several instruments on board the ExoMars spacecraft have recently been locked until 2099, but there is no objective confirmation of this information. In some cases, the 2099 deadline is set as a "default deadline" in the European Space Agency archive. It is possible that this is the case, and the deadline will be updated later. For those without access to the Martian satellite archives and, possibly, to the primary LASCO data, the only option is to wait until the middle of next month, when the object is expected to become accessible to a wide range of professional large optical instruments.