[U: This is the "OTHER" Atlas! Oh Well.] Friday Funnies: Hmm. Would Any Alien "Intelligence" Fly -- For Millions Of Years, To Dip Close To Our Sun -- And Only Then [Incompetently] Break Their Ship, Into Pieces?!

Admittedly, this is making fun of Prof. Loeb, at his considerable expense. But overnight we learned that 3I/ATLAS (as comets very often do!) has broken up, into three irregularly shaped shards, due to both the heating of approaching the Sun, and the gravity slingshot it endured, as it accelerated past Sol.

Those three chunks of dirty snow are now speeding past Earth's orbit, in the next few days, at a very safe distance. This is, in sum, a very old. . . but entirely non-intelligent. . . comet. Here's the Space.com story:

. . .Astronomers have captured striking footage of the solar system comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) breaking apart on the nights following Nov. 11 after it was destabilized by a close brush with the sun in early October.

Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) brightened significantly in the months following its May 2025 discovery. As it got closer to the sun and heated up, the frozen [simple chemical elements] in its core turned into gas and formed a reflective cloud around it known as a coma. Solar wind caused this gas to blow out behind it, forming the characteristic tail seen on most visible comets.

Sadly, C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) didn't brighten enough to become a naked eye comet. However, its close approach to the sun on Oct. 8 does appear to have wreaked havoc with the comet's structural integrity, setting the stage for the dramatic fragmentation of its ancient nucleus.

Luckily for us, the fragmentation was captured on Nov. 11-12 by astronomers using the 1.82 m Copernicus telescope at the Asiago Observatory in Italy. . . .

Smiling -- on a sunny, warming Friday -- and separately, we learned that NASA's Goldstone deep space radio dish was damaged, likely by operator error, some time in the last few months, but since the shutdown, no one has officially come forward to explain why we are relying on Italy and Australia to phone "Vger" (Voyager) One and Two, from time to time -- and not. . . our own Goldstone dish -- in California. Yikes.

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