Franck Marchis is a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer and Founder at Unistellar. He has dedicated his work to the study of our solar system, specifically the search for asteroids with moons, using mainly ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics.
Simon Steel is Deputy Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute. As an observational astrophysicist, he specialized in optical spectrophotometry, with an interest in the star formation histories of galaxies.
Bettina Forget is an art-science researcher, educator, and visual artist who joined the SETI Artist-in-Residence program in 2016 as a Researcher in Residence and became its Director in 2020. In this capacity, she facilitates collaboration between artists and the SETI Institute’s scientists, promotes art-science research, and weaves a network of institutional partners active in art, science, and technology.
What can a visitor from another star system teach us about our own cosmic neighborhood?
Join host Dr. Franck Marchis and guest Dr. Cecilia Tubiana (INAF) for a conversation about interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS and the surprising observations made by ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) during its rare close encounter with this ancient traveler.
In November 2025, Juice turned five of its instruments toward 3I/ATLAS, capturing a once-in-a-lifetime dataset as the comet passed through the Solar System. From massive water vapor outgassing to tails stretching millions of kilometers into space, the observations are helping scientists better understand what this object is made of, how it behaves near the Sun, and what it can tell us about planetary systems beyond our own.
We’ll talk about:
📅 June 11, 2026
⏰ 9:00 AM PDT
Bring your questions for the live Q&A.
Press release: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/Five_things_Juice_has_revealed_about_Comet_3I_ATLAS
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