The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile recently captured rare footage of the visitor known as 3I/ATLAS — only the third interstellar object discovered. What’s more impressive: The observatory recorded the video a full 10 days before the comet was officially identified by NASA 's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System.

Its path through space will take it between the orbits of Earth and Mars before it heads back out toward interstellar space again. When it was discovered by NASA’s ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) on July 1,