THE VIEWPORT: We Built 3I/ATLAS.
Sixteen dated Hubble, IRAM, Subaru, and Tianwen-1 observations. Real JPL ephemeris. Every claim cited. Explore it yourself.
SUBJECT: 3I/ATLAS INTERACTIVE 3D RECONSTRUCTION MODEL // 16 KEYFRAME OBSERVATIONS // JPL HORIZONS EPHEMERIS (e=6.145, q=1.356 AU) // REAL-TIME THERMAL IR VIEW // VOLUMETRIC JET SIMULATION // CITED SOURCES PER OBSERVATION
DATE: MAY 6, 2026
CROSS-REF: THE REFINED FUEL | THE OPERATING SYSTEM | THE HEARTBEAT | THE SURGE | THE VERDICT | THE IGNITION SEQUENCE | THE SENTINEL DOSSIER
DATA CONFIDENCE: VERIFIED (JPL HORIZONS SMALL BODIES DATABASE, HUI & JEWITT arXiv:2601.21569, SCARMATO & LOEB arXiv:2604.18773, BIVER ET AL. arXiv:2603.23240, SHINNAKA ET AL. arXiv:2603.25002, LI/SHI/HUI/SHI arXiv:2602.14218v1, 7DT COLLABORATION arXiv:2602.12930v1, ANDREE arXiv:2603.16981) + MODELED (SENTINEL RECONSTRUCTION FROM PUBLISHED PARAMETERS)
We are building the video side of this operation. If you want the briefings in a format you can watch, subscribe to The Sentinel Network on YouTube.
THE MODEL
https://3i-model.thesentinel.network/
Open the link. Drag to orbit. Click features to inspect. Scrub 16 dated observations across the bottom timeline. Switch to thermal IR view. Every number you see is sourced to a published paper from a Sentinel briefing.
We built this because the object deserves better than static diagrams in PDFs that nobody reads. Thirty-five+ briefings of documented anomalies now live inside a single interactive reconstruction you can rotate with your hands.
New here? START HERE for the full reading order.
WHAT THIS IS
This is not an artist’s impression. It is not speculative. It is a reconstruction built from the published observational record, assembled parameter by parameter from papers we have cited in every briefing since December.
The hull dimensions come from Hui and Jewitt. The jet position angles come from Scarmato and Loeb. The exhaust velocity comes from Biver et al. at the IRAM 30m telescope. The sequential chemistry activation comes from the Korean 7DT array and the Shanghai radio telescopes. The rotation periods come from Italian ground photometry cross-validated against Hubble visit cadence. The orbital elements come from JPL Horizons.
When you scrub to a date, the model shows what was observed on that date. Not approximately. The heliocentric distances match Hui and Jewitt’s Table 1 to four decimal places. We computed the orbit from scratch using the published elements (e=6.145, q=1.356 AU, perihelion October 29 2025 14:38 UT) and back-solved every Hubble visit date from the published distance values. They match.
THE 16 KEYFRAMES
Every observation in the model corresponds to a real published measurement. The timeline across the bottom of the cockpit shows all sixteen.
July 1, 2025. Discovery. ATLAS Chile telescope. Red, featureless surface. No gas detected. Silent approach.
July 21, 2025. Hubble first light. Teardrop dust cocoon. Nucleus constrained to 0.22 to 2.8 km radius. (Jewitt et al. 2025 ApJL 990 L2; TESS precovery back to May 2025)
August 17, 2025. CN ignition at 2.97 AU. The Korean 7DT 20-filter array catches the breakpoint. One filter out of twenty deviates. Gas appears outside-in, starting 20,000 km from the surface and filling inward. Color shifts blue. We covered this in THE IGNITION SEQUENCE.
September 8, 2025. Water activation. Shanghai Tianma 65m radio telescope. First OH detection. 80 to 90 percent of the water comes from an extended source, not the nucleus. Six independent teams have now confirmed this. We documented the evidence in THE GHOST COMA, THE WIDE ANGLE, THE WEIGH-IN, and THE REFINED FUEL.
October 3, 2025. Mars flyby. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE images the object at roughly 30 km per pixel. MAVEN captured the coma October 5.
October 29, 2025. Perihelion. 1.356 AU. Solar conjunction. No ground observations possible. Despite a 16-degree gravitational deflection, the sunward jet re-establishes itself from the opposite pole post-perihelion. A dual pole-flip at 1-in-40,000 statistical odds. We analyzed the trajectory in THE CURATED ORBIT.
November 1-3, 2025. IRAM 30m peak output. Biver et al. clock the exhaust at 0.37 km/s. Half the speed every comet in history has produced at this distance. Sunward flow 20 to 100 percent faster than antisunward. Braking profile. Hydrogen sulfide below the floor of every comet ever measured. Full analysis in THE REFINED FUEL.
November 30, 2025. Hubble Visit 1. The canonical Scarmato and Loeb PA measurement. Jet 2 aligned with the projected transverse direction to within 0.5 degrees. Spin axis at PA=290 degrees, anti-sunward. We covered this in THE HEARTBEAT and THE BLUEPRINT.
December 12, 2025. Hubble Visit 2. Jets in tight collimated beam mode. Same configuration as November 30. (Hui & Jewitt; THE DECEMBER INTERSECTION)
December 19, 2025. Closest approach to Earth. 1.83 AU. Peak observability.
December 27, 2025. Mode-switch. Hubble Visit 3. Overnight, the jets fan open. Phase coherence of the 7.1-hour cycle degrades. Brightness swing 0.311 magnitudes. (Scarmato & Loeb arXiv:2601.10860; THE HEARTBEAT)
January 7, 2026. Hubble Visit 4. Subaru HDS detects [O I] forbidden line (Shinnaka et al.). CO2 still elevated on the outbound leg.
January 14, 2026. Hubble Visit 5. Three mini-jets at 120-degree separation. None pointing antisunward. 5.6-degree rotational shift in 30 minutes. (Hui & Jewitt)
January 16, 2026. TESS goes to safe mode for 72 hours. We documented this in CONFIRMED: TESS CONTINGENCY and THE THREE DAYS OF DARKNESS.
January 22, 2026. Opposition surge. Earth-3I-Sun alignment at 0.7-degree phase angle. 0.2-magnitude brightness spike. Dust scatters like a solid surface, not an ice halo. Full analysis in THE SURGE. (Hui & Jewitt)
March 16, 2026. Jupiter Hill sphere flyby. 53.56 plus or minus 0.45 million km. Exactly the Hill sphere boundary. 1-in-20,000 alignment for a random interstellar arrival. (JPL Horizons)
WHAT THE MODEL SHOWS
Click the hull. You will see a procedurally-generated surface with micro-cratering, longitudinal banding, and weathered patches consistent with a 9 to 13 billion year old thick-disk object. The surface is lit by the actual sun position for the selected date, computed from the real orbital ephemeris.
Click any jet. The specifications match the Andree minimum-thruster theorem: four jets are the minimum configuration that can produce the observed three-axis control. Jet 2 (80,100 N, 7.20-hour period) is the dominant anchor. Jet 1 (28,700 N, 2.9-hour period) traces the precession cone. Jet 3 (11,200 N, 4.3-hour period) carries the normal-direction component. Jet 4 (anti-tail, axial sunward) extends past the Earth-Moon distance. Scarmato and Loeb measured the position angles; Andree proved the geometry requires a minimum of four independent sources. We covered both papers in THE BLUEPRINT.
Switch to thermal IR view. The scene maps through a calibrated FLIR Iron palette. Jets register as bright yellow-white. The sunward hemisphere reads warmer than the anti-sun side, exactly as a radiatively-heated body should. The anti-tail jet, the one pointed at the Sun, burns hottest.
The Tianwen-1 dust measurements that killed the icy grain model are what we reported in THE VERDICT. The Ancient Engine dating analysis. The mass receipt methodology. The entire model is the visual synthesis of every briefing we have published.
THE SENTINEL ASSESSMENT:
We started this publication in December 2025 with a dossier. Since then, we have documented more than sixty distinct anomalies across chemistry, trajectory, physical structure, rotation dynamics, and institutional response. Every one of them is sourced. Every one of them is in the model.
The model does not argue. It shows. Drag it. Click it. Read the citations. Form your own assessment.
The object is outbound. It is past Jupiter. Every telescope that can still see it is watching. The five predictions from THE VERDICT remain on the table: ghost coma persists or it does not, thrust changes or it does not, jets reappear or they do not, brightness deviates or it does not, chemistry shifts or it does not.
We will keep watching. We built the viewport so you can watch with us.
The model is live at:
https://3i-model.thesentinel.network/
It runs in any modern browser. No download, no app, no account. Drag to orbit. Click to inspect. Scrub to travel through time.
Keep looking up.
-- The Sentinel Network™
Every briefing we’ve published is free. That’s not changing. This publication has no institutional backing, no sponsors, and no editorial board. We’re doing the work the newsrooms won’t, sourcing papers, filing FOIAs, building tools, and writing at the pace a once-in-a-civilization event demands.
Paid subscribers fund the investigation directly. They also get access to primary source documents, the comment section on every briefing, Fieldcraft Labs, and the FIELDCRAFT series, the tools and methods behind every investigation we publish. No ads. No sponsors. No strings. Your subscription is a data point against the suppression gradient.
If you can’t subscribe, we don’t care. Read everything. Share everything. The mission is the mission.
Subscribe to The Sentinel Network
Top 100 Science publication on Substack
Share this investigation. The Suppression Gradient documented what happens when this coverage reaches platforms that do not want you reading it. Every share, every restack, every forwarded link is a data point against the gradient.
Previous briefings: WHAT IS MONDALOY | THE TOKYO TABLE | THE BLUEPRINT | THE REFINED FUEL | THE OPERATING SYSTEM | THE FLOOR | THE NARROW BAND | THE VERDICT | THE HEARTBEAT | THE SURGE | THE IGNITION SEQUENCE | THE SENTINEL DOSSIER | THE ATTRITION (SERIES)
This is astonishing work. Congratulations
Wow! 👍