The Europa Clipper spacecraft may soon be pummeled by charged particles — particles ripped away from the ion tail streaming from the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

That's the new prediction from two European researchers whose computer code allows them to identify when spacecraft can align with a comet's tail and the sun. Completely harmless to the spacecraft, the event provides a rare and fortuitous alignment — and a unique opportunity to directly sample material from a comet from beyond our region of the cosmos.

"We have virtually no data on the interior of interstellar comets and the star systems that formed them," Samuel Grant of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, who led the research, told Space.com. "Sampling the tail in this way is the closest we can currently get to a direct samp

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