Abstract
The volatile production-rate literature for interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS spans 12 instruments with differing aperture, fluorescence-model, and reduction-pipeline assumptions — flagged by at least three independent teams as a source of uncorrected systematic bias. Using a companion crosscalibration of 125 published production-rate measurements (Dumpati, 2026), we develop a fourcomponent prospective framework for future LSST-detected interstellar objects: an instrument bias inventory, a standardized aperture convention, an atomic-species fluorescence-model harmonization protocol, and a structured uncertainty budget template. Tested retrospectively against 3I/ATLAS, the framework yields two results. First, aperture standardization narrows JWST/MIRI’s multiplicative deficit from ≈3.4× to ≈2.0×; JWST/NIRSpec improves less and remains ~100× below SOHO/SWAN after correction. Both rest on a small (n = 2 per instrument) sample, and the JWST/MIRI result is in tension with Belyakov et al.’s (2026) own assessment of the same measurement, which reports no evidence of this underestimation — unresolved here. Second, the framework leaves unchanged a large discrepancy between two teams measuring the same species with the same instrument (SOHO/SWAN): a mean 3.6× disagreement before calibration remains 3.6× after it, consistent with a data-reduction-pipeline difference rather than aperture or fluorescence effects, though a molecular fluorescence-model difference cannot be fully excluded. This negative result is informative in its own right: instrument-level calibration can substantially reduce inter-instrument bias, but cannot substitute for reduction-pipeline transparency — a complementary infrastructure need this paper identifies but does not resolve.
Data and code
All data and analysis scripts are openly available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21876454
Preprint: https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.15007739/v1
Author: Shobha Mourya Dumpati, FGS, FRGS
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