Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Instead of a global rock, the newly discovered object appears to be an old rocket from a failed lunar-landing mission 54 years ago, a way to finally return home, according to NASA’s leading asteroid expert. Observations should help nail his identity.
“I’m very jaded about this,” Paul Chodas told the Associated Press. “Finding one of these and drawing such a link has been my hobby, and I’ve been doing it for decades now.”
Chodas speculates that Asteroid 2020 SO, as it is formally known, is actually the Centaur upper rocket stage that was discarded in 1966 when NASA’s Surveyor 2 lander was successfully launched to the moon. The lander crashed into the moon after one of its thrusters failed to ignite on the way there. The rocket, meanwhile, floated toward the moon and orbited the sun, never to be seen again.
Last month a telescope in Hawaii discovered a mysterious object while searching our planet for doomsday rocks. The substance was immediately added to the number of asteroids and comets found in our solar system at the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, marking a number of just 1 million.
The Bright Buzzet is estimated to be approximately 26 feet (8 m) in height. It is in the old St. Urur’s Ballpark, which will be less than 32 feet (10 meters) with its engine nozzle and 10 feet (3 meters) diameter.
The focus of Chodas is that its circular orbit around the Sun is similar to that of Earth – unusual for a planet.
“Flag number one,” said Ava Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Ject Project Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The Earth object is also in the same plane as the Earth, which is not tilted up or down, there are other red flags. Asteroids usually zip at strange angles. Finally, it is about 1,500 miles per hour (2,400 kilometers) closer to Earth, slower than asteroid standards.
As the closer object gets closer, astronomers should be able to better chart its orbit and determine how much pressure it has had around it through the radiation and thermal effects of sunlight. If it is an old centaur – essentially a light empty can – it will move differently than a stone of less space sensitive to outside forces.
In this way astronomers distinguish between asteroids and space junk in general, like abandoned rocket parts, as both appear only as moving points in the sky. There are dozens of fake asteroids potential, but their speeds are too wrong or rumble to confirm their artificial identity, Chodas said.
Sometimes it’s on this side.
For example, in 1991 a mysterious object, Chodas and others, was determined to be a regular asteroid instead of debris, even though its orbit around the sun is similar to that of Earth.
Even more exciting, in 2002, Choudhury discovered that what he believed was the third phase of the remaining Saturn V from the 1969 Apollo 12, which was landed on the second moon by NASA astronauts. He acknowledges that given the chaotic one-year orbit of matter around the Earth, the evidence was conditional. It was never designated as a planet, and was left in Earth orbit in 2003.
Promoting its principle, the path to the latest object budget is straight and more stable.
“I could be wrong about this. I don’t want to be overconfident, “Chodas said. “But it’s the first time, in my view, that all the pieces fit together with a real well-known launch.”
And he’s happy to note that as a teenager in Canada, he embarked on a mission in 1966.
Chodas’s findings are “a good one” based on solid evidence, said Carrie Nugent, an asteroid hunter at Olin K College Ledge Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. He is the author of the 2017 book “Asteroid Hunter”.
“Some more data will be useful so we can know for sure,” he said in an email. “Asteroid hunters around the world will be looking at this object object to get that data. I’m excited to see how this develops! ”
Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics notes that “there are embarrassing phenomena of objects in many, many, many orbits: for a few days before a temporary asteroid designation was obtained he realized they were artificial.”
It’s barely clear-cut.
Last year, Nick Howes, a British amateur astronomer, announced that a planet in solar orbit is probably an abandoned lunar module from NASA’s Apollo 10, a rehearsal for the Apollo 11 lunar landing. While this object is potentially artificial, Chodas and other connections are questionable.
Skepticism is good, Howes wrote in an email. In the late 2030s, “when it is hoped that it is next to Woods’ neck, it will lead to more observations.”
The fourteen were most interested in their respective laps by Earth in 1984 and 2002. But, it could see from 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) away, he said.
He predicts that the March object will spend about four months orbiting the Earth after being captured in mid-November, before returning to its own orbit around the Sun next March.
Chodas suspects the Earth project will slam Earth – “at least not this time.”
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