Observations from a telescope in Hawaii have identified an object of unknown origin orbiting the Earth, NASA’s planetary research institute, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

When it was discovered in September, the celestial body was identified as an asteroid, but Paul Chodas, an asteroid expert at NASA, suspected that the failed 1966 Lunar Mission, the Surveyor-2 space probe, was the upper stage of the Centaur rocket. . The lander crashed into the moon, but the rocket passed the celestial body and orbited the Sun like garbage.

The October Chodas conjecture has been confirmed by a research team led by Vishnu Reddy, an expert at the University of Arizona, using an infrared telescope in Hawaii. As a result of their work, they managed to examine not only the mysterious object more closely, but also another Centaur missile that has been orbiting the Earth since 1971.

The roughly 8-meter object, officially marked 2020 SO, was detected in September by a Hawaiian telescope. Its dimensions are the same as those of the Centaure, which can be less than 10 meters long and 3 meters in diameter.

Chodas’s attention was drawn, among other things, to the fact that the object orbits the Sun in an almost circular orbit, which is unusual for asteroids and is approaching Earth at a slower speed than asteroids.

Chodas predicts that the object will orbit the Earth for about four months after falling into the planet’s gravitational trap in mid-November, then return to its own orbit around the Sun in March. It is estimated that it will return in 2036.

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