However, instead of some of the planets that will orbit the Earth, it could actually be just some old space junk that returned to our planet.
D Near. Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Neer Earth Ject project studies, believes that the object project called Asterid eid 2020 SO is an old booster rocket from the 1960s.
“I suspect that this newly discovered 20 BJT 2020 SO is thought to be an old rocket booster because it is following an orbit about the Sun which is in the same plane of the same rotation as the Earth, and the farthest away from the Sun.” Chodas told CNN.
“It’s definitely the type of orbit that separates a rocket stage from a lunar mission, once it passes through the moon and escapes into the Sun’s orbit. It’s possible that asteroids could evolve in orbit like this, but not impossible.”
In order to try and connect it with any known lunar mission launch, Choudas analyzed the motion of the planet back in time and discovered that it was likely to be “closer to Earth in late 1966.”
He said that it was consistent with the introduction of Surveyor 2 on September 20, 1966. That mission was designed for a soft landing on the moon, but the failure led to the spacecraft crashing, Chodas said. The Centaur rocket that was used to propel the spacecraft passed through the moon and went into orbit around the sun and has not been seen again until today, Chodas suspects.
This Earth object is expected to enter orbit around Earth in late November, and will be considered a mini-moon if it is a planet. However, if it is a booster rocket, as Chodas suspects, it will be another piece of space debris floating around the space.
“In a month or so we will get a clue as to whether the 2020 SO is really a rocket body, as we should be able to detect the effect of sunlight on the motion of this object object: if it were really a rocket, the body would be much less than an asteroid. and a little pressure due to sunlight will change its speed enough that we should be able to find it in the tracking data. “
Long-lost rocket stages are rarely obtained from the orbit of the Sun and the orbit of the Earth, and this would be just another example of a rocket stage being captured from orbit.
It was only the second time in 2002 that Saturn V could be in the upper stage from Apollo 12, Chodas said.
Ashley Strickland of CNN contributed to this report.
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