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The recently discovered “asteroid” en route to Earth may, after all, be just what remains of a rocket launched 54 years ago on a failed mission to the Moon, according to NASA experts.
“I am very excited about this,” Paul Chodas, an asteroid expert at the US space agency, said in a statement to The Associated Press (AP). “It’s a ‘hobby’ that I have, finding an object like that and looking for its origin, it’s something I’ve been doing for decades,” he said.
Chodas speculates that the “asteroid” 2020 SO, as it is formally known, may actually be the top of the Centaur rocket, which in 1966 successfully launched the NASA Surveyor 2 module toward the moon.
The module ended up crashing on the moon, due to a failure in one of the thrusters, and the rocket, meanwhile, passed the moon and entered the orbit of the sun, becoming space junk and had never been seen, at least until now. .
Last month, while searching for potentially dangerous asteroids en route to Earth, a telescope in Hawaii discovered a mysterious object approaching the planet’s orbit.
The object was immediately added to the International Astronomical Union’s Center for Minor Planets registry for asteroids and comets found in the solar system, which already has about a million registered stars.
Based on its luminosity, the object is estimated to be about eight meters long, which matches the size of the Centaur, which would be less than 10 meters long, including the tip of the motor, and three meters in diameter.
What began to attract the attention of Choda, who is director of the Center for the Study of Near-Earth Objects at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, was that the nearly circular orbit of this object around the sun is very similar. that of Earth, which is unusual for an asteroid.
The fact that the object is in the same plane as Earth, and not tilted up or down, was another warning sign, as asteroids often appear at more irregular angles.
Eventually, it is approaching Earth at 2,400 kilometers per hour, which is a slow speed for an asteroid.
As the object approaches, astronomers should be able to better track its orbit and determine how far it is being driven by radiation and the thermal effects of sunlight.
If it’s the old Centaur rocket, which, in the end, is just a light, empty can, it will move differently than a heavy space rock would move, much less susceptible to external forces.
This is, in fact, the way that astronomers normally distinguish between asteroids and space debris, such as rocket debris, since visually both are basically moving points in space.
According to Paul Chodas, there are probably dozens of false asteroids on record, but their movements are too imprecise or complex for their nature to be confirmed.
In 1991, for example, Chodas and other astronomers identified a mysterious object as an asteroid and not as a space debris, although its orbit around the sun is similar to Earth’s.
In 2002, Chodas even found what he believes was a remaining part of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket stage, launched in 1969 and which was the second NASA module to land on the Moon.
The astronomer admits that the evidence was circumstantial, due to the erratic orbit of this object throughout a year around the Earth. It never ended up being classified as an asteroid and left Earth’s orbit in 2003.
The path of the object now detected is, however, much more direct and stable, which reinforces Chodas’s theory.
“I may be wrong. I do not want to sound too confident – says the NASA astronomer – but this is the first time, in my opinion, that everything seems to correspond to an actually known launch.”
And in this specific case, Paul Chodas is pleased to point out the fact that it was a mission that he followed in 1966, when he was a teenager living in Canada at the time.
The “asteroid hunter” Carrie Nugent of the Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts, considers the conclusion reached by Paul Chodas to be “valid” and based on solid evidence.
The author of the book “Asteroid Hunters” (“Asteroid Hunters”), published in 2017, admits that “the existence of additional data would be useful to have more certainty” and guarantees that “asteroid hunters around the world will continue to observe this object in order to gather more information, confessing “anxious about the next developments.”
Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says there have been “countless embarrassing incidents with objects in orbit, which are initially labeled as asteroids and only later perceived as artificial objects.”
The fact is that they are rarely obvious cases, without a doubt.
Last year, British amateur astronomer Nick Howes announced that an orbiting asteroid was likely the solar module left behind by NASA’s Apollo 10, a first test of the Apollo 11 “landing” on the moon. This object is probably artificial, Chodas and other experts are, however, skeptical of this conclusion.
For Howes, this skepticism is a good thing: “We hope it will lead to more observations when you get closer to us” in the late 2030s, he said.
The object that is now capturing all of Paul Chodas’ attention passed the Earth in its respective laps around the sun in 1984 and 2002, but the five million miles away at the time made it too indistinct.
Chodas now predicts that the object will remain for about four months in circular motion around Earth and enter Earth’s orbit in mid-November, then resume its orbit around the sun in March.
As for the possibility of this object colliding with Earth, the NASA astronomer is very skeptical that this could happen. “At least not this time,” he anticipates.
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