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However, moderately than some asteroid that may orbit round the Earth, it could really simply be some outdated area junk that made its means again to our planet.
Dr. Paul Chodas, the director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, believes that the object, named Asteroid 2020 SO, is an outdated booster rocket from the 1960s.
“I suspect this newly discovered object 2020 SO to be an old rocket booster because it is following an orbit about the Sun that is extremely similar to Earth’s, nearly circular, in the same plane, and only slightly farther away the Sun at its farthest point,” Chodas advised CNN.
“That’s precisely the kind of orbit that a rocket stage separated from a lunar mission would follow, once it passes by the Moon and escapes into orbit about the Sun. It’s unlikely that an asteroid could have evolved into an orbit like this, but not impossible.”
Chodas analyzed the movement of the asteroid backwards in time to attempt to hyperlink it with any recognized lunar mission launch and located that it was probably in the “vicinity of the Earth back in late 1966.”
He stated that correlates with the launch of Surveyor 2 on September 20, 1966. That mission was designed to have a mushy touchdown on the Moon, however a failure led to the spacecraft crashing, Chodas stated. The Centaur rocket that was used to enhance the spacecraft handed by the Moon and went into orbit close to the Sun and has not been seen once more, till now, Chodas suspects.
The object is probably to enter into a distant orbit round Earth in late November, and if it is an asteroid it will be thought-about a mini-moon. However, if it is a booster rocket as Chodas suspects, it’s going to simply be one other piece of area particles floating round area.
“In a month or so we will get an indication of whether or not 2020 SO really is a rocket body, since we should start being able to detect the effect of sunlight pressure has on the motion of this object: if it really is a rocket body, it will be much less dense than an asteroid and the slight pressure due to sunlight will produce enough change in its motion that we should be able to detect it in the tracking data,” Chodas stated.
It is uncommon for long-lost rocket levels to be captured from orbit about the Sun and into orbit about the Earth, and this might solely be the second occasion of a rocket stage getting captured from orbit.
The solely different time it occurred was in 2002 from what might have been the Saturn V higher stage from Apollo 12, Chodas stated.
CNN’s Ashley Strickland contributed to this report.
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