Earth’s youngest visitor will leave us forever – BGR

• At the end of 2020, the earth received a new visitor in the form of what was originally a natural piece of space debris, like a small asteroid.
• The object was a disposable rocket stage that was launched half a century ago and just happened to come back and be sucked up by Earth’s gravity.
• After completing its last loop of our planet, the object will soon throw itself back into space and will probably not visit our planet again.

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Maybe you missed the news last year – you know because of the global pandemic and whatnot – but a mysterious object was intercepted by the earth in November. When astronomers saw it for the first time, they thought it was some kind of space spot, and although it was not on a collision course with our planet, it would orbit the earth for at least a while.

It turned out that the object was not a space rock or comet, but a piece of man-made debris. The object, a rocket launcher launched more than half a century ago, was part of the Surveyor 2 mission to the moon, and the debris has been hanging on our planet ever since. Now, with one more stroke to complete our world, the ‘mini-Moon’ will soon enter space again, and it is unlikely that we will encounter it again.

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As EarthSky reports, the rocket first completed a very close flight from Earth before it flew away from our planet only to be retracted again. This latest loop will be his last, as the momentum will be enough to escape the earth’s gravity and embark on an adventure orbiting the sun.

The concept of a ‘mini-moon’ is not exactly science fiction, and since we know of many tiny rocky bodies hanging out in our forest neck, it was quite possible that the object was indeed a space rock. If that were the case, it would have been a true miniature (and temporary) moon, but the fact that it was just man-made rubbish means it does not qualify for such a label.

Astronomers first became suspicious that the object was made by man when they realized that the path around the sun looks very much like the earth. It completed an orbit every 387 Earth days, which is virtually identical to the orbit of our planet, and the incredibly slow speed indicates that it was not an asteroid. Now that we know what it really is, all of these clues make a lot more sense.

Soon, however, it will be gone. The object will probably pass the earth one last time at the beginning of February and then leave us forever. Now everyone waves goodbye.