The second moon of the earth will take a close approach to the planet next week before it enters space and can never be seen again.
“Which second moon,” you ask? Astronomers call it 2020 SO – a small object that fell to Earth about halfway between our planet and the moon in September 2020.
Temporary satellites like these are known as minimoons, although it is called a moon, in this case it is a bit misleading; in December 2020, NASA researchers learned that the object was not a space rock at all, but the remains of a rocket amplifier from the 1960s that was involved in the US Surveyor moon missions.
This non-lunar minimoon reached its closest approach to Earth on December 1 (the day before NASA identified it as the long-lost booster), but according to EarthSky.org, it’s coming for another victory.
Minimoon 2020 SO will make a final close approximation to Earth on Tuesday (February 2), about 220,000 kilometers from Earth, or 58 percent of the way between Earth and Moon.
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The booster will then drift away and leave Earth’s orbit completely by March 2021, according to EarthSky. After that, the former minimoon will be just another object orbiting the sun. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will take an online farewell to the object on the evening of February 1st.
NASA has learned that the object has made several close approaches to Earth over the decades, even getting relatively close in 1966 – the year the agency launched its Surveyor 2-moon probe on the back of a Centaur rocket amplifier.
This gave scientists their first big idea that 2020 SO was man-made; they confirmed this after comparing the chemical composition of the object with that of another rocket amplifier that has been in orbit since 1971.
Godspeed, minimoon 2020 SO. We built you. We left you. And now you are leaving us.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.