Look up in the sky, is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s obviously the Earth’s famous second moon.
Asteroids generally do one of three things when they get a but too close for our liking: they smack into us, miss or, as asteroid 2024 PT5 did, get captured by Earth’s gravity.
The space rock first started looping around the planet in late September but will be breaking free from this gravitational tether very soon.
Well, according to NASA, 4.43pm next Monday to be exact
The mini-moon is only 3,760,000km from Earth. That certainly might sound like a lot – or at least how far the sofa from the TV remote can feel sometimes – but it’s barely a stone’s throw in the world of space.
‘Mini’ is also the key word here. Asteroid 2024 PT5 is only 37-feet or so long – the size of a bus. The Moon-moon is roughly 11,400,000 feet.
Our new lunar neighbour has travelled far to reach us. Experts think it hails from the Arjuna asteroid belt, a ring of primordial crumbs 93million miles from the Sun.
NASA officials speculate it might be a fragment of the Earth’s Moon itself from an ancient impact that has by pure chance found its way back.
PT5 was first picked up by Complutense University of Madrid scientists using a powerful, NASA-funded telescope in Sutherland, South Africa.
‘Mini-moons’ are celestial objects like asteroids or comets that do drive-by visits to the Earth. Though some later revealed by astronomers to be diminutive space junk like satellite scraps or lost rockets.
Mini-moons are very difficult to detect and only in recent decades have scientists been able to spot them – we’ve seen five since the 1980s.
Asteroid 2022 NX1 hitched a ride on our gravity two years ago and had actually been captured before in 1981 and will zip around us again in 2051.
But 2024 PT5 might be too much of a lil guy to be officially classed as a mini-moon. Near-Earth rocks need to fully orbit the Earth in a circle to be bona fide mini-moon, while our planet’s gravity is flinging 2024 PT5 around in a horseshoe shape back out into the abyss of space.
Though, it seems 2024 PT5 has some attachment issues. NASA says it will be back drifting by us in January before continuing its orbit of the Sun.
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