The 1960s rocket may have returned to Earth’s orbit | Voice of America

Scientists from the US space agency NASA say the remains of an unmanned lunar mission from the 1960s may have returned to orbit around Earth 54 years later.

Scientists first discovered the object in September, using a special probing telescope on the Hawaiian island of Maui. They initially believed it was a small asteroid and named it 2020 SO. When they discovered that the object’s path would bring it close to Earth, it attracted the attention of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Center for Near Earth Objects (CNEOS) in California.

But the scientists quickly noticed that the object’s orbit was different from that of a normal asteroid. While the typical asteroid has an elongated orbit and is tilted with respect to the Earth, the orbit of this object was almost in the exact orbital plane of the Earth.

CNEOS director Paul Chodas says further studies and measurements of the object made it clear that it was probably man-made, based on its size and density, and possibly a piece of a rocket. Chodas suspected it was a remnant of a lunar mission and, to prove it, he ran backward in the 2020 SW orbit, plotting its closest path to Earth until September 1966.

This matched the launch date of NASA’s Surveyor 2 lunar lander, an unmanned probe designed to land on the surface of the moon and detect possible landing sites before the Apollo missions, which would have brought humans to the lunar surface for the first time in 1969. .

The spacecraft was launched on an Atlas-Centaur rocket and separated from its Centaur upper stage booster shortly after takeoff. The spacecraft malfunctioned the next day when one of its repeaters failed to turn on and the probe crashed into the moon. The Centaur rocket in the upper stage, meanwhile, has sailed past the Moon and disappeared into an unknown orbit around the Sun.

Now, he appears to be back, albeit only for a relatively short visit. NASA scientists believe that Earth’s gravity brought 2020 SO into an outer orbit on November 8, circling approximately 1.5 million kilometers above our planet. They expect it to stay there for about four months before escaping to a new orbit around the Sun in March.

NASA says 2020 SO will make two large turns around the Earth with its closest approach on December 1. This is where astronomers will take a closer look and study its composition using spectroscopy to confirm if it is indeed an early space age artifact.