[ad_1]
A mysterious minimaon temporarily in orbit Land it is not a large space rock, but a rocket from the 1960s, NASA reported Wednesday (December 2).
The researchers got the feeling that the minimally could not be man-made, but it wasn’t until this week that they confirmed it, after analyzing its composition from afar at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF).
In fact, scientists made the discovery soon after the elusive near-Earth object – known as 2020 SO – came closer to our planet on Tuesday (December 1).
Related: The 10 best ways to destroy the Earth
However, 2020 SO is not here to stay. The minima are small satellites that orbit the Earth for only a short time. In the coming months, the 2020 SO will remain in the “sphere of the hill” – a region extending approximately 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth – until it escapes our gravitational pull and begins to orbit. around the sun instead in March 2021, NASA reported in a statement.
But even as 2020 SO is leaving Earth’s immediate vicinity, scientists plan to monitor its travels for years to come, NASA said.
It is not the moon
Scientists first spotted the 2020 SO in September of this year, when astronomers searching for near-Earth asteroids at Pan-STARRS1, a NASA-funded survey telescope in Maui, Hawaii, noticed the its small size and unusual orbit.
They soon learned that 2020 SO was no stranger to Earth; an analysis of its orbit indicated that 2020 SO had revolved around our planet several times in the past few decades, even taking a fairly close approach in 1966, suggesting it was a man-made object launched into space.
After sifting through NASA’s launch records, Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), suggested that the 2020 SO was a Centaur upper-stage rocket. Surveyor 2, an unmanned NASA spacecraft that was supposed to land softly on the moon, but instead ended up crashing there in 1966.
To investigate this claim, a team led by Vishnu Reddy, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, carried out follow-up spectroscopic observations of the object using NASA’s IRTF on the Big Island. Hawaii, in order to determine the chemical composition of the space oddity. (In spectroscopy, light waves of a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum are measured to reveal the composition of an object.)
“Due to the extreme weakness of this object it follows [the] CNEOS forecast, it was a difficult object to characterize, “Reddy said in the statement.” We got color observations with the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, which suggested that 2020 SO was not an asteroid. “
However, the team did not have enough evidence to link 2020 SO to Surveyor 2. So, the researchers took it a step further and compared its spectral data to that of 301 stainless steel, the material of Centaur boosters from the 1960s. . But the results weren’t a perfect match, Reddy found.
The discrepancy revealed itself early enough; Reddy’s team had analyzed fresh steel in their lab, while 2020 SO steel had withstood the harsh conditions of space for the past 54 years, he said.
“We knew that if we wanted to compare apples to apples, we would have to try to get spectral data from another Centaur rocket that had been in Earth orbit for many years and then see if it better matched the 2020 SO spectrum,” Reddy said. “Because of the extreme speed at which Centaur repeaters in Earth orbit travel across the sky, we knew it would be extremely difficult to lock into IRTF long enough to get a solid and reliable data set.”
An opportunity to finally solve the mystery occurred on the morning of December 1st. At that time, the team managed to analyze a Centaur D rocket from the 1971 launch of a communications satellite in orbit around the Earth. After comparing the data from the 1971 rocket and the 2020 SO, the team had a match.
“This conclusion was the result of a huge team effort,” Reddy said. “We were finally able to solve this mystery thanks to the great work of Pan-STARRS, Paul Chodas and the team from CNEOS, LBT, IRTF and observations around the world.”
Originally published in Live Science.
Source link
