The erosion story of about 2020 SO, recently asteroid now formally identified as a 54-year-old space junk, it looks like a wild yarn today but is perhaps the first installment in a long series of such puzzles.
What was called 2020 was SO see in September with asteroid exploration, but there was always something fishy about the space rock. One NASA expert theorized just from its orbit that it appeared to be a high-end rocket group since a lunar mission called Surveyor 2. was launched in 1966. By the end of November, observations as well as the item having confirmed its status as decades-old space waste going back to unknowingly visit her original planet. The metal hunt made its way closest to Earth on December 1 and is expected to hang around for about four months before being kicked off to re-rip the sun.
The story of the loss and rediscovery of the object is very different from a giant debris in Earth’s orbit, for which experts monitor ability to hit with active satellites. “We are so obsessively observing everything we can in Earth’s orbit because we have created this problem with it,” said Alice Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Australia by tradition. spaceflight, to Space.com.
Related: NASA’s former lunar rocket group has officially returned to Earth orbit… for now
But not so for solar-oriented materials. Here, records may show what was lost in the field, but no one would spend time trying to keep track of them.
“It’s a bit like orphans, they’re all alone in the dark and nobody’s looking for them,” Gorman said. “They’re in the dark and then all of a sudden they’re appear and we are interested in them again for a short time. “
Vishnu Reddy, who studies natural and artificial objects in the Earth neighborhood in the University of Arizona, was interested in the fact that he and his colleagues wanted to find a way to determine for sure what exactly it was, rather than relying on the strange orbit of 2020 SO. But the thing was still a long way off, so hard to see in detail.
“I looked around to see which was the biggest piece of telescope we could throw at it, and it turned out to be the Big Binocular Telescope,” Reddy said, referring to a blade in Arizona with twin telescopes looking into the sky like a pair of eyes.
Despite its size, that instrument could only offer a basic instrument four-color spectrum for the item, which Reddy and his colleagues could compare to the two most common flavors of asteroids, carbon-based and silicate-based. There are no matches – but that’s not a sure sign that the object wasn’t just a very strange space rock.
And so the hunt continued.
Working from the assumption that 2020 SO is that particular high since its launch in 1966, the researchers found pictures of the rocket before it flew, then the manufacturer that handed out the white paint they saw in these images. Samples of paint, the researchers applied the same four-color look to them – but the mystery thing didn’t fit that, either.
So the team reached out to a NASA historian, who said the rocket group would be covered in foam that fell off after launch, revealing stainless steel below. Same deal: find the right stainless steel, get a piece, take the four-color spectrum, look for matches. This time, nothing.
At the same time, 2020 SO had been approaching, and by mid-November, Reddy realized that the team could get a much, much more accurate spectrum by borrowing from NASA ‘s Infrared Telescope Facility ( IRTF) on Hawaii. The first attempt was deceptive, but a second view was running at the end of the month offering cleaner data. Again, the spectrum matched the stainless steel samples, but with something else mixed.
Back to the historian the team went for one last news; he noted that the stage would have been Mylar covering its electric bay. And the spectrum refraction matched the organic name of this plastic, the researchers realized – unraveling the mystery.
But through this process, the researchers had also been looking for an even heavier comparison: tracking one of the highest levels of Centaur that scraps the Earth’s orbit to looked the same as her long-lost cousin.
“We don’t have that much stuff out there outside of Earth’s lunar system, and it doesn’t come back as often so we don’t get the term for squiz to be there,” Gorman said. “We have all of those Other centaurs that’s in orbit too, so we have a direct comparison. “
But the Centaur Reddy and his colleagues chose to compare to 2020 SO presented its own challenges: Things move on Earth moving very, very fast, and the IRTF has a tiny vision, and as that was, it was unlikely that researchers would be able to properly time ideas and their spectrum. A plan to use rear-view telescopes to introduce the material failed because buildings and a retractable chimney hampered the scientists’ ideas.
They tried anyway.
“We went to the IRTF praying, you know, give it a look – I had a 1% chance this would work,” Reddy said. “Sure enough he came in and the operator of the magical telescope pulled and caught it” – all the while, in true 2020 fashion, on video call spanning time zones to the colleagues bound.
And there it was: perfect matches. “We got a data set or two,” Reddy said. “Boom: Equivalent plastic organic bands, the same spectral shape, it’s like a slam dunk.”
A unique comparison, just by appearing on the screens of scientists, 2020 SO has offered a number of new details. Even seeing it as early as scientists did, back in September and earlier in archival images studied by scientists after the discovery, is crucial, it gives scientists a feeling about how strong they are search skills son.
“Truly the fact that we will see this at a great distance is encouraging,” said Paul Chodas, who heads NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies and initially thought 2020 SO was the 2 Centaur Surveyor level , to Space.com earlier this fall. .
Now that the object is definitively identified, scientists can refer to known statistics about its size and other features and evaluate their observations to better understand the true asteroids near Earth.
In particular, the issue of 2020 SO is the first time that scientists have once again identified the level of a lost rocket. The next most alarming case was in September 2002, when scientists saw what could be the third stage of the Saturn V rocket. used during the Apollo 12 mission. But two decades ago, that designation was inconclusive – and NASA had only seen 2,000 objects near Earth.
Today, that number is more than 10 times greater and is only going to keep growing. Lost space hardware will travel the sun like 2020 SO as well, whether scientists try or not.
“We get rocket bodies as a side benefit of the asteroid research missions,” Chodas said. “I certainly expect to see more examples of old asteroids found among the hundreds and hundreds and indeed thousands of asteroids we find from the new generation of asteroid research capabilities. “
And as scientists see more and more lost materials, these rocket parts may begin to tell more of the stories without them.
“I think this makes it interesting when something like this Centaur suddenly comes back, after being away for a while, like a cousin he lost a long time ago, just coming out of nowhere, “Gorman said.” Suddenly, there’s an opportunity to ask him, ‘Well, what did you see while on that trip, in your special little orbit? ‘”
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.