The second moon on Earth will take a close look at the planet the next week before it moves into space, never to be seen again.
“What is the second moon,” you ask? Astronauts call it 2020 SO – a small object that fell into Earth’s orbit about halfway between our planet and the moon in September 2020.
Temporary satellites like this are called minimoons, although in this case he calls it a slightly misleading moon; in December 2020, NASA researchers learned that the object is not a space rock at all, but the remnants of a 1960s rocket lift involved in the American Surveyor lunar missions.
This non-lunar minimoon made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 1 (the day before NASA marked it as the long-lost missile), but it comes back for one lap of impact others, according to EarthSky.org.
Minimoon 2020 SO will make a final close path to Earth Tuesday (February 2) at about 140,000 miles (220,000 kilometers) from Earth, or 58 percent of the way between Earth and the moon.
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The ascent will then move away, leaving Earth’s orbit completely by March 2021, according to EarthSky. After that, the previous minimoon is just like something else orbiting the sun. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will bid farewell online to the object on the night of February 1st.
NASA has learned that the object has come close to Earth in a number of ways over the decades, even approaching it in 1966 – the year the group launched the lunar probe Surveyor 2 rear Centaur rocket lift.
That gave scientists their first big news that 2020 SO was made by humans; they tested it after comparing the object ‘s chemical composition with the rise of another rocket, which has been in orbit since 1971.
Godspeed, minimoon 2020 SO. We picked you up. We have forsaken you. And now, you will abandon us.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.