Astronomers have confirmed that the Centaur’s high-altitude rocket launch that helped build NASA’s infamous Survey 2 spacecraft toward the moon was a small object captured for a period of time by Earth’s orbit. .
The object, named 2020 SO, was first discovered by the Panoramic Survey and Rapid Response Telescope System, which monitors near-Earth objects such as asteroids that may pose a threat to Earth. Upon closer inspection, scientists at the Center for the Study of Near-Earth Objects (CNEOS) realized that this was not a normal asteroid. An asteroid orbit is usually longer and thinner in relation to the Earth’s orbit. However, before 2020 SO was captured by the gravity of this planet, it was orbiting the sun in a near circle and in an orbital plane that almost matched the Earth. Adding to the mystery, the 2020 SO route changed slightly in response to being pushed by the solar wind, suggesting that it seemed empty.
Suspecting to find an old rocket booster, CNEOS director Paul Chodas described the object’s orbit back in time and found that the 2020 SO approach at the end of 1966 would have been close enough that it might have come e from Earth – coinciding with the launch of the Surveyor 2 spacecraft aboard the Atlas-Centaur rocket. The spacecraft’s maze crash caused a crash into the moon on September 23, while the last Centaur’s high-altitude rocket was launched into space.
The final confirmation of the 2020 SO identity came from a team led by Vishnu Reddy, an associate professor and planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. “My job description is very simple – if something is going to hit the Earth, I’ll tell you what it is… before it hits us without a doubt!” Said Reddy, who made follow-up observations using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility. He and his team compared spectrum data from 2020 SO with the data of 301 steel, the material used to build Centaur rocket boosters in the 1960s.
Although the game was good, it was not perfect, so they investigated it further. “An Air Force colleague warned us to look at other rocket groups in Earth orbit,” says Reddy. “My fast student obtained a visible wavelength spectrum of two of the Centaur rocket crews from the 1970s using our small 24-inch telescope at the university. ”The spectra matched 2020 SO, confirming the identity as Centaur’s co-existence.
2020 SO made its closest approach to Earth on December 1, 2020, and will remain within the Earth’s dominant sphere until it returns to a new orbit around the sun in March 2021.
But even after we say goodbye to the Centaur rocket rise, this may just be the beginning of encountering historic space artifacts. Reddy said: “The number of products we put into space each year is not going up, so we have a responsibility to run into things like 2020 SO in the future as long as humanity spreads its wings over the inner solar system. ” Who says you can’t go home again?
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