Mysterious space object that zoomed past Earth turns out to be from humans, NASA says
NASA has confirmed that a mysterious space object discovered in September that has flown past Earth several times is actually man-made.
After analyzing the object’s orbit, Center for Near-Earth Object Studies Director Paul Chodas concluded that the object was a rocket booster from NASA’s 1966 Surveyor 2 mission to the Moon, according to a news release.
The space object, known as 2020 SO, made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 1 and will stay in the planet’s sphere of “gravitational dominance” until it goes into a new orbit in March 2021 around the Sun.
Vishnu Reddy, associate professor and planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, made observations using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility on Maunakea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii. His team compared the composition of the space object with the material that made up Centaur rocket boosters in the 1960s.
“We knew that if we wanted to compare apples to apples, we’d need to try to get spectral data from another Centaur rocket booster that had been in Earth orbit for many years to then see if it better matched 2020 SO’s spectrum,” Reddy said. “Because of the extreme speed at which Earth-orbiting Centaur boosters travel across the sky, we knew it would be extremely difficult to lock on with the IRTF long enough to get a solid and reliable data set.”
On Dec. 1, Reddy and his team observed a Centaur D rocket booster from a launch of a communication satellite in 1971. They concluded that the space object was also a Centaur rocket booster.
