Earth’s second moon will approach the planet closely next week before drifting into space and will never be seen again.
“What second moon” you ask? Astronomers call it 2020 SO – a small object that fell halfway between our planet and the moon in Earth’s orbit in September 2020.
Temporary satellites like this one are known as minimoons, although calling it a moon in this case is a little misleading; In December 2020, NASA researchers discovered that the object is not a space rock at all, but rather the remains of a 1960s rocket booster that was involved in the American Surveyor lunar missions.
This non-lunar minimoon approached Earth on Dec. 1 (the day before NASA identified it as the long-lost booster), but it’s coming back for one more victory lap, according to EarthSky.org.
Minimoon 2020 SO will definitively approach Earth on Tuesday (Feb. 2) at approximately 220,000 kilometers from Earth, or 58 percent of the way between Earth and Moon.
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The booster will then drift and, according to EarthSky, will leave Earth’s orbit completely in March 2021. After that, the former minimoon will simply be another object orbiting the sun. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will say goodbye to the object online on the night of February 1.
NASA found that the object made several close approximations to Earth over the decades, even relatively close in 1966 – the year the agency launched its Surveyor 2 lunar probe on the back of a Centaur rocket booster.
That gave scientists their first big indication that SO 2020 is human-made; They confirmed it after comparing the chemical composition of the object to that of another rocket booster, which has been in orbit since 1971.
Godspeed, minimoon 2020 SU. We built you. We have left you. And now you leave us.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.