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Two months before the Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon for the first time, another capsule from NASA was captured in a tempting way – but it's been lost for decades.
The Apollo 10 mission was supposed to be a "dry run" in which all operations, except for the real lunar landing, had been done. With his two popular cartoon characters as mission mascots, the command module was nicknamed "Charlie Brown" and the lunar module "Snoopy" – so named because it was meant to "poke" the surface of the Moon from a close orbit.
As Charlie was coming home, Snoopy never did it. Instead, the lunar module was dropped into an orbit around the Sun, the only single-crew American spacecraft ever to be seen again.
Like a needle in a cosmic haystack, the chances of observing the capsule were about 235 million dollars. Fifty years later, on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, astronomers are "98% convinced" that they acted exactly like that.
Led by amateur astronomer Nick Howes, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, research has been ongoing since 2011.
At that time, forty years after the mission, Snoopy's latest known orbital movements and information had long been influenced by the gravity of the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon. This means that astronomers, volunteers and students have had to scan terabytes of telescope data over a vast field of research.
Even now, after all this work, Howes and his colleagues can not say for sure if the object they've identified is really NASA's lost capsule. Although this time, the odds seem to be in their favor.
"Until someone really approaches the situation and gets a detailed radar profile, we can not be sure," Howes told participants at the Cheltenham Science Festival in the UK. United, according to Sky.
Read more: NASA is 60 today, but the Apollo moon landing in 1969 is arguably the biggest feat of the agency yet. See how the United States has succeeded.
"We have to wait a few years for it to come back, but once that happens, the idea is that we will get a really detailed picture of the situation.This would be a really fantastic achievement for science. "
The next date for Snoopy 's closest approach to Earth will be about 18 years old, Howe said. He has some ideas on how we could check and even recover the capsule.
"I would love to have Elon Musk and his wonderful spaceship, grab them and knock them down," Howes said at the conference.
"Eugene Cernan, a member of the Apollo 10 team, told me:" My son, if you find that and you reduce it, imagine the queues at the Smithsonian? "
Read more: These 17 panoramas and GIF show the first landing of the moon with incredible detail
But the astronomer also recognized on Twitter the costs of such an undertaking would result.
Even if taking Snoopy home is not one of our priorities, it is amazing to think that we may have found a piece of history of exploration of the long-abandoned space in our solar system.
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