Astronomer captures possible image of long-lost NASA Centaur rocket booster

A tiny mysterious object traverses Earth today, giving astronomers a great opportunity to finally confirm it as the top stage of a Centaur rocket this was launched by NASA in 1966.

Is it or not? This is the question that astronomers have been asking since September, when scientists from the Pan-STARRS1 survey in Maui, Hawai’i, Point the object, named 2020 SO. Astronomers have good reason to believe it is returning space debris, especially a Surveyor 2 Centaur rocket thruster from the 1960s. Problem is, they haven’t been able to prove it.

2020 SW normally revolves around the Sun, but Earth’s gravity has, albeit temporarily, transformed this object into an artificial minimoon. The object will perform a pair of orbits around our planet before adopting a new orbit around the Sun, but today (December 1, 2020) is a special day, as the object comes closest to Earth.

Gianluca Masi, an astronomer with the Virtual Telescope Project 2.0 – a group that uses remote-controlled telescopes to observe space – took the ability to capture a photo of the object last night.

“I succeeded in obtaining an image followed by the object, but also a trace [upper left in the photo] and the latter shows a dotted pattern, basically a shiny dot, followed by a paler one and so on, ”Masi explained in an email. “This suggests that the object was spinning, with a period of about 10 seconds.”

Masi said he will have more to share soon, so we look forward to that.

Looking at the image, we still can’t be sure we’re looking at the Lost Rocket Booster, but we so want to believe that it is. The purpose of NASA’s Surveyor 2 mission was to examine the lunar surface before the Apollo missions. Launched on September 20, 1966, the mission got off to a good start, but on the second day, a thruster on Surveyor 2 failed to ignite, throwing the spacecraft into a spin. Surveyor 2 crashed into the lunar surface, while the Centaur’s upper stage drifted past the Moon and in an unknown orbit around the Sun.

After that, no one gave it much thought.

NOTThe ASA’s Surveyor program was actually quite successful, despite two failures in seven attempts to make soft landings on the lunar surface between 1966 and 1968. You can read more about these missions here.

Shortly after 2020 SO was spotted by PanSTARRs, astronomers from the Center for Near Earth Objects Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported the object due to its unexpected behavior. The object’s orbit resembled Earth more than an asteroid, with an almost circular orbit in the Earth’s orbital plane. This is not usually seen in asteroids.

Additional observations showed that 2020 SO had a trajectory that was altered by a phenomenon known as solar radiation pressure, like NASA Explain:

The pressure exerted by sunlight is weak but continuous, and it has a greater effect on a hollow object than on a solid object. A used rocket is essentially an empty tube and therefore is a low density object with a large area. It will therefore be pushed more by the pressure of solar radiation than a mass of high-density rock – just as an empty soda can will be pushed by the wind more than a small stone.

Given these quirks, CNEOS director Paul Chodas sought to determine the object’s origin, which he did by rolling back its orbit. in time to see where he was in the past. His calculations showed that 2020 SO has made close approaches to Earth in recent decades, but the object’s flyby in 1966 was close enough that it could have originated from Earth.

“One of the possible paths for 2020 SO brought the object very close to the Earth and the Moon in late September 1966,” Chodas said in a NASA statement. “It was like a eureka moment when a quick check of the lunar mission launch dates showed a match with the Surveyor 2 mission.”

Today’s close-up provides an excellent opportunity to study SO 2020 even more and for scientists to make irreproachable confirmation of its identity. In addition to optical images, astronomers can study the object with spectrometers to determine its chemical composition. We should know very soon if this mystery object is indeed the upper stage of the Centaur.

Whether artificial or natural, this object is most certainly a temporary minimoon. 2020 SO entered this special phase of its orbit on November 8 and will emerge from Earth’s gravitational clutches in March 2021. Earth was recently visited by a natural minimoon, asteroid 2020 CD3, which has spent the past 2.7 years as a temporarily linked satellite.