Astronomers believe they have finally found the lost lunar module of Apollo 10

An abandoned Apollo 10 lunar module known as "Snoopy" has been drifting in space for 50 years, its location is a complete mystery. Now, after a meticulous eight-year search, a team of astronomers suspects that they have finally found it.

On May 22, 1969, just two months before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their famous stroll, NASA's Apollo 10 mission was conducting a major preparatory exercise approximately 47,400 feet above the moon.

During this dress rehearsal for the moon landing, astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan spent time in a lunar module, nicknamed Snoopy, while his other astronaut, John Young, was waiting in the command module, nicknamed appropriately Charlie Brown. The lunar module received his name because he was going to "snoop" around the future lunar landing site.

After the docking maneuver, the astronauts joined Young in the command module and returned to Earth, but Snoopy never returned home, nor on the lunar surface. Instead, the lunar lander was thrown into an orbit around the Sun, never to hear about it again – until now. Perhaps.

As reported in Sky News, a team of astronomers said they were "98% sure" of locating Snoopy's position in space. The news was revealed by Nick Howes, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, to an audience attending the recent Cheltenham Science Festival in the United Kingdom.

Howes started Snoopy's research in 2011. Over the past eight years, his team has analyzed radar data collected by several observatories. Howes told Gizmodo in a direct message from Twitter that his team had "searched through many data" with the help of members of the Asteroid Zoo. In 2015, the team thought they had detected Snoopy, but the object Wt1190f, as it was called, had once again entered the Earth's atmosphere; at that time, it had been identified as the trans-lunar injection stage of the 1998 Lunar Prospector mission.

The object in question was finally seized by the Mount Lemmon Sky Survey team in January 2018. "It quickly became clear that the size and orbit closely resembled the calculations we made in 2011 and 2012 for Snoopy" said Howes to Gizmodo. . Howes explained that his team had used online orbit calculators such as the AGI System Toolkit (AGK) to determine the orbit of the object.

Howes told Sky News, "We can not be 100% sure," this object is Snoopy. For that, we have to get very close and get a detailed radar profile. Howe said when it would happen, but he told Gizmodo it would not be so soon.

"Now [it’s] from us "and" it is expected that we will return in 18 years, "he said. The object currently has a magnitude of 29.5 in terms of brightness, which means that it is impossible to create an image with most telescopes, he added.

If the object ultimately had to be confirmed as Snoopy, Howes said we should try to intercept it and image it. He thought that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk would be a good candidate for such a mission. As to whether we should use Snoopy, "it's an interesting question," he said, "because the cost would be high compared to the return of science," adding that "it's an argument similar to the one Bob Ballard had met in the 80's when we look for the Titanic. "

Howes is right to say that it's an "interesting question" as to whether we should recover Snoopy, if it's really the subject. But to be fair, this historical relic does nothing for anyone in the depths of space. My preference is to pick her up and put her in a museum in plain view. It would be an expensive proposition, no doubt, but also very cool.