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Fans of astronomy keen to get a glimpse of what could be a piece of space debris from a 1960s NASA mission are in luck.
An object named 2020 SO – which was captured last month by Earth’s gravitational pull during its solar orbit – is expected to be within 50,000 kilometers of the planet on Tuesday, according to The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0.
“We still don’t know what it is: an asteroid or the Surveyor 2 rocket thruster,” VTP founder Gianluca Masi wrote on the site, which broadcasts the close-up.
On November 20, Masi captured a first image of space debris, which appeared as a dot in the skies.
Scientists at NASA JPL’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies analyzed the object’s trajectory and retraced it in time, according to CNET.
“One of the possible paths for 2020 therefore brought the object very close to the Earth and the Moon at the end of September 1966,” CNEOS director Paul Chodas said last month.
“It was like a eureka moment when a quick check of the launch dates of the lunar missions showed a match with the Surveyor 2 mission,” he added.
The ill-fated Surveyor 2 lander ended up crashing into the moon, as the Centaur rocket thruster rushed into space, CNET reported.
2020 SO is expected to remain in Earth orbit until March 2021, when it will venture into a new orbit around the sun.
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