Missile thruster has been flying around Earth for weeks after being launched over 50 years ago

According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, the Centaur, the improved upper stage missile that helped lift the ill-fated spacecraft from Earth, has been captured by our planet’s gravity outside of its orbit around the sun. .

It will fly over the next few weeks or months until it finally escapes from Earth’s gravitational pull and returns to solar orbit.

Rocket booster

The small object was spotted in September by astronomers, the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope on Maui, which saw it following a slight but distinctly curved path across the sky, and initially assumed that it was an asteroid.

When it was first observed, the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass. Called it SO 2020, a standard designation for an asteroid.

But scientists at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (JPL) in Southern California saw orbit and suspected it was something completely different.

JPL realized, after further observations, that it was a worn out rocket thruster from the early years of the space race.

The Surveyor 2 lander was launched to the moon on September 20, 1966, on the Atlas-Centaur missile, and the mission was designed to explore the surface of the moon prior to the Apollo missions which led to the first manned landing on the surface. of the moon in 1969.

Shortly after takeoff, however, Surveyor 2 detached from the Centaur’s upper stage thruster as intended, and it lost control of the spacecraft a day later when one of its engines failed. lit, spinning it.

The spacecraft collided with the moon southeast of Copernicus Crater on September 23, 1966, and during that time a exhausted Centaur rocket sailed into the upper phase of the moon, disappearing into an unknown orbit around the sun.