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This week, sky watchers are enjoying the beauty of the full moon as well as the excitement surrounding a small object close to Earth that scientists initially thought was an asteroid. But now they believe it’s something from our early space age coming back for a visit.
First of all, the full moon. Although not officially full until Monday morning, the moon will look full when it rises tonight and this apparition will last until Tuesday. Since we have a snow-producing weather system moving across the Great Lakes region on Monday, the cloud cover could prevent us from seeing the moonrise on some of these nights.
The full moon on November 30 is known as the cold moon, according to NASA’s Gordon Johnston, who describes sky-gazing treats on his monthly blog. Full moon names are taken from nicknames used by Native Americans and linked to the seasons, he said.
“Depending on the season, like the last full moon of fall, the Algonquin tribes of what is now the northern and eastern United States called this moon the cold moon, due to the long, cold nights,” he said. Johnston said in his blog.
This moon is also known as the Beaver Moon, Frost Moon, or Winter Moon.
Johnston had another full moon story to share:
“Like the full moon before the winter solstice, an ancient European name for this moon is the oak moon, a name some believe to be linked to ancient Druidic traditions of harvesting oak mistletoe, first recorded by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder in the 1st century AD. The term “druid” can derive from Proto-Indo-European roots for “oak” and “seeing”, suggesting that the term means “oak connoisseur” or “oak seer”. Europeans also called this the Moon Before Yule, a three-day winter solstice festival. In the 10th century, King Haakon I associated Yule with Christmas as part of the Christianization of Norway, and this association spread throughout Europe. Some sources use these names for the December Full Moon, even though it occurs after Yule and the Winter Solstice.
Now on the tiny “temporary moon”. On Tuesday, December 1, the day after the moon is officially full, something known as the 2020 Near Earth Object will pass through our planet at around 8,700 mph. At its closest point, it will be approximately 50,000 kilometers from Earth.
“This object’s orbit around the Sun is close enough to that of Earth to make it a temporary Earth moon,” Johnston said.
2020 SO was first spotted in mid-September by researchers at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. Initially, some scientists thought it was just a small asteroid approaching Earth, but its movements since then have led them to believe it really is a piece of our past.
“This orbit and its size suggest that 2020 SO may not be an asteroid at all,” Johnston said. “It could be a rocket thruster from one of the Apollo-era lunar missions that has been orbiting the sun ever since.”
This 1964 photograph shows a Centaur top stage rocket before it was mated to an Atlas booster. A similar Centaur was used when Surveyor 2 launched two years later.
This week’s flyby won’t be the only near-Earth approach of 2020 SW. It is expected to come close to us on February 2 before leaving our orbit in early March.
Paul Chodas, director of the NASA NEO program office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said he believed this tiny object could be the rocket thruster for the Surveyor 2 Centaur, launched in September 1966. Determine if the object is covered of a white titanium dioxide paint, which would help identify its origin.
Last month, NASA released an explanation of its research so far in SO 2020 and details on what first caught their attention.
“Earth has captured a tiny object from its orbit around the Sun and will hold it as a temporary satellite for a few months before it returns to solar orbit. But the object is probably not an asteroid; it’s probably the top-stage Centaur rocket thruster that helped lift NASA’s ill-fated Surveyor 2 spacecraft to the moon in 1966. ”For more on this cool find, check out the article from the NASA here, which is complete with photos of the Centaur spacecraft.
Stay tuned for more information on what could be a blast from our past.
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