[meteorite-list] Newfound Object Orbiting Earth is Likely Apollo Junk

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:08:24 2004
Message-ID: <200209111831.LAA05892_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_object_020911.html

Newfound Object Orbiting Earth is Likely Apollo Junk
By Robert Roy Britt
space.com
11 September 2002

An object found Sept. 3 to be orbiting Earth every 50 days is most likely a
rocket booster leftover from the Apollo era, a NASA scientist said today.

Speculation had begun in various publications that the object might be a
small, second natural moon of Earth.

"It's most likely a spacecraft," said Donald Yeomans, a scientist at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's not likely to be a natural object, not in
that kind of orbit."

In a telephone interview this morning, Yeomans said his colleague Paul
Chodas was running computer calculations to determine if the object is in
fact a rocket booster, as they suspect. The results are expected to be
released in the next day or two.

The object stumps astronomers who routinely hunt the night skies for
asteroids. Bill Yeung detected it with an 18-inch (0.45-meter) telescope in
Arizona. If the object were a satellite or some piece of space junk, it
should have been detected before, some scientists said.

The object, designated J002E3, was first listed as a minor planet (typically
meaning an asteroid) by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
which serves as a clearinghouse for such objects. It was later removed from
that list when it was found to be in Earth orbit.

In the unlikely event the satellite turns out to be a tiny natural moon of
Earth, it would not be the first such candidate. However, other possible
small moons of Earth are on strange orbits that are gravitationally balanced
-- for a time -- by the Sun. The objects tend to be captured only for a few
thousand years. The object is not visible from Earth without a powerful
telescope.

Yeomans said the brightness of this object and the estimated distance to it
suggest it's about the size of a rocket booster, given that scientists
estimate such a hunk of metal would reflect about 50 percent of the sunlight
hitting it.

"The trouble is they [rocket boosters] get out there and ... their orbits
are largely chaotic," Yeomans said. "It's almost impossible to say what
belongs to what."
Received on Wed 11 Sep 2002 02:31:38 PM PDT