Earth's gravity seemed to trap a rocket booster that reached the abyss during the 1966 Surveyor 2 robotic Moon lander mission. It would orbit around the planet for a few weeks.
Centaur, the high-level rocket booster that helped lift the Earth's uncrewed spacecraft, has now carried our planet out of the Sun's orbit.
For the next few weeks or months, it is expected to become a temporary satellite before it eventually comes out of the Earth's gravitational force and returns to solar orbit.
NASA launched the Surveyor 2 mission to the moon in 1966, but due to moderate flight, the spacecraft lost control, and NASA ultimately lost touch.
In September, astronomers with a NASA-funded Pan-StarRS1 survey telescope in Maui discovered this small object.
They noticed that in the sky, an indication of its proximity to Earth, it was taking a slightly curved path, and at first, it was assumed to be an asteroid.
How Lawler 'desired' Surveyor 2
As part of the American Surveyor Program for Moon Exploration, Surveyor 2 was the second lunar lander operated by NASA. Failure to change Surveyor 2 mid-course resulted in decreased spaceship power.
NASA launched the booster rocket from Cape Kennedy, Florida on an Atlas-Center rocket on September 19, 1966. The USSR space ship Luna 9 was the first to make a soft landing on the moon and submit images. 1966 was a busy year for the lunar mission.
Surveyor 1 became the first spacecraft in the U.S. to land and send images in May. Then, Surveyor 2 was supposed to do the same thing in September, but from a different location, but it crashed.
The booster rocket faced mid-course alteration failures that resulted in decreased power of space ships. On September 22, they lost contact with the spacecraft two days after its launch.
When operating the mid-course correction, one of the thrusters failed to burn, causing it to become unbalanced and vibrate for 54 hours. Three days after launch, on September 23, it crashed near the Copernicus lunar surface.
It was named 2020 SO, a regular asteroid designation, when it was first identified as the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But scientists at the NASA JPL Southern California Near-Earth Object Studies Center saw the orbit and suspected it was something quite different.
After further observation, JPL researchers discovered that it was a rocket booster expended in the early years of space racing.
Before the Apollo mission that led the first crew to land on the moon on 19ol9, the mission was planned to recreate the lunar surface.
Did it orbit the Earth several times?
CNEOS Director Paul Chodas, according to New Atlas, took the measured orbit and ran it backward in time. He found that it crossed the planet many times this year.
NASA says the object reached the Hill sphere on November 8, 2020, which has a radius of around 930,000 miles (1.5 million km), which represents the region of gravitational supremacy of the Planet. This has taken the SO of 2020 into a temporary orbit around the earth. It will last until around March 2021, when the Sun will orbit again.
Until then, on December 10, 2020, SO will make a near flyby of the Earth, when astronomers carry out a spectroscopic study to determine its composition and, probably, confirm that it is indeed a long-lost rocket.
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