A so-called mini-moon of the Earth that was abiding in the heavens since September, Monday will begin a journey towards the sun as it prepares to disappear until 2055.
The school bus size asteroid known as 2024 PT5 may actually be a large rock that broke off the moon after another space rock crashed into it centuries ago, astronomers say.
Currently 2m miles from Earth, about nine times the distance to the moon, the asteroid never quite got close enough to be captured by the planet’s gravity.
But his farewell pace will bring it as close as 1.1m miles in January for a final look ahead the sungravity pulls in deeper space.
The small moon’s small size, about 33 feet across, and distance meant that it was never visible to the human eye, only through powerful telescopes. Nasa passed the asteroid by side deep space network since it was first spotted in August by a South African-based telescope belonging to the University of Hawaii.
It has been a “distant companion” of Earth ever since, Nasa said, and studies determined it was not a man-made object.
“Given the similarity between asteroid 2024 PT5’s motion and that of our planet, scientists at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies suspect that the object may be a large piece of rock ejected from the moon’s surface after an asteroid impact a long time ago,” wrote Josh Handal, program analyst for the space agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office in a briefing.
“Rocket bodies from historical launches can also be found in such Earth-like orbits, but after analysis of this object’s motion, it has been determined that 2024 PT5 is more likely to be of natural origin.”
It has been following a horseshoe-shaped path around the Earth for the past two months, and will pick up speed exponentially once the sun’s gravitational pull takes full effect after Monday. Its speed during its close pass in January will be at least twice that from September, astrophysicist Raul de la Fuente Marcos of Madrid’s Complutense University told the Associated Press.
Nasa will track the asteroid for more than a week in January using the Goldstone Solar System radar antenna in California’s Mojave Desert.
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When it returns after an orbit around the sun in 2055, the asteroid will once again make a temporary and partial orbit around the Earth.
