A new “moon” is orbiting around our planet
A small asteroid has found its way into Earth’s gravitational pull and now the asteroid called a mini moon, is orbiting our planet alongside our own moon. Albeit for just a short time.
We won’t get to see the mini moon, named 2024 PT5, with the naked eye. It was spotted by a network of satellites set up to spot asteroids.
While this asteroid will not collide with Earth, its discovery highlights the importance of planetary defenses to spot asteroids that get too close and could pose harm to our planet.
Terry Oswalt an astronomer, and associate dean of the Physical Sciences Department at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, said asteroids coming close to Earth like 2024 PT5 is not uncommon.
“It's only going to loop around and fling back out,” Oswalt said. “But technically because its orbital energy is negative, with respect to the Earth, it's going to be bound for a few weeks, 57 days, to be exact, and it'll do it again in a few years. So, it's not like it's the only time that that this happens.”
While this asteroid is about the size of a school bus, Oswalt said it is quite small compared to our Earth’s moon. The rock does not pose a threat to our planet.
“It's over a million times too faint to be seen with the naked eye, so only very large telescopes can accurately image it,” Oswalt said. But you only need to image an object to calculate its orbit, so you can't resolve details on it.
NASA continually scans asteroids, meteors and other space rocks like 2024 PT5 with the network called the Atlas Project and with NASA’s Center for Near Earth Objects. But even with these two networks, Oswalt said more eyes in the sky is always better.
Oswalt said even though NASA monitors the skies, “that doesn't mean it's looking at every piece of the sky continually for 24 hours, seven days a week,” Oswalt said. “There's always a need to have more telescopes, and they don't have to be very large in order to detect these objects. All you need is to be able to see that little point in the sky that's moving at the rate that suggests that it's in our orbit that's of interest to us.”
Tracking weather 22,000 miles above our planet
After Hurricane Helene made landfall as a category 4 storm and swept across Florida’s Big Bend coast and up into Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas, storm surges caused major flooding across the state. Millions of people were left without power. The storm killed at least 133 people across the southeast, with that number expected to rise.
Storms like Helene leave devastation in their paths and scientists are trying to monitor and analyze these storms from space.
Back in February of this year, NOAA and NASA joined forces to launch an advanced weather satellite. This satellite is the final in a constellation of space-based sensors from NOAA.
GOES-U launched this past April. The satellite will study climate data and monitor Earth’s most destructive environmental phenomenon – like wildfires, volcanoes and hurricanes.
Back in February, Ryan Page, an engineer with Lockheed Martin said the goal is “this incredibly valuable piece of technology that is supposed to help us citizens and save lives for 10 years.”
As an engineer, Page said this satellite and the other GOEZ weather satellites are the best weather sensing satellites NOAA and Lockheed Martin can build.
“You're talking about a 15-year mission life,” Page said. “So, they actually plan life of 10 years, but we build them for 15. They're these giant, hardy satellites with the best possible technology equipped to them. We work as Lockheed Martin, as one of the prime contractors with a lot of best-in-class vendors to put this thing together with the best possible hardware software and build it just for that intent; that 10-year mission life.”
Aside from tracking weather, the satellites have the capability to see objects on the Earth’s surface. Page said the things the satellites can capture is unbelievable.
“It can actually see the changes in light from the different light spectrums, and then it can also track the volcanic ash as it slowly comes through this to the surface,” Page said “I was fortunate enough to be with this program since GOES-R was launched. They always had speculation that could do this, but they launched GOES-R in 2016 and then, sure enough, they could see boats. So, you can see asteroids entering Earth's atmosphere. You can actually track meteors with this too”
