The researchers found that the strange bright light Came from a Centaur booster rocket from the 1960s.
To confirm the origin of the object, data obtained at the Infrared Telescope Facility of the NASA (IRTF) and the orbit analysis of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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Detailed analysis of the orbit revealed that the rocket had come close to Earth several times over the decades, with a focus on 1966, which brought it close enough to our planet.
Paul Chodas, director of CNEOS, said that “it could be the rocket booster of the upper stage Centauro of the failed Surveyor 2 mission of 1966 of NASA to the Moon”.
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#Argentina: A strange white light was registered in the landscape of Villa la Angostura ..
07/12/2020 pic.twitter.com/6K3446v724– World Alert / Earthquakes and Disasters (@ World Alert19) December 8, 2020
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For his part, Vishnu Reddy, associate professor and planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, issued a statement in which he suggested that “due to the extreme weakness of this object following the CNEOS prediction, it was a difficult object to characterize ”.
“We obtained color observations with the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, which suggested that 2020 SO was not an asteroid,” he added.
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