On September 17 he was sighted for the first time a strange object heading towards Earth to enter our orbit. However, it was too far away to confirm what it was about. So a rocky body was thought to become a temporary mini moon, or a second theory that it could be a rocket from the past.
After several investigations during these last two months, on December 1 it had its closest approach to Earth, and thanks to that they were able to confirm the second theory, that It is a 1966 Centaur booster rocket launched to the Moon then, and now returned to Earth orbit.
The rocket, christened 2020 SO, has finally been identified thanks to data from the IRTF infrared telescope in Hawaii and the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The history of the Centaur rocket
54 years ago, en September 20, 1966, NASA’s Centaur upper stage booster rocket and Surveyor 2 mission were launched to the Moon to survey its surface before the Apollo missions. But nevertheless, this thruster, one of the ones used by the ship, did not ignite, just one day after launch, which caused the ship will begin to spin uncontrollably and end up crashing on the Moon.
The rocket disappeared in an unknown orbit around the Sun. But Paul Chodas, director of CNEOS, compared the data obtained almost two months ago with the missions carried out by NASA and established the theory that that mysterious rocket that remained unaccounted for was returning. It wasn’t an asteroid, it was space junk.
As said, being still too far away it was very difficult to determine with certainty if it was that rocket or not, estimating that from October until next May 2021 it would be orbiting and there would be time to analyze it in depth. Something that has finally happened.
The new investigation that has been definitive
Vishnu Reddy, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, decided to use the IRTF telescope with his team to compare the composition of 2020 SO with 301 stainless steel, a material used for 1960 Centaur rockets. As there were certain similarities, they observed that they were not taking into account space weather, so they began further investigation.
“Due to the extreme speed at which Centaur thrusters in Earth orbit travel through the sky, we knew it would be extremely difficult to fix the IRTF long enough to get a solid and reliable data set “, explica Reddy.
On December 1, the day 2020 SW made its closest approach, compared it to a 1971 Centaur D booster rocket, and the matches were consistent enough to conclude that it was the 1966 rocket. Now will continue in our orbit, in a region of space called “Hill Sphere”, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, until March 2021, when it will orbit the Sun.
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