Yep. You read that right. Double rainbow memes aside (were you even old enough to understand that? No? GET OFF MY LAWN!!), Earth will be getting another friend for a few months, in the form of an Asteroid orbiting us and eventually leaving us.
On Sept 29th, a Near Earth Object from the Arjuna asteroid belt, will enter orbit in a what is being called a Horseshoe orbit, which is better described as if you drew a capital U, but did a lowercase o in the bottom to signify an extra lap around Earth. Earth being in the bottom of the U, and our current Moon, somewhere off to the side of the lines.
Where is the Arjuna asteroid belt?
Well, it’s not like the Kuiper belt way out near where Pluto calls it’s home, or the “Roman” belt between Mars and Jupiter, but rather a small collection of “bulbs” of NEO’s, or Near Earth Objects, shown here in red. And no, the tiny red dot near Earth in this photo, is nothing currently in this article.
How long will it be with us?
It will officially leave orbit around 9:15pm EST Nov 25th 2024. It will make a brief return in January 2025, however it will not be considered a mini-moon at that return, as it’s mostly an incomplete orbit. It will return again around 2055.
STFU Jeff.. can we see it?
YES YOU CAN SEE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you have a professional grade telescope, as most home based scopes with 12″ diameters or lower, cannot see it. NASA describes night sky objects using Magnitude scale, similar to Earthquakes. The faintest object the human eye can see is +6.5. As that number goes up, the object is less visible; called a ‘Reverse Logarithmic scale’. The Sun is -27.8m, our (Full) Moon is -12.7m. Sirius, the “North Star”, also known as the brightest star in our night sky, is -1.46m. This object will be…. +27.6m.
Why did you get our hopes up like that? Jerk.
Sorry, some education is boring, but some is cool. Hey, did you know NASA currently has a satellite in orbit that YOU, yes YOU, with eyeballs, can see it without anything else? (Yes, you will need your corrective lenses still). The BlueWalker 3 Satellite is +0.4m. This number is currently 400 times brighter than the next closest object visible in orbit, the International Space Station, at -6m. Currently it makes about 1.3 orbits per 24.25 hours. We are lucky in that every 3 nights, we will see it in our sky moving slowly over the night sky around 11pm-1am EST. If you go out and look and don’t see it, try again tomorrow 😉 As of Sept 20th, the day I’m typing this article up, it is sadly orbiting us right now at 11am-1pm, so we won’t see it with that silly ball of nuclear fusion up there. Do the math in 0.33 nights per orbit when you last saw it. Everyone on the Earth outside of McMurdo Station, will be able to see it at some point!