‘Temporary mini-moon’, a bus-size asteroid being sucked toward Earth.

INA - SOURCES

Blue Moon will no longer be standing alone, as the Earth will be getting a second moon in the form of Asteroid 2024 PT5, which will start orbiting our planet later this month. 

The space rock’s celestial sojourn was detailed recently in a study published in the non-peer-reviewed journal AAS Research Notes.
“This particular object will undergo this process; becoming a lunar entity; starting next week,” said the lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of the Complutense University of Madrid.

The bus-size asteroid, which was discovered on August 7 by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System - ATLAS, will be sucked in by Earth’s gravitational pull from September 29th to November 25th.

During this interstellar layover, the space rock will likely become a “temporary mini-moon,” per Marcos.

To become a mini-moon, a cosmic body has to approach Earth at a comparatively close range of around 2.8 million miles while traveling at a relatively slow speed of around 2,200 mph.

In this case, Asteroid 2024 will travel in a horseshoe pattern and will likely not fully circumnavigate the Earth.

“You may say that if a true satellite is like a customer buying goods inside a store, objects like 2024 PT5 are window shoppers,” the space expert quipped.