SPACE.com -- Newfound Object Orbiting Earth is Likely Apollo Junk

FIND IT: Experienced amateur astronomers with 8-inch or larger telescopes and CCD cameras should be able to spot J002E3. Click to see a sky map.

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	Newfound Object Orbiting Earth is Likely Apollo Junk By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 01:25 pm ET 11 September 2002

Mystery Object Orbiting Earth

An object found Sept. 3 to be orbiting Earth every 50 days is most likely a rocket booster leftover from the Apollo era, a NASA scientist said today.

Speculation had begun in various publications that the object might be a small, second natural moon of Earth.

"It's most likely a spacecraft," said Donald Yeomans, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's not likely to be a natural object, not in that kind of orbit."

In a telephone interview this morning, Yeomans said his colleague Paul Chodas was running computer calculations to determine if the object is in fact a rocket booster, as they suspect. The results are expected to be released in the next day or two.

The object stumps astronomers who routinely hunt the night skies for asteroids. Bill Yeung detected it with an 18-inch (0.45-meter) telescope in Arizona. If the object were a satellite or some piece of space junk, it should have been detected before, some scientists said.

The object, designated J002E3, was first listed as a minor planet (typically meaning an asteroid) by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which serves as a clearinghouse for such objects. It was later removed from that list when it was found to be in Earth orbit.

In the unlikely event the satellite turns out to be a tiny natural moon of Earth, it would not be the first such candidate. However, other possible small moons of Earth are on strange orbits that are gravitationally balanced -- for a time -- by the Sun. The objects tend to be captured only for a few thousand years. The object is not visible from Earth without a powerful telescope.

Yeomans said the brightness of this object and the estimated distance to it suggest it's about the size of a rocket booster, given that scientists estimate such a hunk of metal would reflect about 50 percent of the sunlight hitting it.

"The trouble is they [rocket boosters] get out there and ... their orbits are largely chaotic," Yeomans said. "It's almost impossible to say what belongs to what."