Mysterious ‘asteroid’ now appears to be an old rocket!!! Know more..

Instead of cosmic rock, the newly discovered object appears to be an old rocket from a failed moon-landing mission 54 years ago that’s finally making its way back home. A telescope in Hawaii last month discovered that the mystery object heading our way while doing a search intended to protect our planet from doomsday rocks. “I’m pretty jazzed about this,” Paul Chodas told. “It’s been a hobby of mine to find one of these and draw such a link, and I’ve been doing it for decades now.”

It is actually the Centaur upper rocket stage that successfully propelled NASA’s Surveyor 2 lander to the moon in 1966 before it was discarded. The lander ended up crashing into the moon after one of its thrusters failed to ignite on the way there. The rocket, meanwhile, swept past the moon and into orbit around the sun as intended junk, never to be seen again until perhaps now.  The object promptly was added to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center’s tally of asteroids and comets found in our solar system, just 5,000 shies of the 1 million marks. The object is estimated to be roughly 26 feet (8 meters) based on its brightness. That’s in the ballpark of the old Centaur, which would be less than 32 feet (10 meters) long including its engine nozzle and 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter. The object is also in the same plane as Earth, not tilted above or below, another red flag. Asteroids usually zip by at odd angles. Lastly, it’s approaching Earth at 1,500 mph (2,400 kph), slow by asteroid standards.

As the object gets closer, astronomers should be able to better chart its orbit and determine how much it’s pushed around by the radiation and thermal effects of sunlight. If it’s an old Centaur essentially a light empty can it will move differently than a heavy space rock less susceptible to outside forces. That’s how astronomers normally differentiate between asteroids and space junk like abandoned rocket parts since both appear merely as moving dots in the sky. There likely are dozens of fake asteroids out there, but their motions are too imprecise or jumbled to confirm their artificial identity. A mystery object in 1991, for example, was determined by Chodas and others to be a regular asteroid rather than the debris, even though its orbit around the sun resembled Earth’s.