Asteroid to join Earth’s orbit as ‘mini-moon’ for two months

An asteroid will be temporarily captured by Earth’s gravity and will briefly join the planet’s orbit.

This is asteroid 2024 PT5, which was discovered on August 7 by the Asteroid Impact Alert System (ATLAS) in South Africa, which is funded by NASA, according to the German agency DW.

This body, which has a diameter of between 10 and 11 meters, “It will be a mini-moon for about two months,” CNN en Español said.

DW reported that astronomers such as Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos, from the Complutense University of Madrid, explained that The asteroid will begin its orbit around Earth on September 29 and will continue until November 25..

During these two months or so, Earth will have a second moon temporarily, a condition known as “temporary gravitational capture.”

The small moon PT5 poses no risk of colliding with Earth either now or in the coming decades, said de la Fuente Marcos.

The space rock will orbit at a distance of about 4.2 million kilometers, or about 10 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.Experts said.

Researchers believe this asteroid could be a member of the Arjuna family, a group of near-Earth objects with orbits similar to our planet.

“These orbital elements are consistent with those of the Argonas, a low-resonance group of small near-Earth objects in an extant secondary asteroid belt that surrounds the path followed by the Earth-Moon system,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.