9/16/2002

Earth's newest moon? Sky and Telescope describes Canadian Bill Yeung's discovery of a 16th magnitude object, now named J002E3, moving rapidly across his field of view in his 0.45 meter CCD telescope. "JPL's Paul Chodas concludes that J002E3 is possibly a leftover Saturn-IVB stage from one of the Apollo missions of the late 1960s. His report includes an animation of the object's recapture by Earth in April 2002 after being in a heliocentric orbit for several decades. This recapture, incidentally, explains why it eluded detection until now" See the Near-Earth Object Program

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home