Once in a mini-moon.
You won’t be able to see the 2024 PT5 asteroid when it hitches a ride in the moon’s orbit of Earth starting today – not with your average backyard telescope – but that doesn’t mean it won’t still be there.
The interstellar interloper is about 33 feet wide, which puts it roughly the same size as a Mountain Line bus.
However, it will still be more than 2 million miles from Earth.
At a fraction of the present lunar orb, this bus will be but a miniscule blip in the vastness of it all.
Still, the visit of the tiny rock will be a kind of big deal in the space pantheon, Carlos de la Fuente Marcos told Space.com and reporters with various media outlets last week.
The “mini-moon” designation and all that, said Marcos, a researcher with Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Lots of asteroids in lots of sizes regularly enter the space-confines of Earth, he said, but they seldom hang around long enough to get groovy with gravity, making this space sojourn somewhat rare.
When they do, such as 2024 PT5, which is expected to be on its path through Nov. 25, they achieve mini-moon status, Marco explained.
He gave a down-to-Earth comparison: “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 researcher said.
Grocery shopping – of the interstellar kind – has been on the collective minds of Lindsay Smalls’ students at Westwood Middle School for the past several months.
She teaches science at the school on River Road, and last spring, the budding scientists and engineers in her class got some national attention from NASA for work on ways to grow crops on Earth’s moon.
Such work is a staple of the space agency’s ongoing Artemis project, with aims to eventually put astronauts on Mars.
That means colonizing the aforementioned moon, first.
Colonizing, as in planting vegetable seeds from home in the regolith, that dusty covering of rocks and minerals about as far removed from the fertile soil of America’s Heartland as 2024 PT5 is from Earth.
“You can’t truck tons of soil up there,” Smalls said. “Not at $15,000 a ton.”
Her students were lauded by NASA for devising a system to effectively water crops, either in the zero gravity of the flight up – or the low gravity once everyone gets there.
In other words: that’s one small step for interstellar irrigation … one giant leap for space-spinach, to be.
Meanwhile, Earth’s (temporary) mini-moon will remind everyone of just how in-motion the cosmos can be, Marcos and other scientists who will track the visit say.
Earth’s gravitational pull will put the brakes on the asteroid, slowing its roll, as it were.
To around 2,220 mph.
And don’t forget to mark your calendars for the return cruise.
After it veers out at the end of November, the asteroid is projected to circle back around 31 years from now, in 2055.
