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Moon NASA Space

Astronomers Discover Possible 60s-Era Moon Rocket Booster Heading Back To Earth (teslarati.com) 66

Posted by EditorDavid from the heading-home dept.
An anonymous reader quotes Teslarati: On August 19th this year, astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System observatory in Hawaii spotted an object destined to enter Earth orbit this fall. Designated as object 2020 SO, the item is now believed to be a rocket booster from NASA's Surveyor 2 mission which crash landed on the Moon in 1966 during the Apollo-era of the Cold War's space race.

"I suspect this newly discovered object 2020 SO to be an old rocket booster because it is following an orbit about the Sun that is extremely similar to Earth's, nearly circular, in the same plane, and only slightly farther away the Sun at its farthest point," Dr. Paul Chodas, the director of NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, explained in comments to CNN.

"That's precisely the kind of orbit that a rocket stage separated from a lunar mission would follow, once it passes by the Moon and escapes into orbit about the Sun. It's unlikely that an asteroid could have evolved into an orbit like this, but not impossible," he said. This specific type of event has only happened once before, namely in 2002 with a Saturn V upper stage from Apollo 12, according to Dr. Chodas.
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Astronomers Discover Possible 60s-Era Moon Rocket Booster Heading Back To Earth More

Astronomers Discover Possible 60s-Era Moon Rocket Booster Heading Back To Earth

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  • Cosmos to humans: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @12:44AM (#60549542) Journal

    "Here, take your shitty junk back!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I think the assumption back then was that making a bit of a mess wasn't too big of a deal because a) it was a race against the USSR and b) as technology rapidly improved and we colonized the solar system we could just clean it up later.

      • We both know clean up was never a consideration. We're humans. We destroy shit and only in retrospect do we ever decide cleaning shit up is in our best interest and only then if it's creating a problem.

  • Don't let it back in (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @12:53AM (#60549560)

    We have enough boosters already, we haven't got enough rockets for the boosters we already have.

  • Big difference guys.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      So you wrote the author to let them know you found this egregious error, yes?

      • Negative. Public humiliation is the best teacher.

        • But we know that the writers on Slashdot never read Slashdot. And put thoughts are irrelevant to them. So public humiliation doesn't work.. Perhaps a televised public flogging would be better.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          And you feel posting about it on /. counts in some way as "public humiliation"? That's like yelling about it from your front porch on a cabin on the Siberian tundra.

    • When did you discover that?

    • We already knew it existed, just lost track of it.

    • No. Literally synonyms [thesaurus.com]. They even have "find" in the definition, before the list of other synonyms, and "found" is just the past tense of "find".

    • Actually, it found us!
    • The writer must've been a white dude.
      They're always "discovering" shit the locals all new about already for ages.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Makes sense. I mean when we go trekking the stars we may well discover a planet filled with an alien race. The locals can be part of what you are discovering.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      You've got a lot of history textbooks to correct. The whole Columbus discovering America thing.

      • Is it possible to write history without a perspective? It only makes sense that you would get a white euro-centric historical record since we have written language. Most native history is passed down by word of mouth. Precious few written records have been found.

        We find pictographs and artifacts but rarely do we find written anything.

        So with that in mind, of course Columbus discovered American, because the rest of the world outside of American, did not realize it was even there.

        Had the native Americans foun

        • Strange as it may seem, America was discovered by Europeans and forgotten at least twice before Columbus. Well known is Leif Ericson circa AD 1000. Less well known and with only a small amount of evidence is some settlements circa BC 2000: Look up "America's Stonehenge" for a tantalizing introduction.
      • They still put that shit in the history books? Everyone knows that it was Russians (Yakutians, even) who discovered America, about 15000 years ago. Columbus arrived to give (and receive, probably) sexually transmitted diseases to the people he met there.

  • I've seen this one. (Score:5, Funny)

    by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @01:12AM (#60549590) Homepage Journal

    I've seen this one. [wikipedia.org] It gains sentience, makes a robot clone of Spock, then merges with Captain Decker before flying back out into space, never to be seen again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by WallyL ( 4154209 )
      Dang, it was Ilia and not Spock... anything other than the real Spock and he would be less robotic!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Oh, sorry, misread the summary. I can honestly say that I had to read the summary, because like the recent Star Trek movies (everything after the one with Picard and the Nexus), I have little memory of this one beyond the fact that there was a probe called V'Ger, something weird happened, the end. Initially, I remembered it so badly that I conflated it with the probe in Star Trek IV and was thinking it came to find the whales.... :-(

        I remember Khan through Generations. Everything else is a blur.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      I've read this one. [wikipedia.org] Among other results, a duplicate of Stonehenge is created a few hundred yards north of the real one. Or possibly they were swapped.

  • J002E3 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @02:05AM (#60549650)
    Similar event:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Leave nothing but footprints (Score:3)

    by Jesus H Rolle ( 4603733 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @02:30AM (#60549670)

    So are we going to recover the booster, or at least put it in a stable orbit? It'd be nice to see what 60 years of micrometeorites have done - might give us a ballpark lifetime on the ISS and future space projects.

    And out of principle, we really should clean up our shit before it hits someone. Or at least put a few magnetic solar powered beacons on it so we can track it and deal with it later. That'd be a fun NASA project.

    • Re:Leave nothing but footprints (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @03:25AM (#60549742) Journal

      So are we going to recover the booster, or at least put it in a stable orbit? It'd be nice to see what 60 years of micrometeorites have done - might give us a ballpark lifetime on the ISS and future space projects.

      And out of principle, we really should clean up our shit before it hits someone. Or at least put a few magnetic solar powered beacons on it so we can track it and deal with it later. That'd be a fun NASA project.

      One of the things we need to start doing is clearing Earth's orbit of the dead junk that's out there. It's too bad we have nothing like the Space Shuttle anymore. We could bring back some of the more historically important stuff that way, but, that's not going to happen. We won't see another shuttle-type vehicle in our lifetimes.

      That leaves:
      1 - Robotically giving a shove to the stuff so it'll fall into the atmosphere and burn up, and...
      2 - Putting stuff we want to save for history's sake into stable orbit so that its possible it CAN be recovered in the future.

      • Re:Leave nothing but footprints (Score:5, Interesting)

        by multi io ( 640409 ) <olaf.klischat@googlemail.com> on Monday September 28, 2020 @04:33AM (#60549828)
        The initial retirement plan for the Hubble Telescope was to bring it back to earth with a shuttle. It was always one of my biggest regrets that they scratched that plan after (I think) the Columbia accident. That would be one of the greatest National Air and Space Museum exhibits of all time.
        • Otherwise known as a colossal waste of money. The down-mass capability of the space shuttle was one of the main motivators behind the design of such an inherently unsafe and expensive system. This one requirement may have set US spaceflight back by 30 years. And for anyone but the military it is useless. Hubble was designed to be serviceable almost as a way to justify the existence of the shuttle. But if Hubble weren't serviceable we might actually be on the 3rd in a sustainable sequence of optical/UV

      • One of the things we need to start doing is clearing Earth's orbit of the dead junk that's out there. It's too bad we have nothing like the Space Shuttle anymore. We could bring back some of the more historically important stuff that way, but, that's not going to happen. We won't see another shuttle-type vehicle in our lifetimes.

        That leaves: 1 - Robotically giving a shove to the stuff so it'll fall into the atmosphere and burn up, and... 2 - Putting stuff we want to save for history's sake into stable orbit so that its possible it CAN be recovered in the future.

        Small ion drives and gaffer tape ought to do the trick.

      • >We won't see another shuttle-type vehicle in our lifetimes.

        Why would we want one? Assuming Starship comes to fruition it will be superior to the Shuttle is pretty much every way. Install a passenger capsule and a robot arm in a "chomper" cargo design and you've got something with the versatility of the shuttle, along with a vastly larger cargo bay/workshop that could be pressurized (or not) on demand, with enough room to allow astronauts to work on all but the largest deployed satellites without the r

      • Need to get SpaceX to recover it, shove in a few Raptor engines, and send it back out again with enough comsats to provide a constellation around the Moon. Recycling!

        Will one of the Voyagers encounter a micro black hole somewhere in the outer cloud, whip a U turn, and come back as V'Ger?

    • Re:Leave nothing but footprints (Score:5, Informative)

      by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @03:38AM (#60549764)

      nice to see what 60 years of micrometeorites have done

      Most of the damage done in Earth orbit is by manmade debris. This booster hasn't been near Earth for a long time: it's in an independent orbit around the Sun that only now is syncing up with Earth, maybe for the first time since the 1960s.
      There isn't much manmade debris in such orbits, so this stage won't be representative.

      We're already much better at cleaning up our shit than in the 1960s. Launches to Earth orbit have to follow strict regulations: anything in LEO is required to reenter within x years; stages have to be passivated to reduce the risk of explosions; a graveyard orbit has been established above GEO, etc.
      This is hardest for missions that leave Earth orbit. For the Moon, most of the Saturn V stages were aimed to impact the Moon after separation. For other targets, the last rocket stage enters an elliptical orbit around the Sun instead.

      • nice to see what 60 years of micrometeorites have done

        Most of the damage done in Earth orbit is by manmade debris. This booster hasn't been near Earth for a long time: it's in an independent orbit around the Sun that only now is syncing up with Earth, maybe for the first time since the 1960s. There isn't much manmade debris in such orbits, so this stage won't be representative.

        That's a good point; I guess it won't be so useful for Earth satellites. Still, it would be good data for designing probes headed to the outer planets.

        We're already much better at cleaning up our shit than in the 1960s. Launches to Earth orbit have to follow strict regulations: anything in LEO is required to reenter within x years; stages have to be passivated to reduce the risk of explosions; a graveyard orbit has been established above GEO, etc. This is hardest for missions that leave Earth orbit. For the Moon, most of the Saturn V stages were aimed to impact the Moon after separation. For other targets, the last rocket stage enters an elliptical orbit around the Sun instead.

        It's those untracked rocket bits left to orbit the Sun that are worrisome, but I suppose the odds of an old booster in solar orbit hitting a satellite are astronomical.

        • I suppose the odds of an old booster in solar orbit hitting a satellite are astronomical.

          We see what you did there.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pjt33 ( 739471 )

        Most of the damage done in Earth orbit is by manmade debris. This booster hasn't been near Earth for a long time

        It seems to me that that would make the data more valuable. We've got data on some Earth orbits – I was reading recently about data from recovered Hubble solar panels – but do we already have data on the kind of space this booster has traversed?

        • Well, it's very nearly the exact same space that Earth traverses, so yes, we do have some data. It might offer a further glance of what Earth orbit is like once you get away from Earth's local space, but it's a pretty fair bet that it's very similar aside from there being a generally lower density of stuff, mostly moving at slower speeds (since Earth accelerates anything nearby towards itself), and some buildup of material near the Lagrange L4 and L5 points.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dstwins ( 167742 )

        Will this FINALLY convince those "moon landing was a fake" idiots? (or does it have to land on their heads literally?)

  • Since it's 2020 ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by pablo_max ( 626328 ) on Monday September 28, 2020 @02:34AM (#60549674)

    I would rather put my money on a "space missile" fired by a passing alien ship 50 years ago. The people, panicked by the incoming doom from above quickly begin to burn down society, ending the world as we know it.
    The missile, lands rather than explodes, containing vast stores of knowledge, which the Humans who just blasted themselves back to the stone age can no longer use. Because.. 2020.

  • I for one welcome our new over lord V'ger. Live long and V'ger

  • What goes around comes around

  • Surveyor 1 landed on the Moon on June 2, 1966 to collect photographs for the Apollo program’s landing sight assessment;

    Did they hire the /. editors?

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