Quasi-satellite of Earth has Lunar-like Material
Kamo’oalewa, a 50-meter diameter quasi-satellite of Earth, shares spectroscopic similarities with a lunar sample collected by Apollo 14.
One of the weird fallacies of our knowledge of the solar system is the idea that the Earth only has one moon. Wait, what? No, it’s true. The Earth has other natural satellites than the Moon. They’re not on the same order as the Moon, though, so they’re called quasi-satellites, and Earth currently has five of them. We say ‘currently’ because these bodies are small and usually have orbital characteristics that deteriorate until the tiny moons escape the Earth’s gravity well.
Of the five quasi-satellites we know of at the moment, the one with the most stable orbit is Kamo’oalewa, a 50-meter diameter near-Earth object with a rapid rotation of thirty minutes that can come within 14.4 million kilometers of our home planet. And while its orbit is stable-ish, the geometry of the orbit with Earth makes it difficult to observe. A team of researchers has collected about five years’ worth of observational data from the Large Binocular Telescope and the Lowell Discovery Telescope. They collected both photometric and spectroscopic data in the hopes of understanding Kamo’oalewa.
