Earth’s second Moon
According to Astronomers , our planet Earth is quite capable of playing host to more than one moon. This news bodes well for researchers who hope to capture various types of meteorite and study them up-close.
According to surveys dating back to 2006, we regularly capture small satellites in our orbit. This has led to academic speculation that earth is capable of, and indeed regularly supports, an additional “moon”.
According to Mikael Granvik at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, “The scientific potential of being able to first remotely characterize a meteoroid and then visit and bring it back to Earth would be unprecedented.” What makes this particularly exciting news is the fact that the scientific community has one of two possibilities in sight for mankind in space. Sending astronauts to Mars, or to an asteroid. By capturing these nuggets in our orbit, we are able to add a wealth of information to our collective knowledge… information that up to this point, had to be gleaned from whatever saw fit to come through our atmosphere and land somewhere on earth.
Apparently, the capturing of small objects in orbit is quite common for Earth, Granvik explains; “At any given time, there should be at least one natural Earth satellite of 1-meter diameter orbiting the Earth, These objects should hang around for about 10 months and make about three revolutions of the planet. That means Earth ought to have a metre-sized moon right now.”