Bus-sized asteroid hurtling toward Earth will become ‘temporary mini-moon’

Our blue moon will no longer stand alone.

Jupiter, eat your heart out: Earth will get a second moon in the form of asteroid 2024 PT5, which will begin orbiting our planet later this month. The space rock’s celestial habitat was recently detailed in a study published in the non-peer-reviewed journal AAS Research Notes.

“This particular object will undergo this process (becoming a lunar entity) starting next week,” lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of the Complutense University of Madrid told Space.com.

The bus-sized asteroid, which was discovered Aug. 7 by the NASA-funded Last Alert Earth Impact System (ATLAS), will be absorbed by Earth’s gravitational pull from Sept. 29 to Nov. 25, USA Today reported.

During this interstellar layer, the space rock is likely to become a “temporary mini-moon,” according to Marcos.

To become a mini-moon, a cosmic body must approach Earth at a relatively close distance of about 2.8 million miles while traveling at a relatively slow speed of about 2,200 mph.

In this case, Asteroid 2024 will travel in a horseshoe pattern and will likely not completely circle the Earth.

“You could say that if a real satellite is like a customer buying goods inside a store, objects like 2024 PT5 are window shoppers,” the space expert said.

After its brief period as a mini-moon, the intergalactic glob will turn toward the sun and return to its presumed home in the Arjuna asteroid belt — a mass of small asteroids that follow Earth-like orbits.

In other words, Asteroid 2024 will not occupy this role for as long as our main moon, which has been orbiting Earth for 4.5 billion years.

Unfortunately, stargazers won’t be able to see this lunar happy hour unless they’re armed with some high-tech space gear.

“The object is too small and faint for typical amateur telescopes and binoculars,” Marcos said. “However, the object is within the illumination range of typical telescopes used by professional astronomers.”

He added, “A telescope with a diameter of at least 30 inches plus a CCD or CMOS detector is needed to observe this object, a 30-inch telescope and a human eye behind it will not suffice.”

Not to mention that Asteroid 2024 is only about 33 feet in diameter—much smaller than the Moon’s width of 2,159 miles.

According to the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the asteroid is one of 35,000 putative near-Earth objects, or NEOs, 99% of which are asteroids.

Perhaps the most ominous recent NEO was the stadium-sized asteroid 2024 ON, which passed dangerously close to Earth on Tuesday evening.