The Earth will have a new “mini-moon” for the next two months with a small asteroid being captured in the planet’s gravitational pull.
The Asteroid, known as 2024PT5, is 10m in diameter. It will do a single orbit of the Earth, well away from the planet, before heading back into space nearly two months later.
It is not the first time the planet has pilfered a spare moon from space.
An asteroid measuring between two and three metres circled for a year from 2006 to 2007 and another smaller rock was believed to have orbited for several years before exiting in 2020.
Another event was also recorded in 1981.
The latest mini-moon was spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) last month.
It will be hard to spot in the sky due to the small size (10m). In comparison, the main moon has a diameter of 3475km.
NASA describes any space object that comes within 190 million kilometres of Earth a “near-Earth object”.
NASA tracks the locations and orbits of around 28,000 asteroids using ATLAS which consists of four telescopes that scan the sky every 24 hours.
