Sept. 20, 2002: Something odd is circling our planet. It's small, perhaps only 60-ft long, and rotates once every minute or so. Bill Yeung, an amateur astronomer in California, first spotted the 16th magnitude speck of light on Sept. 3rd in the constellation Pisces. He named it J002E3.
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Automated asteroid surveys scan the skies every few weeks, yet there was no sign of Yeung's object earlier this year. "It must have entered Earth orbit recently," says Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at JPL. "But it doesn't match any recently-launched spacecraft."
In other words, it's a mystery.
Citat fra Nasa.gov |
