The Earth has 3 Moons??

By Robert Conkey
Staff writer

On September third, amateur astronomer Bill Yeung found what very well could be an additional moon orbiting the Earth. Up to this point there have been two known objects orbiting our planet: first, the moon, and a second, little-known satellite that was discovered in 1986 called Cruithne. Cruithne, pronounced “croo-een-ya” is a small asteroid that takes a strange horseshoe-shaped path around both the Earth and Sun. At its closest orbit it is 9 million miles away from our planet, or about one tenth of our distance from the sun. The third, newest object, officially labeled “J002E3,” is calculated to have entered orbit in either march or april of this year, according to Paul Chodas of the American space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

So what is this object? Scientists are still not sure. Australian astronomer Tony Beresford first suggested that the object may not be man made. All of the so-called “space-junk” that humans are responsible for is accounted for. Further, our incessant automatic scans have never picked it up until now. And if it were a piece of metal, it should be showing the variations of brightness that such spinning objects give off. Since it does not, the evidence seemed to point to the object being a natural satellite. However, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory produced a new theory: it is possible that this satellite is a third-stage booster of the Saturn V rocket that provided that extra thrust the Apollo 12 astronauts needed to reach the moon in November of 1969.

So how did this object, whatever it is, begin orbiting the earth? According to Chodas, the J002E3 was in a heliocentric (around the Sun) orbit until it passed through a gravitational Lagrange point between the Earth and Sun. A Lagrange point is a point in space where the gravitational fields of two separate bodies overlap. At this point the gravity from Earth just barely overcame that of the Sun, and the object was ever-so-slowly pulled toward our planet. This has been “the first known case of an object being captured by the Earth, although Jupiter has been known to capture comets via the same mechanism,” said Chodas. Further, he noted that this object has a 3 percent chance of hitting the Earth, and a “one in five” chance of hitting our moon in 2003.