Earth's temporary moon

[tony873004]

Last year Apollo 12 rocket booster S-IVb was discovered in Earth orbit, having been captured after spending years in solar orbit. Does anyone know how many other man-made objects are orbiting the Sun as space junk, objects that were launched on escape trajectories or objects launched into Earth orbit but close enough the Moon's orbit to get ejected from the Earth / Moon system. There's probably a lot of other Apollo junk and other stuff out there.

Here's an article on the booster found last year:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/s ... 20919.html

[JackHiggins]

Tony

Way ahead of you... I've had an xyz for neocp j002e3 on my site for ages! It's #6 on the spacecraft page of http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/ . The model isn't great, (one of my first attempts) but it still shows the trajectory pretty well...

There are dozens of dead spacecraft orbiting the sun- lots of planetary flyby craft, or landers which missed *cough* Russians! *cough* probably a few earth satellites escaped too, although i wouldn't know about numbers... I think the only apollo Saturn IV-B boosters which were lost were A12 & A14, although A8 & A10 may have too...? (No point crashing them, since we had no lunar seismic stations back then, unlike the ALSEP experiments)

[tony873004]

Thanks, Jack
I'm new to Celestia and not quite sure what to do with your add-on to see the trajectory. I'll goof with it tonight and figure it out.

I'm trying to use my own program, GravitySimulator, to model Earth escapees which is why I'm wondering how many such things exist. I put 10 objects into Earth orbit, high enough for the Moon to eject them. After watching 1 Moon collision and 9 ejects, I then followed these 9 objects for 50 years and watched their returns to Earth/Moon vicinity. After 50 years, I've had 3 objects pass inbetween the Earth and Moon, but none captured, and 1 object collided with Earth. Fifty years was only enough time to watch each object make 1 return, but I'm planning on letting this simulation run for 1000 years to see the ultimate fates of all the test objects.

I'm not sure if this is something that can be modeled in Celestia, but if it is, I'd like to try it, but I'll have to learn the software first.

[ElPelado]

As far as I know, the Apollo 14 Saturn IV-B booster did crash in the moon because there was a sismic station or experiment... and I think I ve read that was not the only Saturn IV-B booster that crashed on the moon.