The trouble with finding out we’re going to have an extra moon hanging around is that the reality isn’t quite as exciting as the headline. The moon we’ve got is pretty spectacular and it’s always been easy to dream of having several. Maybe they’d be different colors and sizes, people could have favorites, and without a doubt they’d do an utterly predictable dance with each other that I will never be able to comprehend, but will enjoy. Bring ‘em on, I say.
So we’re due for an extra moon September 29th. They are calling this one a mini-moon, but that’s still pretty fancy for a pitted potato about the size of my house. We won’t be able to see it. It’s a disappointment. The idea is it would orbit Earth for 57 days, and then peel off to orbit the sun again, like some space tourist. Just going to have a gander at our open-air markets and an ancient church or two, and then right back to grab a Cinnabon and a souvenir T-shirt on the way back home.
Which didn’t make sense to me. If some potato was going to orbit the Earth, seems to me it would just keep orbiting, and eventually grow closer and closer and flame out into tater tots over our oceans. If the Earth sucks hard enough to grab an asteroid it shouldn’t spit it right back out again.
Turns out I’m correct about that. It’s not going to orbit properly in a nice tidy circle but sort of bloop around the Earth in a horseshoe trajectory before having second gravitational thoughts. There are a number of these travelers the experts have their eyes on, just in case they were planning to blow us to bits, and they know when they’re going to show up and when they’re going to leave. This one, for instance, is slated to come back in 2055. They say that, but hey. Asteroids these days! They’re all Be there with bells on! on the RSVP but when it comes down to it they might not show up at all if something more interesting drifts by.
This sucker travels in the Arjuna Asteroid pack, which is unusual in not being named after anything Roman. These are near-Earth objects with similar orbits around the sun, such as taking about an earthly year for the trip, and having low inclination. I looked up “inclination” for you but my whole brain seized up, as it always does when dealing in spatial visualization. Before I knew it, we were deep into something called the Argument of Periapsis and that’s just not something I want to get into, in these contentious times.
Not only that, but I learned the Sun has an equator, which I was not aware of. I would have thought it had burned up by now. My father minored in astronomy and labored rather hard to jam some of this stuff into my feeble brain, but, being overstuffed with metaphor, it had low inclination. He’d be happy to explain it to you, but he’s 116 years old and doesn’t get out much anymore.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the invisible company of our new space turd while you can, and try not to be upset you can’t see it. You wouldn’t believe the number of cool things we can’t see.
I thought Elon Musk was our space turd.
Well, he can see MY moon.
Time travelers from our future, who colonized a distant planet as we managed to destroy the Earth. They disguised their ship as a tiny little asteroid that everyone would find harmless. I find it a little TOO coincidental that this coincides with the election. Two possible reasons for their tourism:
The pessimistic spin: “This is where everything went tits up, leading to our getting an eviction notice from Mother Earth, and NO, we didn’t get our deposit back!”
A more optimistic spin: “This is the pivotal moment in history when hope and peace won over hatred and despair. Granted, we still had to colonize another planet, ’cause the Earth was already fucked… but we had more time to do it, and Science won over Dogma.”
I think that you probably know from comments I’ve made lo, these many years, that I am of the Pessimist persuasion. I do HAVE hope…. I’m just not very hopeful about my hope. And if it IS the worst case scenario, I hope that it actually IS an asteroid that will suddenly veer off and strike the Earth. We are the taint of all of Earth’s species. Any one of the other species would have done a better job at evolution than chimpanzees. Especially birds, my parrots tell me.
About this time one of my fonder wishes is that we do not bother to try to colonize another planet when we have a perfectly good one we could just quit pooping on.
Chimpanzees didn’t evolve into us. We have a common ancestor. The chimp branch went on to evolve into arboreally inclined apes. Our ancestors became bipedal and eventually evolved big brains and massive inferiority complexes.
Sounds like a dangerous combination to me. And yeah… I knew that in the back of my mind about chimps and us. I was reading a book a while back called The Ape House (I forget the writer’s name. The same author of Water for Elephants.) and much was made over the fact that chimps are aggressive and warlike, whereas Bonobos are peaceful and loving (maybe a little TOO loving, if you get my drift.) Humans are definitely in the former category in my mind.
We’re definitely more like chimps than bonobos, but even bonobos aren’t absolutely peace loving. I know one researcher who had the tip of a finger bitten off by one of her star subjects. But I suppose that’s better than having your face ripped off as happened to a person who pissed off a “pet” chimp.
Bonobos are known as the hippies of the ape world, solving everything with sex.
Now, see, I wasn’t even going to mention that chimps are our cousins, because I’m polite that way, but if my little moon post develops its own rabbit holes, well, I can only be glad of it.
This is the first I’ve heard about the extra moon and I’m disappointed we won’t be able to see it. Maybe they could aim a really supersized telescope at it and show it on the tv news?
I think SOME telescopes can find it? Just not ones you or I have much access to. I am willing to stand corrected, though, or just sit on my haunches corrected and fling poo.
I’m stuck back there on imagining multiple moons. I know some of the best planets have them, but those don’t have 13 year old females, or mothers to term, or even moony lovers as far as we know. If we had five lunars tugging at our beaches, wombs, and astrologers, why, good heavens! This one moon Earth is perfect for us as it is. Um, was. Oh, dear.
Seems like an awful lot of things could be in retrograde and since I don’t know what that means it’s just as well we don’t have to deal with it. We do have us a mighty fine moon.
Jupiter has seven moons or is it nine?
Saturn has a million, billion, trillion sixty-nine;
And ev’ry one is a little sun, with six little moons of its own!
But we have only one!
Just think of all the fun we’d have if there were nine!
Then we could be just nine times more romantic!
Dogs would bay ’til they were frantic!
we’d have nine tides in the Atlantic!
The man in the moon would be gigantic!
But we have only one! Only one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rj9Zr43B_E
By Leonard Bernstein. My college roommate sang this in recital way long ago, and I have never forgotten it.
That’s what it is…memorable.
But still we must woo, and right quickly, with two!
So is Pluto still a planet or has it been shunned by the planetary community? Yet this interloper is called a “mini moon.” Such a fickle solar system.
Pluto is now classified as a fun-sized planet.
I am astonished that no company has thought of putting advertising on this “new” moon – who would be the contenders?