Good news everyone! The moon is about to get a new best friend in the form of a mini-moon which will begin orbiting planet Earth from next week onwards.
While normally we’re going round and round in space with just the one moon going round us, it’s set to be double lunacy for a short while.
Yes, sorry people who are already coming round to the idea of a mini-moon becoming a regular new fixture in the sky, it’s not going to last and it’ll be gone by the end of the year.
This new moon was spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, a group of people who really wanted their organisation’s name to form the acronym ‘ATLAS’.
They caught sight of an asteroid named 2024 PT5 on 7 August, and they reckon it’ll fully orbit our planet between 29 September and 25 November before breaking free of Earth’s gravitational pull and hurtling off somewhere else in space.
According to Live Science, the new moon will be with us for just 57 days in which time it’ll be very difficult to spot because it’s only going to be about 10 metres wide.
Just to put that into perspective, our actual moon is about 3.4 million metres wide so perhaps we ought to be putting more emphasis on the ‘mini’ aspect of this mini-moon.
They also report that from time to time we do get the occasional mini-moon, with similar things happening in 1981 and 2022.
Meanwhile, space aces have suggested that learning to mine mini-moons for their resources could be a possible stepping stone for extracting material from asteroids which hurtle by.
Of course, the announcement of a mini-moon has got lots of Earthlings in a bit of a tizz over what this could do to the werewolves (which definitely don’t exist).
As long as it doesn’t slam into our planet and hit anything particularly important then we ought to be fine with the mini-moon, though it being on the exceedingly small size means people trying to spot it are likely to be disappointed.
In other space related happenings, you’ll soon be able to get a look at a comet that’s been orbiting our solar system for 80,000 years.
The last time it was zipping above Earth was during the Stone Age, so don’t miss out.
Meanwhile, those two astronauts who were supposed to be back from the International Space Station by now are having to wait a while longer.