New Moons

The other day I was listening To Morning Edition on NPR. The story that caught my interest was about captured moons orbiting the Earth. These are essentially are passing space rocks that are captured by Earth's gravity and fall into orbit around the Earth. Previously it was believed that our planet's gravity was too weak to do this very often but now, with improved detection devices and telescopes more are being found and astronomers and scientists are admitting that from time to time that Earth may have many more moons than familiar Luna. That is until the object is perturbed by Luna's gravity or swings out to a point where the Earth can no longer hold it and it continues on it's way.

We've known for decades that Deimos and Phobos, the moons of Mars are likely captured bodies as are probably all the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

The part of the story that struck me was a description of the discovery of one of these “mini-moons”. This object was initially believed to be a piece of space junk left over from our space program, perhaps some part of a vehicle used by the Apollo program. Analysis of its orbit however proved that it could not be left by Apollo, or any other human source so it was determined that it was a captured asteroid. At that moment I realized that they couldn't tell what it really was. They were inferring that if it wasn't man made space debris then it had to be an asteroid. Nothing else could be considered. Apparently the astronomers had no way of determining if this object was composed of a few dozen pounds of magnesium and aluminum or a couple of tons of nickle and iron, ...or an alien ship.

There have been hundreds of reports of huge craft, often called “Mother Ships” due to their size. They are reported to be many times the size of aircraft carriers and come in all shapes. We hear about them in well documented observations from highly reliable sources such as airline pilots and scientists. Often they are simultaneous tracked by radar. But when these huge craft are not in our skies where do they go? Perhaps they simply move to a high orbit around the Earth where we can't distinguish them from a space rock.