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.
