Earth Temporarily Gets a Second Moon – What You Need to Know

“You can say that if a real satellite is like a customer buying goods inside a store, objects like 2024 PT5 are storefronts,” Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, lead author of the paper, told Space.com.

The asteroid poses no threat to Earth.

You will probably only see the mini-moon in the photos

This mini-moon is nothing like our real moon. It’s super mini. Forget seeing it with the naked eye or even with binoculars.

In fact, according to Dan Bartlett, an astrophotographer in California, asteroid 2024 PT5 is so faint that it “far exceeds the limits of the best amateur telescopes.”

That won’t stop him from trying to photograph her though.

From his dark-sky vantage point in the middle of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Bartlett thinks he might be able to catch the asteroid by imaging all night with his sophisticated telescope equipment on a very dark night when the main moon is not in the sky.

“The picture probably won’t look like much, but you never know until you try,” Bartlett told BI in an email.

However, telescopes used by professional astronomers should be able to image 2024 PT5 easily, according to Marcos.

So stay tuned for pictures.

When the mini-moon returns

However, the asteroid will not make its closest approach to Earth until after it loses its mini-moon status.

On January 8, 2025, according to NASA, it will fly past Earth at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers).

For reference, the main the moon (the big one you see in the night sky) is, on average, about 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away from us. It will probably still be impossible to see with binoculars or the naked eye.

After that, our temporary moon won’t fly by again until 2055.

It’s not our first mini-moon and it won’t be our last. Another asteroid, called 2022 NX1, briefly fell into Earth’s orbit in 2022. Astronomers have declared it a mini-moon, or “short-term natural satellite,” and have determined it will return again in 2051.

The situation brings Bartlett to a simple conclusion that you may have reached: “Space is neat,” he said.