The moon is supposed to be the only natural satellite that exist on earth, so when scientists reported that one of the satellites has fallen to earth, so many questions began to pop up and we started to ask question about how many satellites do we really have?
Far back in 2016, precisely in the month of August the astronomers of Australia gave a report about a meteoroid that had passed over the atmosphere of the earth which only lasted for about 5 seconds, the activity quickly came to an end when there was a burning of space close to the earth’s surface and it left white traces on the sky, even if astronomers usually record activities like this almost every year, this appears to be different because this particular object had been discovered to have a complete orbit around the earth on several occasion, this is supposed to be a regular activity of the moon, it was after one of those successful orbit that the satellite crashed into the earth.
Series of research carried out by Astronomers with the help of camera’s that have been placed in space has helped them with the discovery that the satellite that hit the earth in 2016, was more like a mini-moon.
Every planet that exist on the solar system except Venus and Mercury have their own satellites, and some of them have more than lots of it. Mars consists of two natural satellites, Neptune has 14 of its own while Saturn has 82 natural satellites.
In the year 1846, a French scientist whose name is Frederic Petit, announced the discovery of a second satellite of the earth, which only took round 2 hours and 45 minutes to move around the earth completely, but it was later discovered that Petit made a lot of mistakes in presenting his data and this made his theory wrong.
Further research has however proven that there is no other satellite on earth except for the moon but there are other celestial bodies that exist, these celestial bodies fall within orbital resonance and they are usually close to the earth for a very long time, the general name for the celestial bodies is Quasi-satellite and the most popular of them is known as Kamo’oalewa which has a size of 40-100m. This asteroid forms a complete orbit around the sun which lasts for 366 days. After the discovery of Kamo’oelewa, scientists also found out other four for Quasi- satellite.
There was a great impact that occurred with one of the satellites in the year 2006, the remaining portion of the stone, flew into space but after some years it was found to find its way back to earth again, some scientists consider it as just a full fledge of stone and this gave a temporary conclusion that the only satellite that exist is the moon.
Hello @ben-edom, I love this kind of post. Although I love knowing about space, stars, and planets; I had never known the concept of Quasi-satellite, I really thought that meteors did not become entities that spin around the planet. But it makes sense. It's amazing that they can be attracted by the force of Earth's gravity and still be kept at a certain distance. But the speed at which these satellites travel will most likely cause them to disintegrate over time.
Thanks for sharing :D