Is it an Asteroid or Space Junk?
Whatever it is, it's expected to fly past earth on Tuesday.
Now before you start to take cover, the scientists at NASA have announced that when the "thing" passes over earth it should safely fly past our planet at the "proximity of about one-seventh the typical distance to the moon" according to News 10. So it'll fly by far enough away to not cause any concern but close enough for us to possibly get a look at "it".
What is it? That seems to be a question that has people talking. Is it an asteroid or is it space junk? Astronomers have been tracking the object they call 2020 SO, since September, when it was spotted from an observation station in Hawaii.
At first they thought it was an asteroid, but now NASA scientists are suggesting that it's a piece of space junk that might be left over from early U.S. space exploration. Back in November NASA officials said that, "The object is likely not an asteroid. It’s probably the Centaur upper stage rocket booster that helped lift NASA’s ill-fated Surveyor 2 spacecraft toward the Moon in 1966."
NASA records said that, "Shortly after lift-off, Surveyor 2 separated from its Centaur upper-stage booster as intended. But control of the spacecraft was lost a day later when one of its thrusters failed to ignite, throwing it into a spin. The spacecraft crashed into the Moon on Sept. 23, 1966. The spent Centaur upper-stage rocket, meanwhile, sailed past the Moon and disappeared into an unknown orbit about the Sun."
Whatever it is, it's believed to be anywhere form 15 to 30 feet wide and when it does make it fly by researchers think that they should be able to get a good enough look at it to decided exactly what it is.
As soon as NASA releases their findings we will update this article with the results.