Asteroid 2010 KQ

Did you see this report yesterday from NASA? It’s about an “asteroid” which passed the Earth this spring. It came from deep space and swung by just outside the Moon’s orbit.

What’s interesting about the report? The fact that they’ve decided that this almost certainly isn’t an asteroid or any other sort of natural object. They believe that it is a spacecraft of some sort.

Yeah, I’ve read Rendezvous with Rama too, but before you get too excited, the assumption is that it is part of one of our own interplanetary probes coming back at us. They can’t say which one, but it looks like it might have been near Earth about 30 years ago, so it’s probably the upper stage from one of our launches in the 70’s. It looks like it’ll be coming back in another 30 years, so we might get a better look at it then.