Now we’re all SmarterEveryDay by a day

Them kids are leaving those damned space toys in my orbital lawn again.

A dicarded Apollo artifact went orbitally extra solar?

Will it some day be a hazard to navigation ?

All space junk is on a large scale, but very few individual pieces matter compared to the whole.

>them Kerbals

FTFY

No. It's in interplanetary space.

Only in LEO. Interplanetary space is many, many orders of magnitude larger.

One day a high school class will be taking a day trip to the sun and that fucking thing is going to go hurtling by without warning because the space bus didn't have detection systems because of cost saving because someone on reddit in 2022 said "No. Its in interplanetary space."

So, do people just watch Veritasium and Smarter Everyday Day then quote it on Reddit. Is that how to mine karma? Asking for a friend

We did it reddit!

Easier than you think. Was likely in orbit of the Earth for a while then got a fortunate boost from lunar gravity flinging it further.

Though I’ve not read the details in a while and I’m travelling so can’t load the wiki page.

Are they saying that the object orbits the Earth for a while until all the planets align right, then leaves Earth orbit to orbit the Sun, then orbits the Sun for a while until all the planets align right, then returns to orbit the Earth again?

If so, that's wild. What are the chances? Seems like that's the kind of thing you couldn't pull off if you tried!

no its just in an unstable orbit, so it flies around the earth a bit, until it dips over the L1 point(where the Suns gravity outweighs the earths, so it leaves for a sun orbit) and then it returns back to earth orbit after a few laps round the sun. heres an animation: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/images/j002e3/j002e3.gif

yes and no, NASA tracks a whole bunch of space debris (this one is designated J002E3) so probably not. but its predicted to eventually crash into either the moon or the earth, where due to higher speed and different angle, it might actually not break up and be a nonissue like the upper stages from previous Apollo Missions :)

smater everyday day? :D yes, that video brought me onto this, and i thought it was cool enough to share with people :)