
Small Asteroid Is Earth's Constant Companion - suprgeek
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6537
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beamatronic
"In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a game of leap frog with Earth
that will last for hundreds of years. "

...and then what? Would be interesting if they speculated on the end game. Or
perhaps they already know.

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jobigoud
From Wikipedia article on Quasi-satellites:

> Over time they tend to evolve to other types of resonant motion, where they
> no longer remain in the planet's neighbourhood, then possibly later move
> back to a quasi-satellite orbit, etc.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-
satellite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-satellite)

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lunchTime42
Capture it, wrap it and notch it closer with ion drives? Everybody dances the
Dinosaurus?

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RangerScience
Good news for asteroid mining! Don't have to go all the way to the belt -
might not even have to move the thing from where it currently is.

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dogma1138
The Asteroid Redirect Mission was never about going all the way to the
Asteroid Belt.

We have discovered about 2000 near earth asteroids so far, this one is cool
because it also orbits the earth in a fairly closed pattern but it's not
unique.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-
Earth_object](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object)

That said the orbit of this one actually doesn't make it a good candidate for
the ARM as it seems to be further than pretty much every ARM candidate and
it's orbit isn't really good either. What we want is something that would
woosh close us anyhow and we need only a relative small amount of energy to
redirect it into an earth or lunar capture orbit (lunar is of course safer
since if we screw up the math it doesn't end up blowing a landmark like
something that was picked up off michael bay's cutting floor).

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marcusarmstrong
So does this mean the Earth has not yet cleaned its orbit? And thus needs to
be classified as a dwarf planet?

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dogma1138
Our orbit is quite dirty there are probably over 10,000 NEO's, but Pluto's
orbit is even dirtier. Earth is the 30 year old single guy/gal, Pluto is the
19 year old college slob.

