The Mystery of Asteroid Kamo'oalewa: Why It's Not from the Moon express
Asteroid Kamoʻoalewa is the target of a Chinese sample-return mission. Scientists debated: is it a chunk of the Moon or an interloper from the main belt? Calculations showed: the probability of a lunar origin is minuscule; most likely, it's from the asteroid belt. So who is it — a child of the Moon or a wanderer?
Kamo'oalewa is Earth's partner in a peculiar gravitational dance: it orbits the Sun almost in unison with us, edging closer and then pulling away. Its color — the palette of reflected light — matches the lunar surface. Hence the initial thought: it's a chunk of the Moon from the Giordano Bruno crater.
But calculations comparing brightness and orbits wiped out the romantic hypothesis. Such dancers from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter arrive at an average of 1.23 per epoch, while from that very crater — only 0.042. A gap of almost 30 times! The probability of Kamo'oalewa's lunar origin is laughable. More likely, it's simply a belt native that accidentally copied the lunar attire. In a year or two, the Tianwen-2 probe will collect soil samples — and the dance will end with a solution. Meanwhile, the Vera Rubin Observatory telescope watches its pirouettes.
🎯 Kamo'oalewa spans 40 to 100 meters — about as large as a few football fields — but through a telescope, it appears only as a faint point of magnitude 22. To spot it, you need equipment that captures light tens of times dimmer than what the eye can see.