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Richard de Grijs, Professor of Astrophysics, Macquarie University

Could this asteroid be a piece of the Moon? A Chinese spacecraft is about to find out

A photo taken by Tianwen-2 of itself with Earth in the background. China National Space Administration

The Moon is not the only natural object travelling through space alongside Earth. Several small asteroids travel around the Sun in near lockstep with our planet. And just like Earth, these space rocks also take a year to complete a full orbit. Today, we know of eight such “quasi-moons” or quasi-satellites.

One of them may, in fact, be a fragment of the Moon itself.

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