--- title: Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second Moon description: For almost two months, Earth will joined by a new mini-moon in it's gravitational orbit, believed to be an asteroid known as 2024 PT5 canonical: https://time.com/7022535/earth-second-moon-temporary/ author: Rebecca Schneid article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-09-18T20:40:46.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-19T07:46:56.748Z article:section: Science og:title: Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second Moon og:description: For almost two months, Earth will joined by a new mini-moon in it's gravitational orbit. og:url: https://time.com/7022535/earth-second-moon-temporary/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4daf9955dcaad15b/698a5afd86f68e32ef6f5965/GettyImages-2172780113.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Harvest Moon Seen Over Downtown San Diego og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second Moon twitter:description: For almost two months, Earth will joined by a new mini-moon in it's gravitational orbit. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4daf9955dcaad15b/698a5afd86f68e32ef6f5965/GettyImages-2172780113.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second 'Moon' > Sponsored content. 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Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-futureproof-2026q3/newsletters?i=2f306c69-382d-44ce-a556-48e0064a7b95&cr=time-nl-futureproof-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second ‘Moon’ [Watch (HLS stream): Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second ‘Moon’](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/p151JDtU.m3u8) (2:46)  _Published 2024-09-23. Starting next week, the moon, Earth’s closest celestial body, will be joined by a new neighbor: a second moon. From Sept. 29 until Nov. 25, astronomers calculate that 2024 PT5— which is what scientists think is an asteroid but have dubbed a “mini-moon”—will be looping around Earth. It will eventually break free of the planet’s gravitational orbit._  by [Rebecca Schneid](https://time.com/author/rebecca-schneid/)  ## Rebecca Schneid Reporter Sep 18, 2024 8:40 PM UTC  by [Rebecca Schneid](https://time.com/author/rebecca-schneid/)  ## Rebecca Schneid Reporter Sep 18, 2024 8:40 PM UTC Starting next week, the moon, Earth’s closest celestial body, will be joined by a new neighbor: a second moon. From Sept. 29 until Nov. 25, astronomers calculate that 2024 PT5— which is what scientists think is an asteroid but have dubbed a “mini-moon”—will be looping around Earth. It will eventually break free of the planet’s gravitational orbit. Sadly, at just about 10 meters, the mini-moon will be extremely hard to see from Earth, but its presence will be there nonetheless for almost two months. The asteroid, which was discovered on Aug. 7 by [NASA](https://atlas.fallingstar.com/), originated from the Arjuna asteroid belt, where it will likely return once it leaves Earth’s orbit. “Earth can regularly capture asteroids from the Near-Earth object (NEO) population and pull them into orbit, making them mini-moons,” researchers Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos wrote in their [published research](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ad781f). According to NASA, a [Near-Earth Object ](https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/basics.html)is any body, asteroid or otherwise, that is “nudged” by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets that pushes them to Earth’s neighborhood. NASA [has their own program](https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/basics.html) that works to track the locations and orbits of tens of thousands 28,000 asteroids, with data pages for every NEO, including their orbital parameters and a close approach summaries. Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said 2024 PT5 is possibly a piece of ejecta from an impact on the moon, meaning the mini-moon may have originated as a piece of the original moon, according to the [New York _Times_](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/science/new-mini-moon-earth-orbit.html). Mini-moons can come in multiple types, according to research. The first, “temporary captured orbiters,” are long episodes in which bodies perform one or more revolutions around the Earth and can remain in the planet's orbit for many months, or even years. The second, which includes the upcoming mini-moon, are dubbed “temporary captured flybys,” as they do not complete one revolution and remain in Earth’s orbit for a very short period of time. ## Transcript Hi. I'm Jeffrey Kluger, editor at large, and space writer for Time Magazine. And this week, the coolest space story comes not from my computer, but from that of my colleague who has written a piece about Earth's newest moon. And we are getting a second moon. For 4.5 billion years. Earth got by on the one moon that we know. But from September 29 to November 25, we're going to have a second moon now. It's, much smaller than our original moon. It's only 10 meters or about 30 feet long, and it's cannot affect us. It can't affect the tides. You won't be able to see it, but astronomers and NASA know it's there. The way we got it was a little bit of gravitational Jujitsu. The new moon comes from a cluster of asteroids called the Arboga asteroid belt. Those asteroids were created mostly by collisions with big asteroids and our large moon, which sent up a lot of ejecta and rubble into space. That rubble flew out away from the moon and got captured into its own earthly orbit. The short time this rock will remain circling the earth has a lot to do with its velocity. In order to maintain an orbit around the Earth, a rock has to move just slow enough that it doesn't reach what's called escape velocity, which allows it to rip away gravitationally and fly back into space. The new moon is moving too fast to be held in an Earth orbit, and as a result, we'll only have it for about eight weeks before it rejoins the Arjuna asteroid belt. The new asteroid, which will become a moon for a little while is part of a group of objects in space called near Earth objects. NASA has cataloged about 28,000 of and they are defined as any asteroid that moves within 27 million miles of Earth. That's important because an asteroid that comes that close to Earth could at least, in theory, enter the atmosphere and cause all kinds of problems. If this rock were to do that, it could cause some damage. In 2013 over Cheabins, Grussia, a rock that measured about 20 meters across exploded in the atmosphere and damaged 2,500 buildings. Fortunately, nobody was killed, but some people were injured. This rock with about half of that mass and a half of that length would cause about half of that damage. But to put it in perspective, the new moon, the little asteroid measures 10 meters across. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago measured a whopping 9.3 miles. 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