--- title: Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second ‘Moon’ | TIME description: 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. canonical: https://time.com/video/p151JDtU/ og:title: Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second ‘Moon’ og:description: 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. og:url: https://time.com/video/p151JDtU/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/p151JDtU/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second ‘Moon’ twitter:description: 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. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/p151JDtU/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * Science # Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second ‘Moon’ > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## 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._ --- Sep 23, 2024 6:42 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [An Israeli Spacecraft Took a Selfie With Earth on Its Way to the Moon](/video/ylBBdWOC/) ### An Israeli Spacecraft Took a Selfie With Earth on Its Way to the Moon [You Can Now Stream One Of Earth's Most Impressive Migrations](/video/TeDj0J97/) ### You Can Now Stream One Of Earth's Most Impressive Migrations [How to Make Earth](/video/CoXJjZ7h/) ### How to Make _Earth_ --- ## 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. Our new little moon, which will visit us for a while poses no such danger. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Earth Is Temporarily Getting a Second ‘Moon’","description":"Starting next week, the moon, Earth’s closest celestial body, will be joined by a new neighbor: a second moon.\nFrom 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.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/p151JDtU/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2024-09-23T16:52:40.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/p151JDtU.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/p151JDtU/","duration":"PT2M46S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/p151JDtU/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```