Quote:
On 2002-09-13 02:03, David Knisely wrote:
However, it is clearly in a solar orbit and thus is *not* a moon of the Earth, despite what some rather exagerated press releases might be saying (I'm a little surprised that the BBC didn't get this right).
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One of its discovers,
Paul Wiegert, has described it as Earth's "companion asteroid." He mentions that they've found a couple more.
The original article in Nature was titled "An Asteroidal Companion to Earth."
His webpage about the asteroid (I got the addresses from
the BA's page about Cruithne) said "The near-Earth asteroid 3753 Cruithne is in an unusual orbit about that of the Earth," so it's not hard to see how the BBC might interpret that that way.
<font size=-1>[Add pdf article link, and reference to 1998 UP1 and 2000 PH5]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: GrapesOfWrath on 2002-09-13 10:10 ]</font>