ATLAS, an asteroid impact early warning system in Hawaii, spotted a small asteroid that will temporarily orbit Earth for the next two months. Asteroid 2024 PT5 is a 10-meter (33-feet) wide space rock that is expected to come as close as 1 million kilometers of Earth in an orbital path that resembles a horseshoe.

Asteroids have been making headlines for various reasons over the last couple of years. One example is NASA's first-ever planetary defense test, named Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which had a small spacecraft crash into an asteroid in an attempt to change its orbital path. Others have been looking to cash in on asteroids and other celestial bodies by mining the precious metals they contain. This time, however, it is about an asteroid becoming a temporary satellite of Earth.

Asteroid 2024 PT5 was first spotted on August 7, and is expected to make one complete orbit of Earth between September 29 and November 25, 2024, before leaving Earth's gravity pull. Because of the asteroid's rather small size, it will be difficult to spot in the night sky. Two asteroid dynamics researchers from Universidad Complutense de Madrid Ciudad Universitaria recently published a study concerning the asteroid and its upcoming orbital path around Earth.

The duo, Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos, pointed out in their recently published paper Earth can regularly capture asteroids from the Near-Earth object (NEO) population and pull them into orbit, causing them to become mini moons. While some of these objects do not complete one revolution before dropping out of orbit, some remain longer. In 2006, a small asteroid circled Earth for approximately one year, and another did so for several years before falling out of orbit in 2020.

According to the researchers, asteroid 2024 PT5 likely originated from the Arjuna asteroid belt, loosely defined as a dynamic group of asteroids in the Solar System. The asteroid group got its name after Arjuna, a central hero in the Hindu epic Mahabharata.