Claimed moons of Earth

It was claimed to have also been reported by Lebon and Dassier at Toulouse, and by Larivière at Artenac Observatory, during the early evening of March 21, 1846.

[9] The 11.4 km (37,000 ft) perigee is similar to the cruising altitude of most modern airliners, and within Earth's atmosphere.

[10] In 1898, Hamburg scientist Dr. Georg Waltemath announced that he had located a system of tiny moons orbiting Earth.

"[13][12]: 148 E. Stone Wiggins, a Canadian weather expert, ascribed the cold spring of 1907 to the effect of a second moon, which he said he had first seen in 1882 and had publicized the find in 1884 in the New-York Tribune when he put it forward as probable cause of an anomalous solar eclipse of May of that year.

[14] He said it was also probably the "green crescent moon" seen in New Zealand and later in North America in 1886, for periods of less than a half-hour each time.

[15] The existence of these objects put forward by Waltemath (and Wiggins) was discredited after the absence of corroborating observation by other members of the scientific community.

[18] In 1926, the science journal Die Sterne published the findings of amateur German astronomer W. Spill, who claimed to have successfully viewed a second moon orbiting Earth.

[12]: 148 In the late 1960s, John Bagby claimed to have observed over ten small natural satellites of Earth, but this was not confirmed.

[21] In early 1954, the United States Army's Office of Ordnance Research commissioned Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, to search for near-Earth asteroids.

[22] Donald Keyhoe, who was later director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a UFO research group, said that his Pentagon source had told him that the actual reason for the quickly-initiated search was that two near-Earth objects had been picked up on new long-range radar in mid-1953.

He does say, however, that newspaper reports of 18 months ago announcing the discovery of natural satellites at 400 and 600 miles out are not correct.

[24]At a meteor conference in Los Angeles in 1957, Tombaugh reiterated that his four-year search for natural satellites had been unsuccessful.

[5] In 2010, the first known Earth trojan was discovered in data from Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and is currently called (706765) 2010 TK7.

[28] The interpretation of some bodies has led to sometimes bold statements in the astronomy press, though often allowing for other interpretations:[2] Earth has a second moon, of sorts, and could have many others, according to three astronomers who did calculations to describe orbital motions at gravitational balance points in space that temporarily pull asteroids into bizarre orbits near our planet.Although no other moons of Earth have been found to date, there are various types of near-Earth objects in 1:1 resonance with it; they orbit at a similar distance as Earth to the Sun, rather than the planet itself.

The earliest known mention in the scientific literature of a temporarily-captured orbiter is by Clarence Chant about the Meteor procession of 9 February 1913:[29]It would seem that the bodies had been traveling through space, probably in an orbit about the sun, and that on coming near the earth they were promptly captured by it and caused to move about it as a satellite.

[36]Later, in 1916, William Frederick Denning surmised that: The large meteors which passed over Northern America on 9 February 1913, presented some unique features.

On 8 February 2016, an object, ~0.5 meter in diameter, was discovered orbiting Earth with a period of 5 days and given the temporary designation XC83E0D, and most likely lost.

It is expected to be temporarily captured by Earth's gravity and exhibit an orbit with an eccentricity of less than one from 29 September til 25 November 2024.