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00:00The asteroid getting its proverbial 15 minutes of fame is called 2020 for BT5, discovered

00:20with the help of a NASA-funded asteroid detection system and a South African observatory in

00:26August.

00:27But before digging out binoculars from the closet, know this, it's only 33 feet wide

00:33about the length of a Greyhound bus and not bright enough to view with the naked eye or

00:38an amateur telescope.

00:39See also.

00:40NASA's Mars rovers had a gangbuster summer of rocks through the solar system, close to

00:46300 moons orbit the eight planets and Pluto, and scientists often find new ones as surveying

00:53methods improve.

00:54The vast majority of moon-circle gas giants turn entupite.

00:59They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but their defining characteristic is that

01:05they orbit another cosmic object larger than themselves.

01:09While these natural satellites are quite common, moons are special to humans because Earth

01:15has just one in a fixed orbit, albeit a big rocky one, only one-quarter Earth's size

01:21about 239,000 miles away.

01:25Earth has captured asteroids and pulled them into orbit with its gravity before, but often

01:31these space rocks fly by without completing a full circuit around the planet.

01:36Compared to many moons of the recent past, 2020 for BT5 is a short time-out.

01:43In July 2006, a visitor dubbed H120 stayed in orbit around Earth for a year before getting

01:51flung out in July 2007.

01:55Astronomers believe one that escaped in May 2020 could have been sweeping around the planet

02:01for several years.

02:03Two astronomers from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain made the latter's steamy

02:09moon discovery while calculating the dynamics of near-Earth objects.

02:14Their findings were published in the journal research notes of the AAS.

02:19Prior research through NASA's Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert system had already shown

02:26that the space rock was not a threat to smashing into Earth.

02:39NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology