At nearly one mile wide, the Earth Trojan is the largest yet—but it’s not here to stay.
“In order to improve the knowledge of its orbit, we performed follow-up observations in February and March 2021, which allowed us to calculate with great accuracy the orbit of the object,” Santana-Ros explained to me in an email. “In turn, this allowed us to find ancillary data of the object in the data archive.”
Those follow-up observations were performed by three ground observatories: the 13.5-foot Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile, the 14.1-foot Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona, and the European Space Agency’s 3.2-foot Optical Ground Station in the Canary Islands. This was combined with archival data gathered between 2012 and 2019 as part of the Dark Energy Survey.
arger than the first known Earth Trojan, 2010 TK7. 2020 XL5 will hang out as an Earth Trojan for another 4,000 years, after which time it will come free and venture through space on a new trajectory.2020 XL5 is not a primordial Trojan, meaning it hasn’t been parked in the L4 point since the time of our planet’s birth. That’s unfortunate
because primordial Trojans “can provide us with information about the formation of its host planet” and, in turn, keys to a better understanding of solar system evolution, Santana-Ros said. Interestingly, 2020 XL5 only became a Trojan around 600 years ago. The discovery of this Earth Trojan “confirms that 2010 TK7 is not a rare exception and that there are probably more bodies populating L4 and probably L5 of the Earth-Sun system,” explained Santana-Ros, adding that this will “encourage us to keep enhancing our survey strategies to find, if it exists, the first primordial Earth Trojan.”The new object is also interesting in that it could be the target of a future fly-by mission, or even a cool place to set up a space station or mine for resources.
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