Letter
Published:16 July 1966

Evidence of an Ephemeral Earth Satellite

JOHN P. BAGBY¹

Naturevolume 211, page285 (1966)Cite this article

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Abstract

THE possibility that the Earth could acquire natural satellites from the debris of large meteoritic impacts on the Moon has been discussed by O'Keefe¹. A possible capture mechanism for bodies into temporary Earth orbit has been investigated by Baker². On February 9, 1913, a widely observed, long duration procession of meteors and fireballs gave rise to the suggestion by Chant, Mebane, and others³ that they actually were such ephemeral Earth satellites which were finally consumed at perigee. More recently, a long, extremely narrow field of both craters and meteorites in Argentina was investigated by Kohmanet al.⁴ and they suggested that these were the end-result of a captured Earth satellite finally spiralling into the denser atmosphere.

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References

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