NASA Thought It Was an Asteroid… But It Was Actually Apollo 12 🚀😳 #facts #vitalshorts #nasa

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Over the course of 2 months, Earth pulled the third stage into a highly elliptical orbit around the Earth, just like the one it was in before. At [music] this point though, astronomers still had no idea what this object was.

[00:00:10]And so, in order to confirm the identity of the object, astronomers did spectroscopy observations to determine [music] what it was made of. Every material reflects light in slightly different ways. More specifically, the amount of light that is reflected will differ at each wavelength. And so, to determine the material of this object, astronomers took light measurements of the third stage at many different wavelengths, which gave them a spectroscopy graph. With this, they could compare it to other spectroscopy graphs and see if it matched any other materials. It turned out that it was very similar to the spectroscopy graph of white titanium oxide paint, the exact kind that was used on the Saturn [music] V. Astronomers were also able to trace the object's trajectory back and found that it left Earth's orbit [music] in 1971. And so, with this information, astronomers could confidently say that this really was the long-lost third stage from Apollo 12. Astronomers continued to track the orbit, and after just a year, it was once again thrown out into an orbit around the sun.

[00:01:01]Calculations made by astronomers showed that it would return to Earth in the mid-40s. This object will spend [music] many more years racing through space, but the laws of physics will always make sure it returns home every now and then.