NASA Lost a Real Spacecraft Named Snoopy in Space

Two months before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, NASA sent a spacecraft named after a cartoon dog to go scout the place out. It was not a joke. It was the real dress rehearsal for the first Moon landing, and it is still out there today.

Snoopy and Charlie Brown Go to the Moon

Apollo 10 launched on May 18, 1969, crewed by Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan.

The command module was nicknamed Charlie Brown and the lunar module was nicknamed Snoopy, after the Peanuts comic strip.

The names were not random. Cartoonist Charles Schulz had already lent Snoopy to NASA as its official safety mascot, and the beagle's face still appears on the "Silver Snoopy" award given to employees and contractors who go above and beyond on flight safety.

Within 9 Miles of the Moon

On May 22, 1969, Stafford and Cernan climbed into Snoopy, undocked from Charlie Brown, and flew down toward the lunar surface.

They came within about 9 miles of the ground, close enough to photograph and scope out the flat plain where Apollo 11 would attempt to land that July.

Snoopy's descent stage carried enough fuel for an actual landing, but NASA deliberately short-fueled the ascent stage. If Stafford and Cernan had landed anyway, they would not have had enough fuel to lift back off the surface.

Then NASA Let It Go

Once the test was finished, Snoopy's ascent stage fired its engine one last time, separated from the rest of the spacecraft, and was sent into orbit around the Sun.

No other flown Apollo lunar module ascent stage ended up there. Most of the later ones were deliberately crashed into the Moon for research, and the earliest test flights burned up returning through Earth's atmosphere.

Apollo 11's Eagle is the other loose end: NASA let it go in lunar orbit and never confirmed what happened to it.

Snoopy is the only one confirmed drifting around the Sun, and mission control did not track exactly where it went. For decades, nobody knew.

Fifty Years, Then a Lead

In 2011, a group of amateur astronomers in the United Kingdom, led by Nick Howes, started looking for it anyway.

By 2018 they had a candidate: an object cataloged as 2018 AV2, classified as a small asteroid.

It orbits the Sun roughly once every 382 days, trails Earth for most of that orbit, and moves at an unusually low speed relative to Earth, exactly what a piece of derelict Apollo hardware would do.

In June 2019, fifty years after the mission, Howes and his team announced they were 98 percent confident that 2018 AV2 is Snoopy.

Still Not Confirmed

It has never been officially verified.

At the time of the announcement, the object was more than 55 million kilometers from Earth, too far away for a definitive match.

Its next close pass by Earth is not expected until 2037, which would give astronomers a much better look.

Until then, a real spacecraft that once carried two astronauts within sight of the Moon is still drifting quietly around the Sun, named after a cartoon beagle.