Travelers In The Night

When Asteroid hunters discover a new object it is given a score ranging from 0 which means it is likely to be a distant main belt asteroid up to 100 which means that it is likely to come near to us. Each newly discovered asteroid which receives a score of 65 or greater is posted on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Object Confirmation Page so that telescopes around the world can track it to estimate it's size as well as to refine our knowledge of it's orbit around the Sun. NASA feeds data on each new discovery into its Scout software system. Scout is designed to identify those objects which are most likely to make a close approach to Earth in the very near future. It's alert allows astronomers to access the new object's risk of impact as well as to study it before it fades into the distance. Fortunately, asteroid hunters have not found any dangerous impacting asteroids, however, Scout's rapid alert has enabled astronomers to measure the size, chemical composition, and rate of rotation for a number of close

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Dr. Hannes Gröller and I traveled to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument to install two night sky meters which will enable this wonderful national treasure to become an international dark sky park. Surrounded by vast tracts of unoccupied public land and having an abundance of clear weather the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument and the Cosmic Campground International Dark Sky Sanctuary both in New Mexico are among the best places in the world to view the natural night sky.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered a 33 foot diameter asteroid which has about a 1.1% chance of impacting the Earth on 569 encounters with our planet between 2045 and 2116. Its name is 2017 LD. It is on the list of the most likely objects to strike the Earth in the next hundred years as reported on NASA's Sentry Earth Impact Monitoring table. Even so, given our current data, there is a 98.9% chance that 2017 LD will not enter our atmosphere on any of its close approaches to Earth in the next 100 years.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Vivian Carvajal was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Cepheus with our small but mighty Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when she discovered 2025 JB1.Fortunately on its current path there is zero probability that 2025 JB1 will impact our home planet in the foreseeable future. Further asteroid hunters continue to search for any other large asteroids which might impact Earth so that mitigation efforts would be effective.

Recently, my Grandsons, Dane and Hank joined our asteroid hunting team at the Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon. The most interesting of our discoveries, 2017 KJ32 is only 16 feet in diameter, orbits the Sun once every 315 days, and can come closer to us than the communications satellites. 4 days and 16 hours before Dane, Hank, and I spotted it, 2017 KJ32 passed about 41,000 miles from the surface of Earth traveling at a relatively slow speed for an Earth approaching asteroid of 1.6 mi/sec. By the time 2017 KJ32 came into one of our images it was already 768,000 miles from Earth and was traveling away from us at 1.5 miles per second. A few weeks later it was too faint to be detected by our most powerful telescopes.

In 2016 NASA created the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to manage the mission of finding, tracking, and studying asteroids and comets which could pose an impact threat to our home planet.The NASA documentary “Planetary Defenders” provides an excellent over view and can be streamed on the internet.

The mystery of Tabby's star began to unfold when in 2015 Dr. Tabetha S. Boyajian [boy-AA-jee-uhn] of Louisiana State University and her team published a paper describing the irregular dips in the light output of what otherwise would seem to be a garden variety star over the period 2009 to 2013. Subsequently a list of proposed explanations include swarms of comets, large asteroids, a debris disk, and even a massive alien megastructure.

Data are consistent with the hypothesis that the planet K2-18b is a Hycean planet with a warm liquid water ocean teaming with life and a thin hydrogen rich atmosphere containing methane and other molecules containing carbon. Scientists in an opposing camp point out what we might be observing is a rocky world with a hot life killing atmosphere.

When we find a planet which appears to have the chemical signs of living organisms in its atmosphere, the desire to take a close up look at it will be hard to contain. In a Scientific American article, Lee Billings describes Yuri Milner's 100 million dollar project "Breakthrough Starshot" which has been created to leap frog our current rocket technology's extremely long travel times to nearby planets. The plan is to put ultra light space probes on paths which will enable them to collect data as they streak by nearby potentially habitable planets. Our current iPhone technology is being used to envision a tiny robotic space probe which features cameras, life detecting sensors, maneuvering rockets, computers, and communications gear and yet has a mass of about that of a dime. Photons from 100 gigawatt pulses from a ground based laser array are then envisioned to reflect off the tiny spacecrafts solar sail where they transfer momentum to the space craft accelerating it to 20% of the speed of light. Numbers of the

In the search for life on Mars, Europa, Titan, and elsewhere in the universe astro-biologists are scouring the Earth for creatures tough enough to flourish under really difficult conditions. So far the leading species are the Tardigrades commonly known as water bears or moss piglets.

The good news is a Mars landing by human colonists and their equipment seems technically feasible given a large budget of cash and grit.

Recently Dr. Yossi Shvartzvald led a team which published their discovery of an Earth sized planet using microlensing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The newly discovered planet OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb orbits a small dim object about 13,000 light years from us. With only 7.8% of the Sun's mass the new planet's star may be a brown dwarf and not a star at all. At about the same distance from its star as we are from the Sun this new planet is likely to be an ice ball world colder than Pluto.

In a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy entitled “Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life”  Dr. Peter Vickers and his team of 10 co-authors report the results  of their survey of the lead authors for the past 10 years in the top three astro-biological journals.  These researchers sought to measure if their sample group of scientists thought it likely that 1) simple life,  and/or 2 ) life more complex than terrestrial bacteria, and/or 3) Intelligent life comparable or superior to human beings exists outside of Earth.

When I discovered 2014 JO25 with the NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on May 5, 2014, it appeared as a single point of light as it moved past us. As 2014 JO25 approached the Earth from the direction of the Sun in 2017, no-one had any idea that it is really a double asteroid system nearly a mile in diameter.

Since there is a world wide market for meteorites some of which can be sold for millions of dollars, on line, the question of ownership becomes important. 

When a fleet of interstellar spaceships leaves our solar system for a planet circling a nearby star the most important of all of the riches that human explorers will carry with them will be libraries of our planet's DNA and the seeds of plants. They are the connection between past life, the inorganic world, and future life.

NASA’s Europa Clipper was launched October 14, 2024 on a mission to conduct a detailed study of Jupiter’s Moon Europa.  The space craft will travel some 1.8 billion miles and should reach Jupiter in April 2030.  This mission will begin to tell us if life as we know it can occur relatively close to home.

The NASA Kepler Spacecraft has discovered more than 2,000 planets which have been confirmed to be orbiting distant stars. It performs this remarkable feat by imaging more than 145,000 stars simultaneously to observe and measure the tiny dips in light which occur as a planet passes in front of its star. Astronomers have long known that many of the solar systems in the Milky Way have more than one star. To investigate the possibilities for life in a double star system, Dr Max Popp a scholar at Princeton University and Dr. Siegfried Eggl of Germany's Max Plank Institute substituted the real giant planet orbiting the stellar pair Kepler 35A and B with an Earth sized one orbiting the Kepler AB pair with periods between 341 and 380 days. Their detailed analysis is published in the journal Nature Communications.

On March 3, 2024 my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Kacper Wierzchos was asteroid hunting with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he spotted a fuzzy object in the constellation of Draco.  After Kacper reported his discovery to the Minor Planet Center, observers in Arizona, New Mexico, and Tenerife confirmed it to be a comet and it was given the name C/2024 E1 (Wierzchos).  Kacper’s discovery has a hyperbolic orbit indicating that after coming slightly closer to the Sun than the planet  Venus on January 21, 2026 it will be ejected from the solar system never to return.

On May 5, 2014 when I discovered 2014 JO25 with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona it was the brightest, fastest asteroid I had ever seen. In April of 2017, 2014 JO25 returned to come within 1.1 million miles of us at 21 mi/s. This rare, very close approach by an asteroid, of 2014 JO25's size allowed scientists at NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar in California and the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to obtain radar images of it. Amazingly these images showed that what we had observed as a solitary moving point of light and had assumed to be a single asteroid is actually two asteroids in contact with each other. This tight pair rotates about a common center of gravity about every 5 hours which in turn orbits the Sun in about three years. 41 days before its encounter with Earth, this tight pair was closer to the Sun than the planet Mercury.