Travelers In The Night

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.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Hannes Gröller was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Ursa Major with the University of Arizona 90 inch Bok telescope on Kitt Peak when he discovered a faint moving object surrounded by a tiny gas and dust cloud called a coma. May 19, 2028 comet C/2025 D1  (Groeller) reaches its closest point to the Sun some 14.1 times the Earth-Sun distance and thus sets the record for the comet which stays furtherest from the Sun.After rounding the Sun comet C/2025 D1 (Groeller) will head back into truly deep space perhaps never to return.

Using the University of Arizona's Large Binocular Telescope atop Mt. Graham in southern Arizona, Dr. Paul Wiegert of Western University in Canada, led a team of astronomers who have determined that a 2 mile diameter object bucks the solar system traffic by traveling in a direction backwards to all of the planets. In their March 30, 2017 article in the journal Nature, these astronomers confirm that 2015 BZ509, travels about Jupiter on a path in a direction opposite to nearly every other member of our solar system. Amazingly it has avoided a collision with Jupiter by using the giant planet's gravity to maintain a path that has been stable for a million years or so. This astounding trick is performed as 2015 BZ509 passes once inside and once outside of Jupiter's orbit as they both travel about the Sun. The resulting effect of Jupiter's timely gravitational pulls on this small asteroid are exactly right to keep it from having a collision or from being ejected from the solar system.

One little known and infrequently observed phenomenon in the natural night sky are “bright nights” during which observers have reported being able to read a book  when both the Sun and Moon are both well below the horizon.  

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was observing with our team's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon in Arizona when he discovered a relatively large space rock, 2017 FD157, which can theoretically come closer to the Earth's surface than the communications satellites. We don't have enough data to predict when it will make a very close approach to us. What we do know is that 2017 FD157's orbit and that of the Earth nearly intersect coming to about Earth diameter of each other. For 2017 FD157 to make a very close approach to our planet, both of them would need to be at the position on their respective paths which are closest to each other. If history is a guide, it is likely that additional observations will reveal that 2017 FD157 will never impact the Earth. About once every 11,000 years one of its size impacts the Earth with an atmospheric impact energy of several of large hydrogen bombs creating a crater a mile in diameter. If in an extremely unlikely turn of events, 2017 FD157, appears likely to impac

On a single February night my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jacqui Fazekas reported  the discovery of 5 Earth approaching objects using our small but mighty Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona.Rest assured that on any given night there are asteroid hunters on the look out for seriously dangerous space rocks.

Asteroid hunters have become aware of the many small space rocks which come near Earth because of improvements made to telescopes, cameras, and computer analysis software. Recently, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rose Matheny used her skills and a new camera to discover the second small space rock in 32 days which came between the communications satellites and the Earth's surface. Rose spotted her 10 to 12 foot diameter space rock as it approached the Earth more than a million miles away with its little full moon face pointing towards us. 31 hours later, her discovery, 2017 GM, came to within 10,100 miles of Earth as it streaked by at about 11 mi/s on its way towards an encounter with Venus five and a half weeks later. It it had been on an impact trajectory with our planet, Rose's early detection would have allowed asteroid hunters to alert humans to prepare for a spectacular light show as it exploded in our atmosphere.

As the Earth travels in its orbit around the Sun it collides with objects called meteoroids traveling through space.  These tiny members of the solar system range in size from dust grains to objects a meter in diameter.By becoming part of the GMN’s network , your data will help to discover and document meteor showers, aid in identifying the parent cometary objects, and in some cases help to identify locations to search for meteorites. 

In 2013 a 56 foot diameter space rock exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia releasing the energy of 450 kt of TNT and filled local hospitals with some of the 1,500 people who were injured. Fortunately no one died. In 1908 a 200 ft diameter meteor exploded over a largely unpopulated region at Tunguska, Siberia knocking down trees over a 750 square mile area. If it had hit over a populated area it could have caused a million casualties. The approximately 250 people in the USA that NASA has working on asteroid detection and ways of mitigating the effects of an asteroid impact have plenty to do. We still have to locate and track about a hundred very large asteroids which could produce global climate change. Further, there are approximately 14,500 undiscovered slightly smaller ones which could cause a hurricane sized footprint damage areas to land areas on our planet. Fortunately it is extremely unlikely that any but one of the smallest space rocks will hit the Earth in the next 100 years.

On 27 December 2024 the Atlas group in Chile discovered an object now known as 2024 YR4 which appeared to have a significant chance of impacting Earth 22 December of 2032. The most recent data indicates the chance that 2024 YR4 impact Earth is about 1 in 25,000.  These data indicate our moon has about a 1 in 700 chance to be impacted by this space rock. Even so astronomers are preparing for 2028 when 2024 YR4 willagain come within the range of our instruments.   Current data indicates 2024 YR4 will miss the Moon by less than 1000 miles on  2032 December 22 giving astronauts there a Merry Christmas.

I was observing with the Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt Lemmon, Arizona when a fast moving object appeared on a set of four images of the same area of the night sky. After I sent the discovery observations to the Minor Planet Center this new object was observed by telescopes in Arizona, Germany , South Bohemia in the Czech Republic , Chile, Pennsylvania , Italy, Hungary, and France. 2017 FE101's unusual path about our Sun is inclined by 53 degrees to the plane where the planets and most of the rest of the asteroids are located. In September of 2016 it was not observed by humans as it streaked by at an amazing 22 miles per second. Once every 125,000 years or so a 5 football field sized asteroid like 2017 FE101 collides with our planet producing a crater 4 or 5 miles in diameter, inflicts damage over a hurricane sized foot print on the Earth's surface, and in some cases throws up enough debris into the atmosphere to produce global climate change. Since on its current path, 2017 FE101 can't come clo

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Hydra with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when a fast moving unknown point of light passed through a set of his images.After Greg reported his observations to the Minor Planet Center for the next 10 days it was tracked by observatories in Arizona, Italy, Hawaii, Australia, and Argentina.  Citizen scientist H. A. Güler analyzed these data.  The Minor Planet Center published the discovery of the near Earth asteroid 2018 CN41. The discovery was deleted when the object turned out to be a Falcon Heavy Rocket Upper stage with a Tesla roadster attached.

A clear night with excellent pinpoint star images allowed me to discover 16 near Earth approaching asteroid candidates with the Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt Lemmon, Arizona. This 9 hr period of time provides us with a snap shot of the kinds of objects which constantly zip past our home planet. Thirteen of the candidates turned out to fit the definition of an Earth approaching object, two were lost because of a lack of additional observations, and the other one is an inner main belt asteroid which for a time imitated an Earth approaching object The thirteen close approachers travel about the Sun with orbital periods ranging from 3.6 years to only 248 days. The largest is more than a quarter of a mile in diameter while the smallest is about the size of a small U-Haul truck. Most of them stay relatively far from Earth with the closest approacher having the possibility of coming to within three quarters of the Moon's distance from our home planet. One of the more interesting members of the group is

Astronomers have yet to discover any long lasting natural object, beside our Moon, which orbits the Earth, however, occasionally, a small space rock enters into a temporary dance with our home planet.