Travelers In The Night

Martian Trojan asteroids have stable orbits around the Sun, leading and trailing the red planet by 60 degrees, where the Sun's and Mars's gravity are balanced. The impact more than 4 billion years or so ago which blasted loose the Trojan asteroids and gave them the 3mi/s required to escape the red planet gives us an insight into the level of violence which occurred before our solar system came into it's present relatively calm state.

Recently my NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered an approaching asteroid about the same size as the one whose high altitude disintegration injured nearly 1500 people in Chelyabinsk Russia in February of 2013.  Fortunately this new one missed planet Earth.  There is more good news.  Carson spotted this small space rock about 40 hours before its closest approach to planet Earth.  This means that if it had been on a collision path with our home planet we would have had time to warn people to seek shelter before it created a potentially destructive sonic boom in our atmosphere.

Recently there were four fireball meteors, brighter than the planet Venus, which exploded over Germany, France, Ohio, and Arizona within the space of only 10 hours. There are likely to be on the order of 1,000 fireball events over the Earth every day.

How would you like to know more about a particular star than anyone else on Earth? 

On Earth, human life is enabled by plants which provide us with calories, vitamins, fuel, medicines, and oxygen to breathe. In addition, recent scientific studies indicate that plant cultivation reduces anxiety and depression and has a positive influence on diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and longevity. It is likely that when humans travel to Mars they will continue this practice. The plants that Mars explorers take with them will provide a source of fresh fruits and vegetables , fresh air to breathe, and perhaps a psychological benefit that is crucial to the success of their mission.

An asteroid hunter literally has to sort through millions of objects to find an unknown Earth approaching asteroid.

The largest asteroid to come near the Earth in 100 years has two moons.

In the space of less than ten nights, my Catalina Sky Survey teammates discovered 8 new Earth approaching objects. One of them can pass closer to us than our communication satellites.

Finding a meteorite that has traveled billions of miles through space to reach it's present location is exciting. It might even be worth real money.

For some people the full Moon is for howling. For asteroid hunters it is time to regroup and make improvements in the process of finding Earth approaching objects.

Experience the wonders of the Universe first hand using your night vision.

Soon it will be possible to study changes in the Universe which have occurred over the past 100 years. Photo: By Harvard College Observatory - Harvard College Observatory, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5280391

China has built and is operating the world's largest Radio telescope.

The most likely alien invaders are viruses or other bits of living materials that humans have exported from or imported to Earth's biosphere. Currently there are international efforts, like the outer space treaty and the Committee on Space Research, to keep the human exploration of space from spreading Earth's life forms to other places or to contaminate our own biosphere with extraterrestrial organisms if they exist.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard discovered, 2016 WJ1, a relatively large asteroid which can come close but will not hit the Earth. Once in every million years or so an asteroid impact by an object of this size could cause global climate change disrupting human agriculture and plunge our society into a real crisis.

n the space of a couple of days the Catalina Sky Survey found 3 potentially dangerous asteroids.

Large asteroids which impact the Earth can cause global change.

Jupiter has been observed throughout human history and is so bright that you can even spot it under the artificial light dome of one of our cities. Even so it is less than 40 years ago that we were first able to view Jupiter in detail as the Voyagers streaked by it. Jupiter contains more than twice the mass of all of the other planets, dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets in our solar system combined.

Asteroids are moving points of light in the night sky, which shine by reflected Sun light. The asteroid hunting community determines a new object's orbit around the Sun by continuing to measure its changing position in the sky. The next time you hear someone state the size of an asteroid it is a safe bet that it based on Dr. Landolt's Standard Star measurements.