Travelers In The Night

During a recent 30 day period asteroid hunters spotted 88 small space rocks passing through our neighborhood. Their diameters ranged from the length of a Uhaul Van to one that would occupy the majority of a city block. None of them pose a threat to Earth in the foreseeable Future.

About a month before my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rik Hill spotted it, a 5 football field diameter asteroid had been almost as near to the Sun as the planet Venus. His discovery images showed it about to cross the Earth's orbit at a speed of 21 miles per second coming towards us. Additional observations by telescopes in Illinois, New Mexico, and Arizona showed that its 7.6 year path around the Sun will take it out to well past the planet Jupiter. This object's orbit is highly elliptical and inclined so that it moves above and below the plane where the planets and nearly all of the other solar system objects exist. It had crossed the Earth's orbital path moving towards the Sun about 6 weeks before it was discovered but nobody noticed it since it was faint and far away from Earth.

Until recently smoky nights at the observatory were rare. Now they have become more common place as wild fires continue to devastate portions of the western United States. The consequences of expanded fire prone areas goes far beyond missing a few nights data at the telescope. Potentially millions of people will be at increased risk of respiratory aliments. Further the burn scars left behind will adversely affect the quality and quantity of the precious water these high altitude areas provide to a a dry and thirsty west.

If you woke up tomorrow morning with radio eyes your surroundings would look very different. Invisible to us, are the radio waves occupying a vast region of other wavelengths.These invisible radio waves are produced by a number of very interesting physical processes in the Universe. In fact how things look would depend on the part of the radio spectrum that you could see.

A break in the weather provides the opportunity to discover an Earth approaching object.

Francesco Manca of the Sormano Astronomical Observatory is doing some of the important work of keeping track of the asteroids which can make close approaches to our Earth, our Moon, and other objects in space. He has compiled the fact that the asteroid hunting community has found more than 2000 small asteroids, of less than several football fields in diameter, which can make close approaches to us. Nearly 700 have orbits which allow them to come closer to the Earth than our Moon. So far more than 250 of these small asteroids have come or are predicted to come less a lunar distance from our home planet.

Relatively recent volcanic activity observed on Mars suggests that where subsurface martian magma and frozen water meet is where microbial life could flourish in the current era.

Evidence from comets and meteorites has brought many scientists to believe that the basic building blocks of life were brought to Earth by small bodies which impacted our home planet early in its history. When and where did the substances, including water and organic materials required for life as we know it, appear in our solar system?

As a result of human caused increases in green house gases the troposphere is expanding and the stratosphere is shrinking. Between 1980 and 2018 the stratosphere has become a quarter of a mile thinner and is projected to contract in total by nearly a mile by 2080 if the present human increases in green house gases continues. Find out why buckle up for safety has more than one meaning in the era of climate change we are moving into.

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate, Rose Matheny discovered a tiny asteroid that passed 115,000 miles from Earth and 104,000 miles from our Moon. Rose's discovery demonstrates the fact that the asteroid hunting community is beginning to have the ability to discover small space rocks before they make their closest approach to Earth.

A team of astronomers find that as many as 14 comets which came to less than 4 times the Moon's distance from us as long as 4,000 years ago are detectable as meteor showers in the present era. These results make us aware of potentially hazardous comets from the past which could come into our space again in the future.

Recently I was observing with the NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon when the computer identified a faint fast moving object in the night sky. Not being sure it was real I scheduled followup observations. About an hour later the second set of observations showed that it is a real object. On the next two nights this small space rock was observed by telescopes near Westfield, Illinois and on Kitt Peak in Arizona. These observations allowed the Minor Planet Center to determine an orbit and a tentative size. It was given the name 2015 GB.

New Rocket engines will revolutionize space travel to the Moon and Mars.

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rik Hill discovered an asteroid about the size of a luxury sedan which cruises about the inner solar system.

An impacting object hit the asteroid Vesta making a 10 mile diameter crater and in the process blasted loose fragments which have been orbiting the Sun for 22 million years or so. In June of 2018 my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski discovered one of them streaking towards Earth with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon , AZ. This small space rock crashed into Earth raining fragments upon the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana.

Recently people from all over the world met in Italy to discuss ways that humans can prepare for the unlikely, but not impossible, situation that an object is on an impact trajectory with planet Earth. They were were presented with a hypothetical asteroid threat. A month after its discovery the hypothetical asteroid comes about 18 million miles from us . It continues to be observed for another month with every new observation making it appear to have a greater chance of colliding with mother Earth about 7 years hence. This is where the participants are left. At this point they don't know its exact size, chemical composition, if it will collide with us or not, and if it does the spot of impact on Earth. They are then charged with the task of obtaining needed observations and to develop a strategy to deal with the potential impact.

In March and April every year amateur astronomers, around the world, in Messier Marathons, attempt to view all of 110 objects in the Messier catalogue in a single night. In a more leisurely approach you can visit a dark sky location like the Cosmic Campground International Dark Sky and view spectacular Messier Objects with your naked eye, binoculars, or a small telescope.

The first human use of the wind to power boats most likely occurred in about 3,000 BC. This was a major improvement in travel over walking and animal drawn carts. Three or four hundred years from now humans may send a robotic space probe to a nearby star using a light sail as big as the state of Texas. Ideally it would deploy its giant solar sail near the Sun perhaps as close to it as the planet Mercury. This would give it maximum initial thrust. After it gets far from the Sun it could be pushed along by a powerful pinpoint laser beam. Theoretically it is possible to achieve a fraction of the speed of light through this means.

Asteroid hunters have discovered a curious object. It appears likely to be either a rock ejected from the Moon or a piece of space junk from a human designed mission to the Moon. Observations which reveal how this tiny object is effected by Sun light could tells us if it is a natural or man made object.

The vast majority of asteroids orbiting the Sun do so on a path that is pretty much in the same plane as the planets. There is a lot of empty space in the solar system, however, we see asteroids with craters on them so we know collisions have occurred. It seems likely that an asteroid whose path is highly inclined to the plane of thesolar system was involved in a collision with another object causing a radical changein its orbit.