Travelers In The Night

Recently the Kepler Spacecraft found that a catalogue star HD 139139 now nicknamed the "Random Transiter" had 28 apparently random sharp narrow dips in brightness in only 87 days. What it is remains a mystery.

During a recent 6 night observing run with the NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, I found 29 Earth Approaching Asteroid candidates. With further observations, sixteen of these turned out to be real asteroids which in fact do not make close approaches to Earth. They range in size from about 5 football fields to nearly a mile in diameter

In our solar system the most exotic body which contains the complex organic molecules necessary for life is Saturn's Moon Titan. NASA's Dragonfly will explore this strange world with a flying drone. What it finds is likely to give us new insights into how life originated on Earth as well as to provide us reasons to value what we have at home.

Asteroid 2014 JO25 is truly an amazing object. It orbits the Sun, every 2.94 years, on a very elongated path that goes closer to the Sun than Mercury and then it travels out to well past Mars. It must be made of hard rocky material since during its close approach to the Sun it was traveling at 84 miles/second. At that point, it was closer to the Sun than the planet Mercury and probably had a surface temperature greater than 800 F. Fortunately this asteroid never gets closer than about 4.4 lunar distances from Earth.

A given piece of ground on Mars receives several times more space rock impacts than a similar sized area on Earth. Perhaps, in the future the Martian tourist industry will bring visitors to view super meteor storms which occur each year when Mars is furtherest from the Sun and to search for meteorites on the red planet's surface.

During a recent 6 night observing run with the NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, I found 29 Earth Approaching Asteroid candidates which were posted on the Minor Planet Center website. The largest of this collection of space rocks is 2014 JO25. It orbits the Sun every 3 years and is about 1/2 mile in diameter. Its closet approach to Earth is about 4.4 times the distance to our Moon at which time it is traveling in excess of 20 miles/second. We will continue to observe it, to make sure that it does not become an Earth impactor, as it passes near other objects in space.

49 years after the Lunar Landing Module "Snoopy" was abandoned by Apollo 10 Astronauts, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls may have spotted it while searching for Earth approaching asteroids in the constellation of Cancer with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona.

When you look out in space you are also looking back in time. Objects in space are older than they appear to us; the Moon more than a second , Mars a minute and a half, and the Great Galaxy in Andromeda appears as it was 3 million years ago. This situation is due to the fact that it takes time for light to travel the great distances in the Universe.

Imagine being under a clear natural night sky, with no moon, waiting to see stars down to the horizon, the Milky Way, star clusters, planets, the zodiacal light, comets, and other wonders of the natural night sky. Suddenly, you are shocked to find the night sky crawling with hundreds of artificial satellites bright enough to be seen in a light polluted city like Chicago.

It may surprise you to know that there are more than 180 confirmed impact craters on our planet. It is likely that many more have been erased by the actions of wind and water. An asteroid smashing into a water rich world like Earth or Mars can generate reservoirs of hot water which may be a good place for early life to start. It could also preserve ancient life forms in impact glass. Perhaps impact craters are the places to search for evidence that life has existed on Mars.

Statistically, asteroid hunters are thought to have discovered 90 to 95% of the Earth approaching asteroids larger than about 3,000 feet in diameter. There are thought to be at least 50 more out there. Where are they?

The asteroid Psyche is named for a Greek mythological figure. It was discovered in 1852 as a moving point of light in the night sky. This small world is about 155 miles in diameter and orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter every 5 years. A visit to Psyche would allow us to directly study a naked planet's core and provide clues as to the nature of what is beneath our feet.

In 2018 Asteroid Hunters discovered 1839 previously unknown space rocks as they passed through our celestial neighborhood. The largest and most dangerous can come to a mere 1,000 miles from humanity. Fortunately, it is not likely to do so until after 2,200 AD.

The Kepler Space Craft has found tiny regular dips in light from a star which is about 500 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus. The dips in brightness come about when planets pass between their star and the Earth. This particular star has at least 5 planets. One of them is named Kepler-186f. It is similar to the Earth in size and is located at a distance from its star which may allow life as we know it to exist. This newly discovered cousin to our Earth orbits a M dwarf star which is very much cooler than our Sun. Its year is only 130 days long

An asteroid has been discovered that comes very near to the Sun where it receives 12.6 times the radiation that heats the planet Mercury's surface to 800 F. This hardy space rock has made this trip many times and is likely to be made of extremely tough materials and in the future could prove to be a valuable source of raw materials for human space colonists.

On Earth Day Astronauts Dr. Ed Lu, Tom Jones, and Bill Anders announced that between 2000 and 2013, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization Network detected 26 explosions on Earth ranging in energy from 1-600 kilotons of TNT. None of them were caused by nuclear explosions, but rather by asteroid impacts. Most of these asteroids exploded high in the atmosphere and did no damage on the ground. These data provide a measure of the frequency at which large space rocks enter our atmosphere.

Fortunately, on its current path, the most dangerous asteroid discovered in 2018 cannot come closer than 12.5 times the Moon's distance to humanity. Not to worry. Asteroid Hunters have not found a single space rock on a collision path with planet Earth.

To the human eye the night sky is a source of mystery and wonder. Our ancestors knew it well. There is a connection to the cosmos that is hard to describe which you will achieve by knowing the names of some of the bright stars. As the seasons progress, the feeling of greeting an old friend is generated, when one of the stars you know first appears in the evening sky. Scientifically we know that the Universe is evolving in many ways. Some of these changes are apparent to the naked eye, however, over the course of the human life span there is constancy in the patterns we see in the night sky.

Being a near Earth asteroid is already a lonely existence since the paths of these small space rocks seldom bring them near any other material objects as they travel about the Sun. The loneliest asteroids of all could be of interest to asteroid miners when one of them makes one of its rare visits to our neighborhood.

The asteroid Itokawa [e toe kawa] is as odd as a barbell with a 29 lb weight on one end and and 18 lb weight on the other. It was discovered in 1998 as a moving point of light in the night sky by the LINEAR project in New Mexico. It was named for the Japanese scientist whose rockets put his nations first satellite in orbit in 1970.