Travelers In The Night

After being lost for ten years, the asteroid 2010 WC9 was re-discovered about a week before it came very close to Earth.

The recent discovery of an asteroid, whose orbit lies completely within that of the Earth, reminds asteroid hunters to continue to search near the Sun so that a large dangerous object does not sneak up undetected on the residents of planet Earth.

An asteroid is exiled to the outer regions of the solar system during Jupiter's rampaging tack away from the Sun long ago. During that process enough material was left in Jupiter's wake to form Venus, Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt as we know them today.

Modern technology provides us with stunning views of objects in the Universe in wavelengths invisible to our eyes, however, nothing is as moving and thought provoking as looking into deep space with your very own eyes.

Brian Africano's first Potentially Hazardous Asteroid discovery can come near to the Earth and Mars.

To find planets close to home NASA has launched TESS the Transiting Exoplanet Satellite which will monitor more than 200,000 nearby, stars over the entire sky to detect the tiny dips in light caused when a planet passes in front of it's star. The TESS era will be a most exciting time as humans discover and are able determine the properties of relatively nearby habitatable worlds and dream about what might be living in our neighborhood of the Milky Way.

In the early evening of January 17, 2018 six hundred and seventy four observers in 11 States and Canada reported a fireball meteor streaking across the sky to the American Meteor Society. To find freshly fallen meteorites visit the American Meteor Society's website but do not hunt for meteorites on private land without permission.

On June 30, 1908 a celestial object exploded 28,000 feet above the Tunguska river drainage area in Siberia, Russia releasing the energy of 185 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. Recently a similar sized space rock made a sudden appearance before it passed very close to our Earth and Moon.

Fireballs are meteors which become brighter than the planet Venus and can sometimes be seen in the daytime. If you are lucky to see a fireball send in your report to the American Meteor Society and become a citizen scientist.

In the space of only four days, my Catalina Sky Survey teammates, Brian Africano, Alex Gibbs, and Greg Leonard, discovered three Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. Searching for such a large space rock on an impact trajectory with planet Earth is what keeps my team, the Catalina Sky Survey, going to our four telescopes, 24 nights per month, when the moon isn't too bright, in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson Arizona.

So far asteroid hunters have discovered about 8,000 of the 25,000, large, potentially hazardous asteroids, suspected to exist, leaving 17,000 more to be discovered. For this reason, NASA has designed and proposed the NEOCam spacecraft to give us the ability to find them before they find us.

If you set your mind to it, you can find and hold a sample of an asteroid, called a meteorite, which has landed on the Earth's surface. On the other hand, watching major meteor showers will allow you to see but not touch comet dust as it enters and burns up in the Earth's atmosphere.

Theoretically, If an asteroid on a collision course with our planet could be slowed sufficiently it could be made to pass behind our planet as it orbits the Sun. It is not as easy as we would like.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard's discovery of, 2018 FO5, a three football field diameter asteroid that can come closer than our Moon is a reminder that we need to keep searching for the many thousands of Potentially Hazardous asteroids larger than 500 feet in diameter which are likely to exist.

Perhaps C/2018 F3 (Johnson) is an interstellar visiting Comet and is thus a sample of a place currently beyond our reach.

On Saint Patrick's Day I discovered a comet which I share with my wife Annie Grauer.

To give you an idea of the asteroid traffic in our neighborhood, on a mostly cloudy night, through holes in the clouds, in a space of less than 2 hours, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski posted 7 new close approaching asteroid discoveries on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Object Confirmation Page.

The large dangerous asteroids that we don't know about are what keep asteroid hunters going to the telescope.

Tonight, even though the chances are extremely slim, an asteroid hunter could find a sizable asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth.If we have decades warning, the potential impactor's arrival time could be changed by impacting the dangerous object with a high velocity mass or if we have less time we will need to nuke it which will either blow it to bits or give it a rocket like push.

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles above the Earth's surface they would rendezvous with their asteroid mining spacecraft which will be their home for the next five years or so.