Travelers In The Night

The lunar roving, battery powered, 4 wheel drive "Moon Buggy" allowed astronauts on Apollo 15, 16, and 17 to travel 8 mph on the lunar surface with a maximum range of approximately 4.7 mi. Some of the rocks that these space travelers brought back, from the tiny area they were able to visit on the Moon, contained volcanic glass beads with trace amounts of trapped water inside of them. 

Dr. Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office reports that on June 26, 2025 shortly after noon a beachball sized meteoroid traveling at approximately 30,000 miles per hour broke up about 27 miles above the town of West Forrest, Georgia.

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. For some time astronomers have considered it unlikely that these asteroids wandered in from the asteroid belt. Recently, Dr. David Polishook of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel led a group of researchers who published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy which sets forth evidence that a group of 7 Martian Trojan Asteroids were blasted from the Martian surface when a large asteroid impacted the red planet early in the history of the solar system. The impact more than 4 billion years or so ago which blasted loose a mile diameter chunk of Mars and gave it a speed of the more than the 3 mi/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.

Amazingly, nature occasionally sends an interstellar traveler through our solar system for us to observe. The third such object that astronomers have discovered coming into our solar system from truly deep space is 3I/ATLAS. It was discovered as it streaked towards the inner solar system at 130,000 miles per hour by the ATLAS team’s 20 inch telescope in Chile and was quickly tracked by telescope around the world.

 The Sun is our very own well behaved star. It rises and sets in our sky every day and powers and makes possible all life forms on planet Earth. A new appreciation for our Sun is growing as we learn more about other suns and their families of planets. The Trappist-1 system of 7 planets orbits a dim M type red dwarf star about 40 light years away in the constellation of Aquarius.Recently, Dr. Manasvi Lingam and Dr. Abraham Loeb of Harvard University have calculated the likelihood that planets orbiting red dwarf stars are able to possess an atmosphere conducive to life. They report, in a recently published a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology that the planet Trappist 1-e is more than 100 times less likely to be habitable than is the Earth. Another group from Harvard and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, headed up by Dr. Cecilia Garraffo also find the Trappist-1 planets to be a tough place to live. These researchers add that the close proximity of these planets to their host star put the

On a a short June night my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was observing with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona in the constellation of Ursa Major when a relatively bright fast moving point of light appeared in a set of his images. Even though on its current path Greg's discovery, 2025 MM89, has virtually no chance of impacting our home planet asteroid hunters will continue to track it to make sure it doesn’t become a threat as it passes other objects in space.

75% of asteroid hunter's discoveries are called C type asteroids. They are dark, have a high abundance of carbon, consist of clay and silicate rocks, and may have a composition which is up to 22% water. Recently Dr. Phillip A. Bland of Curtin University in Australia and Dr. Bryan Travis of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona published an article in the on line journal Science Advances describing their numerical simulations of the evolution of the progenitors of the C type asteroids. These researchers find that these common asteroids are likely to have started out as giant convecting mud balls which could still exist at the center of large asteroids like Ceres. The C type asteroids are particularly significant in that they are likely to have been one of the ingredients which came together under gravity to form Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Their impacts upon a young Earth are likely to be the source of the water in our oceans. Of more immediate interest is that the type C asteroids could be a

Asteroid 2024 YR4 will not hit the Earth in 2032, has a 4% chance of hitting the moon, and most likely will pass within 900 miles of the lunar surface. If 2024 YR4 were to impact the Moon it could send about the mass of several small cargo ships into space with lunar escape velocity and could pose a threat to our satellites.

When it was first spotted by astronomers at Space Watch on Kitt Peak, 2008 GO98 appeared to be one of many outer main belt asteroids moving through the night sky. 9 years later when my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard observed it with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon it had a coma and a tail like a comet. Active asteroids like 2008 GO98 have asteroid orbits but sometimes show cometary activity which could be caused by a collision with another object and/or by thermal fracturing and ice sublimation caused by the slight warming they obtain from sunlight.

In a recent study Dr. Lynnane George and her co-authors investigate Space Elevator technology to remove materials from Ceres and deliver them to orbital depots around the solar system.  The tiny gravity of Ceres, nano-fiber technology, and different water propulsion systems are utilized by Dr. George and her team to construct theoretically possible systems which would extract raw materials from Ceres and deliver them to low Earth orbit and other locations within the solar system.  These researchers estimate such a transport system could reduce fuel costs by up to 60% compared to transport from the Earth’s surface. 

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski discovered a 0.4 mile diameter asteroid with the Catalina Sky Survey Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, AZ. Two hours and 11 minutes later it came into a set images I obtained with the 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, AZ. After I reported it, the new object was tracked by telescopes in Arizona, New Zealand, Slovenia, Kansas, Australia, Hungary, France, and Brazil. The Minor Planet Center used these data to calculate it's 1,353 day long orbit around the Sun, estimate it's size, and give it the name 2017 MB1. Fortunately it will not impact the Earth in the foreseeable future. An object the size of 2017 MB1 strikes the Earth every 200,000 years or so releasing the energy of about 300 large hydrogen bombs. It's impact onto a land area could produce a crater 6 miles in diameter, a fire storm that would ignite vegetation, clouds of toxic dust, acid rain, and produce other ill effects. If 2017 MB1 landed in the middle of the ocean it would make a splash that w

Recently, using data from the Japanese infrared telescope AKARI,  Dr. Amos Y.A. Chen and his collaborators published a paper in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia which predicts the approximate positions of two massive Planet 9 candidates. To arrive at their conclusions this team carefully searched the AKARI observations for objects which over the course of months change their positions relative to distant stars and galaxies.   Further  observations are required to determine if either of these move like a Planet 9 or if instead they are some other type of distant astronomical object. 

The Trappist-1 planetary system located about 40 light years away in the constellation of Aquarius consists of a small red dwarf star and 7 Earth sized planets. By carefully studying changes in the planet's transit timings and the shape of the dip in the host star's brightness as each planet transits across it, astronomers have been able to measure the orbital period, radius, and approximate mass for each of the 7 planets. Dr Billy Quarles of the University Oklahoma and his team used thousands of numerical simulations on super computers to investigate the range in each planet's parameters which would cause it to have a stable orbit and would thus produce the Trappist-1 solar system which we see today. Their results, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that 6 of Trappist-1's planets have rocky composition like the Earth the remaining one may be composed of 25 % water by mass compared to 0.02% water by mass for Earth. The next step will be to use the James Web Space Telescope equipped with t

Big Bear Solar Observatory is a unique facility operated by the New Jersey Institute of Technology.  Its 1.6 meter Goode Solar Telescope is located on the north side of Big Bear Lake at an elevation of 6,760 feet above sea level in the  San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California.  Being surrounded by cold water at high altitude provides the site with exceptional atmospheric stability and thus the possibility of extremely high quality solar images.  It is hard to predict the value of basic research, however, work like this will eventually enable scientists to better understand how solar flares and other activity in the Sun’s atmosphere effect  astronauts, communications systems, auroras, radio blackouts, geomagnetic storms, satellites, power grids, and more on our home planet

Humans are moving towards a day when there are space colonies in orbit, on the Moon, and the planet Mars, places where the force of gravity ranges between zero and 38% of what we experience every day. What effect will such different environments have on the regeneration of liver, skin, and other human body organs? To discover how the remarkable ability of Planaria flat worms to regenerate amputated body parts functions in a weightless environment researchers at Tufts University compared a group of whole and amputated flat worms which had lived for 5 weeks on the International Space Station with control groups which remained behind on planet Earth. The space faring flatworms were found to have undergone metabolic and other body function changes which persisted after they returned to Earth. Strangely one of the amputated worm fragments sent into space developed into an extremely rare double headed worm. Researchers were astonished since they had not seen this happen once during 5 years of observations of 15,000

The US National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope is the worlds largest solar telescope. It is perched 10,000 feet  above sea level on the top of Haleakalā on the Hawaiian island Maui.   Its location and 4 meter mirror enables the Inouye to see details in the solar atmosphere as small in diameter as the island of Manhattan. 3D maps of the solar atmosphere produced by the Inouye’s new Visible Tunable Filter will enable humans to put their equipment into a safe mode when necessary

24 hours a day, 16,600 feet above sea level in the high dry desert of northern Chile, the 66 antennas of 1.4 billion dollar Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array or ALMA receives signals located between the infrared and radio portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The waves that ALMA receives have a length which is about the same as the thickness of a dime. The pattern of present and missing wavelengths in these signals contains the characteristic spectral signatures of the complex molecules that form the basis of living organisms.

After the Earth the Sun is the most important object for human beings in the Universe.  It is the energy source which produces our food and is the source for all of the energy and motion around us except for geothermal and nuclear energy sources. The Sun is normally well behaved the exception being solar storms which can dump incredible amounts of energy onto the Earth. Scientists are working hard to understand solar super storms to enable humans to mitigate the trillions of dollars damage one could cause to our modern electronic technology

The energy required to lift water, food, and construction materials from the Earth's surface is very expensive. Asteroids come relatively close to Earth and could provide space colonists with metals, carbon, water, and the other important ingredients of modern life. Most space rocks like most terrestrial rocks may be pretty and interesting but they are not a practical source of the materials humans use and need.

Sadly humans seem to be in the process of creating a cosmic land fill which will blot out much of the cosmos.