Travelers In The Night

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

When Asteroid hunters discover a new object it is given a score ranging from 0 which means it is likely to be a distant main belt asteroid up to 100 which means that it is likely to come near to us. Each newly discovered asteroid which receives a score of 65 or greater is posted on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Object Confirmation Page so that telescopes around the world can track it to estimate it's size as well as to refine our knowledge of it's orbit around the Sun. NASA feeds data on each new discovery into its Scout software system...

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Dr. Hannes Gröller and I traveled to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument to install two night sky meters which will enable this wonderful national treasure to become an international dark sky park. Surrounded by vast tracts of unoccupied public land and having an abundance of clear weather the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument and the Cosmic Campground International Dark Sky Sanctuary both in New Mexico are among the best places in the world to view the natural night sky.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered a 33 foot diameter asteroid which has about a 1.1% chance of impacting the Earth on 569 encounters with our planet between 2045 and 2116. Its name is 2017 LD. It is on the list of the most likely objects to strike the Earth in the next hundred years as reported on NASA's Sentry Earth Impact Monitoring table. Even so, given our current data, there is a 98.9% chance that 2017 LD will not enter our atmosphere on any of its close approaches to Earth in the next 100 years.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Vivian Carvajal was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Cepheus with our small but mighty Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when she discovered 2025 JB1.Fortunately on its current path there is zero probability that 2025 JB1 will impact our home planet in the foreseeable future. Further asteroid hunters continue to search for any other large asteroids which might impact Earth so that mitigation efforts would be effective.

Recently, my Grandsons, Dane and Hank joined our asteroid hunting team at the Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon. The most interesting of our discoveries, 2017 KJ32 is only 16 feet in diameter, orbits the Sun once every 315 days, and can come closer to us than the communications satellites. 4 days and 16 hours before Dane, Hank, and I spotted it, 2017 KJ32 passed about 41,000 miles from the surface of Earth traveling at a relatively slow speed for an Earth approaching asteroid of 1.6 mi/sec. By the time 2017 KJ32 came into one of our images it was already 768,000 miles from Earth and was...

In 2016 NASA created the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to manage the mission of finding, tracking, and studying asteroids and comets which could pose an impact threat to our home planet.The NASA documentary “Planetary Defenders” provides an excellent over view and can be streamed on the internet.

The mystery of Tabby's star began to unfold when in 2015 Dr. Tabetha S. Boyajian [boy-AA-jee-uhn] of Louisiana State University and her team published a paper describing the irregular dips in the light output of what otherwise would seem to be a garden variety star over the period 2009 to 2013. Subsequently a list of proposed explanations include swarms of comets, large asteroids, a debris disk, and even a massive alien megastructure.

Data are consistent with the hypothesis that the planet K2-18b is a Hycean planet with a warm liquid water ocean teaming with life and a thin hydrogen rich atmosphere containing methane and other molecules containing carbon. Scientists in an opposing camp point out what we might be observing is a rocky world with a hot life killing atmosphere.

When we find a planet which appears to have the chemical signs of living organisms in its atmosphere, the desire to take a close up look at it will be hard to contain. In a Scientific American article, Lee Billings describes Yuri Milner's 100 million dollar project "Breakthrough Starshot" which has been created to leap frog our current rocket technology's extremely long travel times to nearby planets. The plan is to put ultra light space probes on paths which will enable them to collect data as they streak by nearby potentially habitable planets. Our current iPhone technology is being used to...

In the search for life on Mars, Europa, Titan, and elsewhere in the universe astro-biologists are scouring the Earth for creatures tough enough to flourish under really difficult conditions. So far the leading species are the Tardigrades commonly known as water bears or moss piglets.

The good news is a Mars landing by human colonists and their equipment seems technically feasible given a large budget of cash and grit.

Recently Dr. Yossi Shvartzvald led a team which published their discovery of an Earth sized planet using microlensing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The newly discovered planet OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb orbits a small dim object about 13,000 light years from us. With only 7.8% of the Sun's mass the new planet's star may be a brown dwarf and not a star at all. At about the same distance from its star as we are from the Sun this new planet is likely to be an ice ball world colder than Pluto.

In a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy entitled “Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life”  Dr. Peter Vickers and his team of 10 co-authors report the results  of their survey of the lead authors for the past 10 years in the top three astro-biological journals.  These researchers sought to measure if their sample group of scientists thought it likely that 1) simple life,  and/or 2 ) life more complex than terrestrial bacteria, and/or 3) Intelligent life comparable or superior to human beings exists outside of Earth.

When I discovered 2014 JO25 with the NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on May 5, 2014, it appeared as a single point of light as it moved past us. As 2014 JO25 approached the Earth from the direction of the Sun in 2017, no-one had any idea that it is really a double asteroid system nearly a mile in diameter.

Since there is a world wide market for meteorites some of which can be sold for millions of dollars, on line, the question of ownership becomes important.

When a fleet of interstellar spaceships leaves our solar system for a planet circling a nearby star the most important of all of the riches that human explorers will carry with them will be libraries of our planet's DNA and the seeds of plants. They are the connection between past life, the inorganic world, and future life.

NASA’s Europa Clipper was launched October 14, 2024 on a mission to conduct a detailed study of Jupiter’s Moon Europa.  The space craft will travel some 1.8 billion miles and should reach Jupiter in April 2030.  This mission will begin to tell us if life as we know it can occur relatively close to home.

The NASA Kepler Spacecraft has discovered more than 2,000 planets which have been confirmed to be orbiting distant stars. It performs this remarkable feat by imaging more than 145,000 stars simultaneously to observe and measure the tiny dips in light which occur as a planet passes in front of its star. Astronomers have long known that many of the solar systems in the Milky Way have more than one star. To investigate the possibilities for life in a double star system, Dr Max Popp a scholar at Princeton University and Dr. Siegfried Eggl of Germany's Max Plank Institute substituted the real giant...

On March 3, 2024 my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Kacper Wierzchos was asteroid hunting with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he spotted a fuzzy object in the constellation of Draco.  After Kacper reported his discovery to the Minor Planet Center, observers in Arizona, New Mexico, and Tenerife confirmed it to be a comet and it was given the name C/2024 E1 (Wierzchos).  Kacper’s discovery has a hyperbolic orbit indicating that after coming slightly closer to the Sun than the planet  Venus on January 21, 2026 it will be ejected from the solar system never to return.

On May 5, 2014 when I discovered 2014 JO25 with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona it was the brightest, fastest asteroid I had ever seen. In April of 2017, 2014 JO25 returned to come within 1.1 million miles of us at 21 mi/s. This rare, very close approach by an asteroid, of 2014 JO25's size allowed scientists at NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar in California and the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to obtain radar images of it. Amazingly these images showed that what we had observed as a solitary moving point of light and had assumed to...

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Hannes Gröller was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Ursa Major with the University of Arizona 90 inch Bok telescope on Kitt Peak when he discovered a faint moving object surrounded by a tiny gas and dust cloud called a coma. May 19, 2028 comet C/2025 D1  (Groeller) reaches its closest point to the Sun some 14.1 times the Earth-Sun distance and thus sets the record for the comet which stays furtherest from the Sun.After rounding the Sun comet C/2025 D1 (Groeller) will head back into truly deep space perhaps never to return.

Using the University of Arizona's Large Binocular Telescope atop Mt. Graham in southern Arizona, Dr. Paul Wiegert of Western University in Canada, led a team of astronomers who have determined that a 2 mile diameter object bucks the solar system traffic by traveling in a direction backwards to all of the planets. In their March 30, 2017 article in the journal Nature, these astronomers confirm that 2015 BZ509, travels about Jupiter on a path in a direction opposite to nearly every other member of our solar system. Amazingly it has avoided a collision with Jupiter by using the giant planet's gravity to maintain a...

One little known and infrequently observed phenomenon in the natural night sky are “bright nights” during which observers have reported being able to read a book  when both the Sun and Moon are both well below the horizon.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was observing with our team's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon in Arizona when he discovered a relatively large space rock, 2017 FD157, which can theoretically come closer to the Earth's surface than the communications satellites. We don't have enough data to predict when it will make a very close approach to us. What we do know is that 2017 FD157's orbit and that of the Earth nearly intersect coming to about Earth diameter of each other. For 2017 FD157 to make a very close approach to our planet, both of them would need to be...

On a single February night my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jacqui Fazekas reported  the discovery of 5 Earth approaching objects using our small but mighty Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona.Rest assured that on any given night there are asteroid hunters on the look out for seriously dangerous space rocks.

Asteroid hunters have become aware of the many small space rocks which come near Earth because of improvements made to telescopes, cameras, and computer analysis software. Recently, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rose Matheny used her skills and a new camera to discover the second small space rock in 32 days which came between the communications satellites and the Earth's surface. Rose spotted her 10 to 12 foot diameter space rock as it approached the Earth more than a million miles away with its little full moon face pointing towards us. 31 hours later, her discovery, 2017 GM, came to within 10,100 miles of Earth as...

As the Earth travels in its orbit around the Sun it collides with objects called meteoroids traveling through space.  These tiny members of the solar system range in size from dust grains to objects a meter in diameter.By becoming part of the GMN’s network , your data will help to discover and document meteor showers, aid in identifying the parent cometary objects, and in some cases help to identify locations to search for meteorites.

In 2013 a 56 foot diameter space rock exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia releasing the energy of 450 kt of TNT and filled local hospitals with some of the 1,500 people who were injured. Fortunately no one died. In 1908 a 200 ft diameter meteor exploded over a largely unpopulated region at Tunguska, Siberia knocking down trees over a 750 square mile area. If it had hit over a populated area it could have caused a million casualties. The approximately 250 people in the USA that NASA has working on asteroid detection and ways of mitigating the effects of an asteroid impact have plenty to do. We still have...