Travelers In The Night

Comets Travel Between Stars. An interstellar traveler visits our neighborhood on its tour of the Milky Way. Comet Lemmon will continue on a hyperbolic path into deep space. In 2043 it will be further than the average distance that Pluto is from our Sun. Eons from now comet C/2018 U1 (Lemmon) may enter another solar system and be tracked by intelligent beings as it continues its tour of the Milky W...

Asteroids are part of our environment. An SUV sized space rock has spent eons traveling through the silent vacuum of space. In the past 50 years, without humans being aware of its existence, it has made 29 close approaches to planet Earth and 11 visits to the vicinity our sister planet Venus. In the relatively near future asteroid hunters will be able to find more dspace rocks like this one before...

The discovery of a Jupiter family comet whose fate is to become a garden variety main belt asteroid.

Aten asteroids pose a threat as well as an economic opportunity for humans.

On Halloween night while observing with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona I discovered 21 space rocks streaking through the night sky. The most interesting one could be the destination of asteroid miners.

Every year asteroid hunters discover about a hundred objects which are larger than 450 feet in diameter and come closer than 20 times the Moon's distance from us. We call these potentially hazardous asteroids. In 2015 my group the Catalina Sky Survey discovered 21 of them. It was thus exciting news to our team, when, recently, our newest team member Greg Leonard discovered three of them in rapid s...

As asteroid hunters equipment and skills continue to improve we will be able to find and track some of these tiny impactors and perhaps be able to suggest where to find pieces of one of them on the ground.

In 2013 my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Steve Larson discovered a space rock streaking through the night sky. For the next 3 days this object was observed by telescopes in California, England, Chile, and New Mexico and given the name 2013 TX68. About 10 days after being discovered, this small asteroid became invisible to human telescopes as it moved towards the Sun with increasing amounts of its d...

Space is not all that far away. If a powerful solar eruption in 2012 had happened a week earlier, the blast of radiation would have caused wide spread power blackouts disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket as well as the water and sewer systems which rely on electric pumps.

On consecutive nights my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski discovered two very close approaching asteroids. One of Richard's discoveries, 2016 BY14 must be made out of pretty tough stuff since when it was closest to the Sun it received more than twice the solar energy which heats the surface of Mercury to 800 F. Asteroid hunter's continue to need to track 2016 BY14 to make sure that it...

In a dance of unequal partners the Earth and Moon orbit a common center of gravity which itself travels about the Sun. Leading and trailing the moon's twisted path by 60 degrees, are the L4 and L5 Lagrange points, where gravitational forces create a bowl in space time in which an object will remain until it is disturbed. The discovery of two large ghostly neighbors approximately 65,000 by 45,000 m...

Humans are searching the Universe to discover life outside of our Planet. You could wake up any morning to the news that humans have found life beyond our planet. It could be fossils of ancient life on Mars. It could be the discovery of micro organisms in one of the salty oceans on the asteroid Ceres, the moons of Jupiter, Europa and Ganymede, and/or Enceladus the strange little moon of Saturn. It...

Since 1900 there have been 11 close approaches by asteroids larger than 300 feet in diameter. One of them, the Tunguska Object was about 400 feet in diameter. It entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded with such force that it blew down trees over an 800 square mile area in 1908. Hopefully that will not happen again anytime soon.

Astronomers are searching the solar system for new planets. Calculations based on the orbits of the distant objects out near Pluto suggest the existence of a 10 Earth mass planet twenty times farther from the Sun than the planet Neptune. At its great distance the hypothetical new "Planet 9" would take 20,000 years or so to make a single orbit about the Sun. The search for "Planet 9" has begun. Unt...

My team, the Catalina Sky Survey, would not find a single asteroid without Steward Observatory's Mountain Lemmon Operations, or Mtn Ops for short. Bottom line is that Mtn Ops does whatever it takes to make our Asteroid Hunting facilities continue to function.

The Cosmic Campground is one of the last places where one can experience the natural night sky in the lower 48.

Aten Asteroids are stealthy space rocks which can be dim and hard to detect since for most of their path about the Sun their illuminated side is facing away from us.

My Catalina Sky Survey team mate Greg Leonard finds an interesting potentially hazardous asteroid. Since asteroid hunter's main concern are the large space rocks which we don't know about, my team the Catalina Sky Survey continues to scan the skies 24 nights per month using two telescopes located in the Catalina Mountains near Tucson, Arizona.

Ten hours and 46 minutes after my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard discovered a Toyota RAV4 sized space rock, now named 2018 UA, streaking through the constellation of Pegasus at 8.8 miles/second, this tiny asteroid passed less than 1/2 the distance of the communications satellites to the surface of planet Earth

Aten asteroids spend most of their time inside the Earth's orbit, come close to us, travel at speeds our rockets can match, and may be an economical source of raw materials for space exploration.

Until recently the discovery of very close approaching asteroids was rare, however, due to improvements in telescopes, cameras, and computers asteroid hunters are now finding a significant number of these small celestial visitors to our neighborhood every month

A mysterious piece of space hardware comes back to Earth.

Asteroid hunters are developing the equipment and skills which enable them to predict the impact of tiny space rocks. Thus in the future you may have the opportunity to witness the light show an impactor creates and perhaps even obtain clues which will enable you to find a piece of it on the ground.

Humans are creating a new geological epoch

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Pegasus with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when he discovered a 2,000 foot diameter space rock streaking through the night sky. The extremely remote possibility that a big one might have our number on it keeps asteroid hunters going to their telescopes.