Travelers In The Night

Asteroids which approach Earth from inside of our orbit about the Sun are often difficult to discover and may represent a unique threat to our home planet. My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered one of these stealthy asteroids with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow AZ as it streaked through the constellation of Libra at 13 miles/second. Fortunately it will not strike the Earth i...

In the cold deserts of Antarctica nature collects meteorites as ice sheets carrying space rocks are pushed up against mountains. High speed winds remove the ice leaving dozens to hundreds of meteorites stranded in an area often as small as a football field.

The hunt is on for Earth like planets which are close enough for us to study in detail. The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS for short, is observing nearby stars looking for planet revealing dips in brightness, which occurs when a planet passes between its star and our line of sight. Recently TESS discovered a planet, now named TOI 700 d , orbiting a red dwarf star in the conste...

Before artificial lighting many people knew the night sky the way humans of today know their favorite TV channels. There are still places where you can view the naturally appearing sky. There is a new accessible night sky viewing area in the Gila National Forest about 75 miles north and west of Silver City, New Mexico. It is called the Cosmic Campground. Check it out at cosmiccampground.org. It is...

On his first night of solo observing with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Kacper Wierzchos discovered 8 new Earth approaching objects. Theoretically Kacper's smallest discovery, a 20 foot diameter space rock, can pass close enough to Earth that it might enter our atmosphere producing a light show in the night sky and perhaps a few fragments for meteor...

The history of our part of the Universe is written with a fine point in the space rocks which orbit our Sun. Some of them carry small grains of material from the cloud of gas and dust from which our solar system formed. They also carry clocks. Naturally occurring radio active potassium in space rocks decays into argon gas atoms which are trapped until the rock becomes molten. By measuring the pota...

SpaceX's new rockets fuel the dream of visiting some of the planet Mars' unique and spectacular wonders. Today you can visit the NASA Mars Curiosity Rover and/or the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter website and participate in the exploration of our next door neighbor. You could amaze yourself by discovering something new on one of the images of the surface of Mars. It happens.

About one out of a thousand meteorites that you find on Earth started out on the Moon. They were given escape velocity from the Moon as a result of the impact of an asteroid or comet. These lunar space rocks orbit the Sun or Earth and most of them eventually end on our planet.

Assuming the first potentially hazardous asteroid of 2020 has a chemical composition similar to the stony meteorites we find on Earth, it could contain about a million metric tons of metals like iron, nickel, platinum, gold, and other rare minerals and be worth 2.6 billion dollars on the terrestrial metals market.

From the dawn of recorded history, comets have been viewed as the bringers of everything from gloom and doom to water and life. In reality, comets are a sample of material which was present in the cloud of gas and dust which condensed to form our Sun and its planetary system. Until recently a comet's nucleus has remained a mystery enveloped in a veil of gas and dust.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Leo when he spotted a faint fuzzy looking object with a tail moving through the night sky. A recent scientific study suggests that in the next few thousand years, the process creating Carson's discovery could produce a comet 10 to 100 times more active than Halley's comet and be visible, to the humans who surv...

Radar beams that are reflected from your car as you travel down a highway reveal your speed and direction. In a similar way, scientists using a telescope in Chile have discovered two planets orbiting a nearby reddish star by measuring the tiny motions they produce in their Sun as they orbit it.

A recently discovered asteroid spends most of its time high above the plane of the solar system far from our Sun. Unknown asteroids on such a path worry asteroid hunters since one could appear from out of nowhere and be on a collision path with planet Earth. Fortunately the odds that this will occur are vanishingly small. The prospect of a suddenly appearing dangerous celestial visitor keeps my te...

What would your day be like if you woke up and there were no functioning artificial Earth satellites? All of us have become used to finding our way with GPS satellites, watching satellite TV, obtaining up to date satellite weather information, and buying gas with a credit card which is processed with a satellite transaction. The geomagnetic disturbance from a mega solar flare could produce electro...

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne, discovered a potentially dangerous and perhaps valuable asteroid with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, AZ as it streaked through the constellation of Leo. Though Teddy's discovery is unlikely to ever strike the Earth, someday, 2019 LZ1 may become a valuable source of raw materials for space colonists.

When a distant planet passes in front of its star some of the star's radiation goes through the planet's atmosphere. The pattern of colors or wavelengths which are present and missing tells us what is in the planet's atmosphere. The NASA Kepler Spacecraft has discovered more than a half dozen Earth like planets which pass between their star and the Earth. It appears likely that a way to discover p...

In 2019, asteroid hunters set a new record by discovering 2,433 Earth approaching objects including 85 which could potentially become a threat to planet Earth. Fortunately, none of these 2,433 nearby celestial neighbors, having an average diameter of 300 feet, is on a collision course with humanity.

Suppose that a space alien were so far from us that our Sun appears as a tiny point of light in it's night sky. What would the space alien receive if it pointed it's radio antennas at our Sun?

Over the past 50 years, in the interior of Australian meteorites, scientists have discovered a large variety of extraterrestrial organic substances. These include amino acids, sugars, alcohols, and a variety of aromatic hydrocarbons. Other meteorites have been found to contain vitamin B3 and even sugars leading to speculation that meteor bombardments could have brought life's ingredients to a ster...

In the 50 years that human made Travelers In The Night have been visiting the planet Mars we have discovered a wealth of interesting information about our neighbor in space. Mars has a surface which about the size of the land areas on Earth. It has has a climate which has changed dramatically over the eons. We have literally just begun to scratch its surface. NASA has begun planning for the Mars 2...

Recently, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate David Rankin's backyard all sky camera in Tucson, Arizona recorded a brilliant fireball meteor which took a leisurely 15 seconds to cross the entire sky. It was last seen by a trucker on Interstate 10 near Wilcox, Arizona as it headed in the direction of southwestern New Mexico.

If a space alien were to peer around the edge of the Moon from its base on the far side it could see our lights at night and perhaps even the smoke from our factories during the day. It could also pick up radio and TV signals created by humans. An interesting question is could a space alien detect planet Earth and learn something about it if it were so far away that our Sun were only a tiny point...

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Hannes Groeller was asteroid hunting, in the constellation of Hydra, with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he discovered a rather distant comet. On its current path it cannot get closer than four times the distance to our Sun from us, making it a very faint fuzzy ball with a tail in our night sky. This situation could change when 2019 V2 Groeller co...

Currently, women are exploring the planet Mars. Dr. Joy Crisp is the Deputy Project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory. Nicole Spanovich is the Curiosity Mars Rover Science Operations Team Chief. There is also a whole team of women who have constructed a Mars like garden park in Pasadena California to exercise the rovers so that we know how to operate them on Mars. There are unnamed dozens...

Recently a group of high inclination asteroids hiding in Jupiter's shadow have been identified. Encounters with the giant planet's gravity could cause some of them to experience orbital changes making them a threat to Earth. Stay tuned