Travelers In The Night

An interstellar traveler visits our neighborhood on its tour of the Milky Way.

Have you ever wondered how a comet is discovered and named?

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

Over geologic times, the impacts of objects from space have produced significant changes to our planet's biosphere. Earth threatening asteroids present a complicated challenge due to the wide range of compositions, sizes, orbital paths, and warning times that we can encounter.

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.

The Tunguska [ Tun·gu·ska] event occurred on June 30, 1908. It appears to have been caused by a small asteroid or comet which exploded 3-6 miles above the Earth's surface. It is the largest impact event in recorded history.

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.

Scientific evidence suggests that it was a bad day for non-avian dinosaurs when a large asteroid or a comet crashed into the Earth about 66 million years ago. Some species, including mammals, flourished under the changed conditions after the Chicxulub event. It is interesting to speculate that the rise of the human race may have been enabled by an asteroid impact.

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.

Using 2 telescopes near Tucson Arizona, the NASA funded, Catalina Sky Survey searches for Earth Approaching Objects. The method is to take 4 images of the same part of the sky spaced out over 45 minutes. These images are searched with computer programs to identify moving objects.

The discovery of two large ghostly neighbors approximately 65,000 by 45,000 miles in size at the L4 and L5 sites approximately 250,000 miles from both the Earth and Moon.

Looking into the sky on a clear-dark night, have you wondered what it would be like to travel in deep space?

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.

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.

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.

Have you wondered what would happen if a rock from space landed near one of our large cities? We got a clue on February 15, 2013 when a large fireball appeared in the sky over Russia.

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.

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.

Don't count on the decrease in solar activity to save you from human produced global warming, however something potentially important to you is happening on the Sun.

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.

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.

To give you an idea of the celestial traffic in our neighborhood, on a recent clear night, using our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Hannes Groller posted 20 new objects on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Object Confirmation Page. In the future five of these asteroids may become a valuable source of raw materials for Martian colonists.

In the fictional Star Trek series, Vulcan, Spock's home planet was imagined to orbit the A component of the triple star system 40 Eridani [Eri-dani ]. Recently astronomers using the Dharma Planet Survey 50 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona have discovered that there is indeed an actual planet, named HD26965 b, with mass of 8.5 times that of Earth orbiting the star 40 Eridani A once every 42.38...

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered his third comet, Comet C/2018 R4 (Fuls). It is now on its way back into deep space. Given the climate change Earth is experiencing it is hard to predict the state of our planet and humanity when Comet Fuls returns in 7,500 AD.

Asteroid Hunters keep careful track of nearly 2,000 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids [PHAs] to make sure that they are no threat to humanity. The recent discovery of two new PHAs reminds us that there are many still out there to be discovered and followed.