Travelers In The Night

Friday the 13th appears to continue to be a lucky day for the human race. When astronomers first discovered Apophis in 2004 it appeared possible that this 3 million ton, 1,200 foot diameter asteroid traveling at 8 mi/s could impact our planet creating a crater a several miles diameter and more than a half mile deep. Additional observations over the years have eliminated this possibility as Apophis...

The Lagrange point L4 is 60° ahead of Mars whereas L5 is 60° behind Mars on the red planet’s orbital path about the Sun. An object placed at either of these locations is trapped gravitationally and is likely to remain there indefinitely. The Mars L4 and L5 locations could provide a permanent place for staging and resupply missions to Mars and would give humans a different view of space weather and...

To reach the vicinity of the nearest star, 24 trillion miles away, in less than 20 years, an interstellar space probe would have to travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Newton's laws of motion, published 300 years ago, predict that the greater the mass of an object the greater is the force required to increase it's velocity. In order to alleviate the need for the virtually unaff...

50 years ago scientists found that Chlorofluorocarbons or CFC chemicals in widespread use in refrigeration, air conditioning , and hair spray were beginning to damage the ozone layer in the Earth’s stratosphere which blocks harmful Solar UVB radiation from reaching the surface. The world wide response was the Montreal Protocol banning these chemicals from being released into the atmosphere. It sav...

Looking at the stars on a clear dark night, far from the artificial air glow humanity creates, have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel in truly deep interstellar space? 40 years after their launches in 1977, your representatives, the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are in the vast space between the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Aboard each Voyager is a Golden Record time ca...

The planets, millions of asteroids, tens of thousands of comets, distant icy worlds, and countless other bits and pieces of material orbit the Sun. A group of such co-orbiting objects is called the Taurid complex or swarm. It consists of Comet 2P/Enke, a number of near Earth asteroids, and the meteor stream which produces the Taurid meteor shower every October and November.

When the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa [Hi ya Boo sa] visited the near Earth asteroid Itokawa in 2005 it found this 2000 foot by 800 foot elliptical world to have a variety of surface features. Instead of being a solid object like some asteroids, Itokawa is a rubble pile of boulders and pebbles held together by it's tiny gravity. The total volume of pebbles seems to be comparable to the volume of l...

Astronomers have discovered some 1.4 million asteroids.  Approximately 35,000 of these space rocks come near Earth.  Less than 40 of them are classified as being Atira asteroids whose orbits lie entirely within the Earth’s orbit about the Sun. Only one of these, asteroid number 594913 named  'Ayló'chaxnim (eye-LAW-chax-nim ) has an orbit which is entirely within the orbit of the planet Venus. 

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...

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 a...

 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. Mana...

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...

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 Advanc...

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...

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 Ce...

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, Hunga...

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 the...

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...

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...

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 amputate...

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...

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 mis...