Travelers In The Night

An asteroid is exiled to the outer regions of the solar system during Jupiter's rampaging tack away from the Sun long ago. During that process enough material was left in Jupiter's wake to form Venus, Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt as we know them today.

The number of possible places in a galaxy for life as we know it to develop depends on the number of stars which have planets, the presence of necessary elements such as iron, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, and the freedom from nearby supernova which could sterilize an otherwise habitable planet. The good news, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico has reported the discovery more than 150,000 galaxies which are rich with the three life enabling properties. The bad news is we will get monologues and not dialogs since it will take 9 million years for radio waves from the closest one to reach us and another 9 million years for our answer to make the trip back.

Modern technology provides us with stunning views of objects in the Universe in wavelengths invisible to our eyes, however, nothing is as moving and thought provoking as looking into deep space with your very own eyes.

A number of blogs and postings on the web have been spreading the false rumor that there is an asteroid which is about to strike the Earth producing catastrophic damage. There are also recurrent false rumors that the government or governments are hiding the fact that a catastrophe is about to occur. Neither of these has a shred of evidence to back them up.

To find planets close to home NASA has launched TESS the Transiting Exoplanet Satellite which will monitor more than 200,000 nearby, stars over the entire sky to detect the tiny dips in light caused when a planet passes in front of it's star. The TESS era will be a most exciting time as humans discover and are able determine the properties of relatively nearby habitatable worlds and dream about what might be living in our neighborhood of the Milky Way.

Recently the  3.5 meter Space Surveillance Telescope located at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico found an an asteroid which has been named 2015 PU228. It is currently the asteroid which is most likely to collide with planet Earth in this century.  Don't worry, its closest approach to our home planet will not be untill January 15, 2081.  If there is an ideal close approaching asteroid, 2015 PU228 is it.  Humans have discovered this object long before it comes near to our home giving plenty of time to deflect it if that becomes necessary.  Serious scientific and engineering studies are currently underway to investigate various asteroid impact mitigation strategies.  These range from using a solar sail to give the problem asteroid a gentle push to setting off a buried nuclear weapon to create a rocket type thrust which will cause the potential impactor to miss planet Earth.

n the early evening of January 17, 2018 six hundred and seventy four observers in 11 States and Canada reported a fireball meteor streaking across the sky to the American Meteor Society. To find freshly fallen meteorites visit the American Meteor Society's website but do not hunt for meteorites on private land without permission.

If Earth had a mountain about four times higher than Mt. Everest this hypothetical mountain's summit would have the thin atmosphere, UV radiation from the Sun, and the temperature extremes approaching the hostile environment to be found on the planet Mars. 

So far asteroid hunters have discovered about 8,000 of the 25,000, large, potentially hazardous asteroids, suspected to exist, leaving 17,000 more to be found. For this reason, NASA has designed and proposed the NEOCam spacecraft to give us the ability to find them before they find us.

The relentless pull of the Earth's gravity on the Moon causes it to always point the same side towards us. The Moon's slight wobble has allowed us to catch glimpses of a small sliver of the Moon's far side. In 1968 the first humans to see the far side with their own eyes were the astronauts of Apollo 8. Perhaps someday humans will put a base on the far side of the Moon where powerful telescopes would be unaffected by light and electronic noise from Earth. 

If you set your mind to it, you can find and hold a sample of an asteroid, called a meteorite, which has landed on the Earth's surface. On the other hand, watching major meteor showers will allow you to see but not touch comet dust as it enters and burns up in the Earth's atmosphere.

Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski found a faint moving point of light in the night sky.  After his discovery observations were posted on the Minor Planet Center's website it was observed by 10 other telescopes around the world and given the name 2013 US10.  It has taken additional observations to reveal that Kowalski's object is not an asteroid but rather a comet which came closest to the Sun on November 15, 2015. After that its speed will be so great that it will leave our solar system never to return. Its path is not in the direction of any known star making it likely that it will continue its cold lonely journey till the end of time.

When Asteroid Hunters find a relatively large asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth, the challenge is to change its path to make it miss our home planet.

"I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.""Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things"These are only two of the quotes attributed to Sir Isaac Newton.

Greg's comet comes into our neighborhood once per human lifetime and spends most of it's time in the lonely space high above or far below the rest of the members of our solar system.

Imagine a monster telescope that can collect 37 million times more light than can enter your eye.  A huge telescope with this capability, planned by the European scientific community, will sit atop a 10,000 foot high mountain in the high dry desert of northern Chile.

Fireballs are meteors which become brighter than the planet Venus and can sometimes be seen in the daytime. If you are lucky to see a fireball send in your report to the American Meteor Society and become a citizen scientist.

For 16 years, since its discovery at Lowell Observatory, humans knew 1999 JD6 only as a strange, spinning, moving point of light in the night sky. It orbits the Sun once every 303 days on a path that brings it relatively close to Mercury, Venus, and Earth.  In the far distant future this small world is likely to collide with one of these planets, or the Sun, or be ejected completely from the solar system.  A RADAR movie made with a radio telescope reveals 1999 JD6 to be two asteroids in contact with each other giving the object a peanut shape.  Strangely enough 1 in 6 Earth approaching objects are like 1999 JD6 in that they are really two separate objects whose tiny forces of gravity keep them in contact as they orbit the Sun. 

To give you an idea of the asteroid traffic in our neighborhood, on a mostly cloudy night, through holes in the clouds, in a space of less than 2 hours, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski posted 7 new close approaching asteroid discoveries on the Minor Planet Center's Near Earth Object Confirmation Page.

Our everyday world is in the thin web of life that surrounds our planet. We see living organisms made possible by solar energy, water, air, and nutrients from the Earth. Maybe all living creatures are not in an environment similar to ours. When looking for life in other places in the Universe we can take some clues from living systems in extreme environments on our own planet.