Travelers In The Night

Imagine being under a clear natural night sky, with no moon, waiting to see stars down to the horizon, the Milky Way, star clusters, planets, the zodiacal light, comets, and other wonders of the natural night sky. Suddenly, you are shocked to find the night sky crawling with hundreds of artificial satellites bright enough to be seen in a light polluted city like Chicago.

It may surprise you to know that there are more than 180 confirmed impact craters on our planet. It is likely that many more have been erased by the actions of wind and water. An asteroid smashing into a water rich world like Earth or Mars can generate reservoirs of hot water which may be a good place for early life to start. It could also preserve ancient life forms in impact glass. Perhaps impact craters are the places to search for evidence that life has existed on Mars.

Statistically, asteroid hunters are thought to have discovered 90 to 95% of the Earth approaching asteroids larger than about 3,000 feet in diameter. There are thought to be at least 50 more out there. Where are they?

The asteroid Psyche is named for a Greek mythological figure. It was discovered in 1852 as a moving point of light in the night sky. This small world is about 155 miles in diameter and orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter every 5 years. A visit to Psyche would allow us to directly study a naked planet's core and provide clues as to the nature of what is beneath our feet.

In 2018 Asteroid Hunters discovered 1839 previously unknown space rocks as they passed through our celestial neighborhood. The largest and most dangerous can come to a mere 1,000 miles from humanity. Fortunately, it is not likely to do so until after 2,200 AD.

The Kepler Space Craft has found tiny regular dips in light from a star which is about 500 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus. The dips in brightness come about when planets pass between their star and the Earth. This particular star has at least 5 planets. One of them is named Kepler-186f. It is similar to the Earth in size and is located at a distance from its star which may allow life as we know it to exist. This newly discovered cousin to our Earth orbits a M dwarf star which is very much cooler than our Sun. Its year is only 130 days long

An asteroid has been discovered that comes very near to the Sun where it receives 12.6 times the radiation that heats the planet Mercury's surface to 800 F. This hardy space rock has made this trip many times and is likely to be made of extremely tough materials and in the future could prove to be a valuable source of raw materials for human space colonists.

On Earth Day Astronauts Dr. Ed Lu, Tom Jones, and Bill Anders announced that between 2000 and 2013, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization Network detected 26 explosions on Earth ranging in energy from 1-600 kilotons of TNT. None of them were caused by nuclear explosions, but rather by asteroid impacts. Most of these asteroids exploded high in the atmosphere and did no damage on the ground. These data provide a measure of the frequency at which large space rocks enter our atmosphere.

Fortunately, on its current path, the most dangerous asteroid discovered in 2018 cannot come closer than 12.5 times the Moon's distance to humanity. Not to worry. Asteroid Hunters have not found a single space rock on a collision path with planet Earth.

To the human eye the night sky is a source of mystery and wonder. Our ancestors knew it well. There is a connection to the cosmos that is hard to describe which you will achieve by knowing the names of some of the bright stars. As the seasons progress, the feeling of greeting an old friend is generated, when one of the stars you know first appears in the evening sky. Scientifically we know that the Universe is evolving in many ways. Some of these changes are apparent to the naked eye, however, over the course of the human life span there is constancy in the patterns we see in the night sky.

Being a near Earth asteroid is already a lonely existence since the paths of these small space rocks seldom bring them near any other material objects as they travel about the Sun. The loneliest asteroids of all could be of interest to asteroid miners when one of them makes one of its rare visits to our neighborhood.

The asteroid Itokawa [e toe kawa] is as odd as a barbell with a 29 lb weight on one end and and 18 lb weight on the other. It was discovered in 1998 as a moving point of light in the night sky by the LINEAR project in New Mexico. It was named for the Japanese scientist whose rockets put his nations first satellite in orbit in 1970.

During a recent 30 day period, 11 small space rocks passed closer to us than the Moon. If one of them were to enter our atmosphere and you were directly under such an impact you would hear a loud noise as this tiny object exploded 40 to 60,000 feet above you. The blast could break a few windows and would be likely to create objects for meteorite hunters to discover.

Aleksei Dozorov, a motorist in Russia stated “You can get into your car without your pants on, but never get into a car without a dash cam,” . This attitude is caused by poor highway law enforcement. It is why many motorists around the Russian city of Chelyabinsk [Chel ya binsk] were able to capture images of a huge meteor flying through the sky.

Humans are slamming projectiles into space rocks. These experiments will give us the know how to deal with a dangerous space rock which has our number on it.

One million human lifetimes ago an asteroid impact was at least partially responsible for eliminating the dinosaurs. This event has allowed our race to evolve to its present stateThose of us in the asteroid hunting community are also looking for the near Earth asteroids whose impact would leave a hurricane sized foot print on the Earth's surface or produce a mega tsunami if it landed in the Ocean. We are searching the skies to provide the warning time necessary to mitigate the effects of an asteroid impact.

In 1972 Apollo 16 astronauts took an ultraviolet image of the Earth from the Moon which shows that like the Sun ,the Earth too, has a faint corona of gas surrounding it. Scientists are just beginning to explore how Earth's glow relates to our weather and climate.

Imagine a world that is so far from our Sun that it receives less than 1/5000 of the heat and light that makes our life possible. If your were standing on it, you could cover the Sun with the tip of a ball point pen held at arms length.

Traveling an additional billion miles beyond Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft is now sending back data on 2014 MU69, a strange snow man shaped object which orbits the Sun once every 298 years. The New Horizons is spacecraft is likely to continue its lonely odyssey until the end of time.

A human with normal vision standing on Mars would see the Earth and our Moon as a double evening star. An observer on Mars would also see the distance between the Earth and Moon change as they revolve around a common center of gravity. Perhaps one day humans will set up a base on the red planet and will be able to view this beautiful celestial display.