Travelers In The Night

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.

In the space of only four days, my Catalina Sky Survey teammates, Brian Africano, Alex Gibbs, and Greg Leonard, discovered three Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. Searching for such a large space rock on an impact trajectory with planet Earth is what keeps my team, the Catalina Sky Survey, going to our four telescopes, 24 nights per month, when the moon isn't too bright, in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson Arizona.

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 discovered. For this reason, NASA has designed and proposed the NEOCam spacecraft to give us the ability to find them before they find us.

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.

Theoretically, If an asteroid on a collision course with our planet could be slowed sufficiently it could be made to pass behind our planet as it orbits the Sun. It is not as easy as we would like.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard's discovery of, 2018 FO5, a three football field diameter asteroid that can come closer than our Moon is a reminder that we need to keep searching for the many thousands of Potentially Hazardous asteroids larger than 500 feet in diameter which are likely to exist.

Perhaps C/2018 F3 (Johnson) is an interstellar visiting Comet and is thus a sample of a place currently beyond our reach.

On Saint Patrick's Day I discovered a comet which I share with my wife Annie Grauer.

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.

The large dangerous asteroids that we don't know about are what keep asteroid hunters going to the telescope.

Tonight, even though the chances are extremely slim, an asteroid hunter could find a sizable asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth.If we have decades warning, the potential impactor's arrival time could be changed by impacting the dangerous object with a high velocity mass or if we have less time we will need to nuke it which will either blow it to bits or give it a rocket like push.

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles above the Earth's surface they would rendezvous with their asteroid mining spacecraft which will be their home for the next five years or so.

A partnership of humans and computers will help to minimize the damage when asteroid hunters find a space rock with our number on it.

Although no comet nucleus impact on the Earth has been conclusively identified, there is some evidence that suggests the 1908 Tunguska event in Russia, which knocked down trees over a 770 square mile area, could have been caused by a fragment of Comet Encke. However there is no doubt that the Earth's collision with dust and small debris left trailing from comets produces some of the meteor showers we enjoy so much.

In 2017 observers in 50 countries at 440 different observatories made nearly 19 million observations of asteroids and comets which enable scientists to calculate where about 800,000 objects will be in the future.

During the only 3 clears hours of his first night solo as an asteroid hunter, my new Catalina Sky Survey teammate Brian Africano discovered two new Earth approaching asteroids with our Schmidt Telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona. Since one of Brian's discoveries is almost 300 feet in diameter, astronomers at 18 different observatories around the world stayed on it for more than 68 hours, after Brian posted his discovery observations, to determine a reasonable orbit for it.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls was observing, in the constellation Lynx, with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona , when within the space of only 35 minutes, he discovered two small space rocks well before they made very close approaches to Earth.

Starman and Tesla will continue to orbit the Sun for millions of years to come as a physical testament to human ingenuity and our sense of humor.

A large asteroid approached Earth from the direction of the Sun with little advanced warning.

Most of the humans on planet Earth have never witnessed that the natural night sky is not dark; but rather it is alive with it's own lights. See for yourself by visiting a natural night sky location near you.