Episodes
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Most humans live in cities under a dome of light pollution. They have never witnessed that the natural night sky is not dark; but rather it is alive with it's own lights.To see for yourself, pick a natural night sky location near you like the Cosmic Campground International Dark Sky Sanctuary in New Mexico and recruit a friend.
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2008 TC3 was discovered by my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski on October 6, 2008. It is the first of only 9 asteroids which humans have tracked traveling through space, have seen exploding in our atmosphere, and have been able walk up to pieces on the Earth's surface.
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Episodes manquant?
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One of the joys of visiting a natural night sky location on a clear dark of the Moon night is to observe meteors streaking across the sky. It took more than 2,000 years for humans to figure out at meteors and comets are related.
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Recently, my Catalina Team Captain Eric Christensen discovered a potentially hazardous 3,000 foot diameter asteroid, 2017 CH1. Asteroid hunters are discovering less than one asteroid of this size or greater per month. Eric's discovery, 2017 CH1, has an orbit which can bring it to about twice the Moon's distance from planet Earth. Although it will not come anywhere near Earth in the foreseeable future, asteroid hunters will continue to monitor 2017 CH1's orbit to make sure that it remains no threat to planet Earth.
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About 66 million years ago a 6 to 9 mile diameter asteroid traveling at approximately 12 miles per second slammed into the Gulf of Mexico off of the modern coastline of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Ants survived, flourished, and developed agriculture while other species went extinct.
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A winter storm hit Mt. Lemmon, Arizona closing access to the observatory by blowing over trees and producing large snow drifts. After the Mountain Operations Crew cleared the road, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was able to make his way to the top and discover an asteroid which could be visited by human astronauts. Greg's new 120 foot diameter space rock , named 2017 BV93, spends most of its time between Earth and Venus as it orbits the Sun once every 346 days.
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My Catalina Sky Survey teammate David Rankin’s regular job is asteroid hunting at the telescope and creating software to improve detection as well as to better keep track of space rocks that come near our home planet. During his time off, in his backyard in Tucson, Arizona, David has built and operates equipment to track meteors, a seismograph to detect Earthquakes, and a small observatory to discover asteroids.
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If Lunar and Martian colonists are to have chips and salsa they will need grow their own tomatoes. To test methods to do this German Aerospace Center or DLR has developed the EU:CROPIS satellite which will be launched by a Space-X Falcon 9 rocket into low Earth orbit sometime in 2017. Once in orbit the satellite will be programmed to rotate at two different speeds on its own axis to produce Lunar gravity for 6 months and then Martian gravity for the next 6 months. Inside the satellite tomato seeds will germinate and grow under the watchful eyes of 16 onboard cameras. A trickle filter containing the Euglena [U gleen a] microbes will use synthetic urine to produce fertilizer for the tomato plants. The half plant half animal Euglena microorganisms will produce oxygen on the satellite and protect the plants against excessive ammonia build up. LED lights will provide the day night cycle required by both the plants and the Euglena microbes. The separate Lunar and Martian space green houses will operate in a pressure tank to simulate Earth's atmosphere. These experiments will be carefully controlled and monitored by humans on the ground.
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My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Kacper Wierzchos was asteroid hunting with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when he discovered and reported a fuzzy looking unknown object in a set of his images. There is no chance of an impact from Kacper's discovery, P/2019 Y3 (Catalina), in the foreseeable future.
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Comet C2/2015 V2 Johnson was discovered by my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jess Johnson on November 3, 2015. It travels on a hyperbolic path around the Sun which is highly inclined to the plane where the planets and most of the asteroids travel. Jess's comet's path takes it from deep space into the inner solar system slightly further from the Sun than the planet Mars. Although it will not get closer to the Earth than about 75 million miles it may out gas enough material to make it visible to the naked eye. Observers in the northern hemisphere will have their best chance to view Comet Johnson in April and May of 2017 while those south of the equator will be able to observe it until early 2018. Jess's Comet will come closest to the Sun in June of 2017 and then be slung into deep space by the Sun's Gravity. In February of 2037 Jess's comet will be further than Pluto's average distance to the Sun and be invisible to human telescopes as it moves in the direction a star 417 light years away in the constellation of Eridanus. It will take more than 12 million years to get to the vicinity of that distant star.
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My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jacqueline Fazekas was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Aquarius with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon Arizona when she discovered a tiny asteroid which would impact the Earth in about 10 hours.
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My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls was using the new hundred million pixel camera on our team's Schmidt telescope located on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona, when he discovered 2017 AG13. It passes near the Earth's orbit twice a year on its own 345 day path around the Sun. When Carson spotted it, 9 lunar distances from him it was heading in our direction at about nine and a half miles per second. Three days later it came to less than two times the distance the Moon's distance from us. Carson's new space rock, 2017 AG13's orbit, can bring it to less than 2,000 miles from the surface of our planet. It will not come near the Earth again until 2091 and will not strike the Earth in the foreseeable future. 2017 AG13 is slightly larger than the small asteroid which exploded over Chelyabinsk Russia, creating a sonic boom that injured nearly 1,500 people in February of 2013. If it had been on an impact trajectory, Carson's early discovery, would have given humans the time to calculate where it would hit and thus be able to put out a warning for people in the affected area to stay away from doors and windows. Less than three weeks later Carson was using the same equipment when he discovered another small space rock, 2017 BH30, which came to a bit more than an Earth's circumference from our home planet.
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In a recent paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, a philosopher Dr. Vojin Rakić (voyin rack itch) reviews some 50 or so proposed solutions to Fermi’s paradox, including, that human life is so exceptional that it happened only once in the universe, that perhaps other civilizations destroy themselves like we are trying to do, civilizations broadcast radio and TV signals only for a relatively brief period of time, alien intelligent life maybe incomprehensible to our species, and that maybe the energy requirements and distances in the Milky way are too great allow us to discover others of our kind and many more ideas. After sorting through all of these concepts, Dr. Rakić (rack itch) suggests that alien life might be unobservable to the senses evolution has given humans and/or perhaps alien beings live in part of the wider universe we don't know of or cannot yet detect and observe.
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has published an extensive data based review, analysis, and summary of the Earth's Climate. 2016 was hotter than 2015 which was hotter than 2014. 2016 is the warmest year the Earth has been in the more than 180 years of record keeping. Overall in 2016 the whole Earth was 1.8 F above the 1951-1980 average. The Arctic in 2016 was 7.2F higher than it was the pre-industrial age.
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Scientific results are consistent with the hypothesis that the dinosaur killing, K-T layer forming Chicxulub impactor came from well beyond Jupiter while the other 5 impactors in the past 541 million years as well as most meteorites found on Earth came from asteroids formed between Mars and Jupiter. All of this prompts us to marvel that we are here at all and puzzle over how to prepare for what the future might hold. In particular asteroid hunters should take seriously the possibility of an impactor from deep space with our number on it.
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An example that a relatively large space rock can approach the Earth suddenly started with what appeared as a bright star moving across the images that I had just obtained with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona. It was about 100 times brighter than most of Earth approaching objects asteroid hunters discover. Over the next 64 hours it was tracked by 45 different observatories around the globe. This previously unknown space rock, now named 2017 AG5, is approximately 370 feet in diameter and can come closer than the Moon's distance to us.
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4015 Wilson-Harrington (1979 VA) was discovered as a comet by Wilson and Harrington in 1949, lost to astronomers for 30 years, and rediscovered in 1979 as an asteroid named 1979 VA. In 1992 with more data it was determined that comet Wilson-Harrington and asteroid 1979 VA are the same object.
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2016 was another record year for asteroid hunters during which we discovered 1,894 new Earth approaching objects. My team, the NASA funded, Catalina Sky Survey, led the pack with 931 Near Earth Asteroid discoveries.
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Binary asteroids are important since they enable astronomers to study how objects interact in space and in some cases the data can even yield their sizes and shapes.
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A location 9,000 feet above sea level in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco is ideal for an asteroid hunter since the weather is often clear and the skies are dark. It was thus intriguing for me to see that a new asteroid discovery was posted from J43 which is the Morocco Oukaïmeden [pronounced Oukaï-meden] Sky Survey or (MOSS) located near Marrakech , a name I had not encountered except in the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song "Marrakech Express". The MOSS observatory has team members in Morocco, France, and Switzerland, call themselves amateurs, and produces professional quality results.
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