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The company Planet's, Dove satellites may not be spot you looking up, smiling, and waving when you are in the great outdoors but they could detect a car in your driveway.
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My Catalina Sky Survey teammate David Rankin has discovered 13 comets using our team’s professional telescopes. Recently he discovered a 14th comet as an amateur using a small, 11 inch telescope in his backyard Saguaro Observatory in Tucson, AZ.
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When the material came together to form our home planet, gravity was strong enough to pull the heavy materials like iron to the center, giving our planet an iron core. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of known asteroids and comets orbiting our Sun are made of mixtures of rocks and ices of various substances. They do not have enough gravity to cause heavy materials to move to their centers. From scientific measurements the asteroid Psyche appears to be composed almost entirely of iron, nickel, and possibly other valuable metals. Perhaps the Massachusetts sized, 130 mile diameter, asteroid Psyche is the core of a Mars sized planet whose outer layers were blown away by collisions early in the history of the solar system. Although NASA has no plans to bring back material for earthlings to use, space mining enthusiasts are interested in Psyche since the metal in this asteroid may be worth 10,000 quadrillion dollars on today's market. The Psyche spacecraft is scheduled for launch in 2023. It will get a boost in speed from the Earth's gravity in 2024, fly by Mars in 2025, arrive at the asteroid in 2030, and then orbit this strange world for at least 6 months taking scientific data. Since we can not visit our home planet's core a trip to Psyche will enable us to explore the unknown nature of what is below our feet and provide clues about the exotic mixtures of metals and minerals which may be hiding there.
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Meteor shower data can provide an additional warning time for a potentially dangerous comet of from 1 to 12 years giving humans extra time to determine and carry out mitigation strategies.
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Jupiter's Trojan asteroids lead and follow the giant planet around the Sun occupying stable locations where Jupiter and the Sun's gravity balance each other. Humans have discovered only a tiny fraction of the million of them larger than one kilometer or about 3,300 feet in diameter that are suspected to exist. Upon NASA's selection of the Lucy mission, Dr. Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado commented “Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets, they hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system. Lucy, like the human fossil for which it is named, will revolutionize the understanding of our origins.”
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Through out history humans have dreamed about living creatures on planets orbiting distant stars. As technology has improved and our robotic missions have begun exploring our solar system in some detail the aspiration to learn about alien solar systems continues to build. At the focal point of the solar gravitational lens it is theoretically possible to image a planet orbiting a distant star to show its details as small as 20 miles in diameter. Such images could reveal oceans, land masses, clouds, and provide evidence that life is possible on an alien world.
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A research expedition to near the south pole is developing to investigate a meteorite mystery. Meteorites landing on the Antarctica ice sheet are slowly transported along by ice flows until they are dumped into the ocean or up against a mountain range. The concentration of meteorites into stranding zones on the lower slopes of mountain ranges has allowed humans to collect 2/3 of the meteorites discovered on Earth in Antartica. The fact that the percentage of iron meteorites found in these places in Antartica is 1/8 what are found elsewhere on Earth is puzzling.
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The Sun emits a solar wind of charged particles reaching speeds of more than a million miles per hour, bursts of energetic ultraviolet photons, huge blobs of ionized gas called coronal mass ejections and other phenomena which effect the near Earth environment. A team of scientists present a comprehensive network of ground based instruments and analysis tools called the Chinese Meridian Project. This research project has been established to provide stereoscopic, comprehensive, monitoring of space weather from the Sun to the near Earth environment. Although the authors state its results will be shared with the international community such knowledge will provide a powerful advantage to the nation operating it.
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A stony asteroid 130m or about 430 feet in diameter has a mass of 3 billion Kg or 6.5 billion pounds. Such an object is likely to strike the Earth every 11,000 years or so creating a crater a mile in diameter crater and inflicting damage over a hurricane sized footprint on the surface of our planet. If one like this were found to be heading straight for us deflecting it would take some ingenuity. The key is early discovery so that perhaps a gentle nudge would do the trick. How do do we test such an idea before we are in a situation where the test occurs on an incoming impactor where failure is not a good option?
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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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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.
- Se mer
