Travelers In The Night

924-Alessandra's Impactor

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Alessandra Serrano was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Cetus with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when a rapidly mov

413E-454-Comets And Asteroids

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

923-From Alpha Centauri Star With Love

A fascinating research paper suggests the possibility that there is an exchange of chemical elements, organic molecules, and potentially life’s precursors between star sy

412E-453-HAMMER

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.

922-Earth Impactors from Vera Rubin

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, also known as LSST, with its 8.4 m mirror, the width of a tennis court, and the worlds largest 3.2 gigapixel camera, roughly the size of a

411E-452-Small But Deadly

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 n

921-Little Spinner

After completing a sample and return mission to the asteroid Ryugu (ree-oo-goo) and a fly by of asteroid Torifune (toh-ree-foo-neh), the Japanese asteroid exploring space

410E-451-Going Far

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jess Johnson was very surprised when the large comet with a long stringy tail, which he has just imaged with our 60 inch telescope on Mt.

920-Cometary Rocket

Viewed in a telescope an asteroid appears as a moving star like point of light while  a comet often appears to be a fuzzy point of light with a tail.  The orbit of an ast

409E-450-Saint Patrick's Day Comet

On Saint Patrick's Day, while searching for Earth approaching asteroids with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona I spotted a slightly enlar

919-Automatic Detection Of An Impactor

Recently a pair of JPL SynTrack Robotic automated telescopes located at a high altitude low light pollution site in California provided 4 tracking data points taken less

408E-449-Cloud 7

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 S

918-Auroras from Space

The northern lights or Aurora Borealis have fascinated humans throughout the ages. Today aurora watching is a multimillion dollar industry in places like Alaska, Canada,

407E-448-Two PHA's

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

917-Space Dust

As the Earth orbits the Sun at 18.5 mi/s it sweeps up about 100 tons of micrometeorites and space dust every day of which some 14 tons eventually makes it to the ground.

406E-447-Nuking An Asteroid

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,

916-Past Glory

When accurately recorded historical observations do not agree with what we what we see today it is often very rewarding to find out why. In modern telescopes we see Theta

405E-446-Asteroid Homestead

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles

915-Raining Comets

The comets we observe generally start out as icy dirty snowballs of frozen gases like water and frozen carbon dioxide in the Oort cloud. If recent scientific analysis is

404E-445-Not So Secret

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