Travelers In The Night

Humans are dreaming and planning settlements on Mars. There are ice deposits which with solar power could be used to produce oxygen to breathe, water to drink, and hydrogen and oxygen to fuel vehicles of all sorts. Food remains a challenge since the Martian soil contains poisonous perchlorate salts that can harm human health if absorbed by crops, has no organic material, and when wet can pack down like concrete making it difficult for plant roots to grow. Please don’t take the environment we have on Earth for granted.

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.

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 moving unknown object streaked through a set of her images on its way to impact Earth.

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.

A fascinating research paper suggests the possibility that there is an exchange of chemical elements, organic molecules, and potentially life’s precursors between star systems. Could it be possible that microorganisms or complex organic molecules could hitch a ride inside rocky meteorites ejected from a living planet? If so living organisms in our neighborhood of the Milky Way might be related to each other. 

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.

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 small car, will image the entire sky every 3 or 4 nights in such a way as to detect objects that change in position and/or brightness. It is estimated the LSST will discover one or two new impacting small asteroids per year and provide several days of lead time for follow up telescopes to track an impactor into the atmosphere to find meteorites whose chemical composition will tell us about where they originated.

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.

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 spacecraft Hayabusa2 (high-yah-BOO-sah-too )is on its way to fly by the rapidly spinning tiny asteroid 1998 KY2 .

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. Lemmon, Arizona, was an unknown object. Jess quickly emailed his discovery observations along with a description of the comet's coma and tail to the Minor Planet Center. Over the next eight days astronomers at 11 different observatories around the world tracked Jess's new comet. Scientists at the Minor Planet used these data to calculate it's path around the Sun, verify it to be a comet, and give it the name C/2018 F3 (Johnson). We now know that Comet C/2018 F3 (Johnson) had crossed the orbit of Pluto in 1997 and had reached it's closest point to the Sun 217 days previous to Jess's discovery observations. Further, about two weeks before Jess spotted it , moving through the constellation of Leo, Comet 2018 F3 (Johnson) had streaked unnoticed past the Earth. Unfortunately Jess's comet is likely to be visible only in electronic camera images and in 2037 will once again cross Pluto's average distance from the Sun on a path which will take it into truly deep space. Until a few years ago all of the comets human astronomers had observed originated in the distant regions of our solar system, the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud . Perhaps C/2018 F3 (Johnson) is an interstellar visiting Comet and is thus a sample of a place currently beyond our reach.