Travelers In The Night
A real "Science Snack" for anyone who is interested in the extraterrestrial. Dr. Al Grauer is a member of the Catalina Sky Survey which has led the world in near Earth asteroid discoveries for 17 of the past 19 years. The music is "Eternity" by John Lyell. Astronomy Asteroids Space NASA Comets Earth Impact Aliens
Episodes
October 20, 2026 • 2 mins
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.
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October 16, 2026 • 2 mins
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 .
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October 13, 2026 • 2 mins
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 Jes...
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October 9, 2026 • 2 mins
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 asteroid is governed force of gravity exerted by the Sun, planets, and in some cases our moon. In addition the Yarkovsky Effect can cause the orbit of a spinning asteroid to shift slightly over millions of years as the heat it absorbs from the Sun radiates b...
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October 6, 2026 • 2 mins
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 enlarged star like object with a tiny tail moving through the constellation of Virgo. After checking to see that it was not a known comet, I sent my discovery observations along with a description of it's coma and tail to the Minor Planet Center. Turns out that it had b...
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October 2, 2026 • 2 mins
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 than 30 minutes apart which indicated that a small space rock with a diameter smaller the height of a human being was on a collision course with Earth.
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September 29, 2026 • 2 mins
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
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September 25, 2026 • 2 mins
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, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greenland, and Iceland. Auroras are manifestations of the interaction between the solar wind, radiation, and our atmosphere we call space weather.
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September 22, 2026 • 2 mins
The large dangerous asteroids that we don't know about are what keep asteroid hunters going to the telescope.
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September 18, 2026 • 2 mins
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. You can even find some of these particles of space dust by using a magnet on material in the rain gutters attached to your roof.
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September 15, 2026 • 2 mins
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.
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September 11, 2026 • 2 mins
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 Eridani to a be pair separated by about 425 times our distance from the Sun orbiting a common center of gravity. Detailed observations of the spectrum of one of these show it to be itself a pair of stars orbiting each other every 4.1 days. One of this very close p...
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September 8, 2026 • 2 mins
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 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.
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September 4, 2026 • 2 mins
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 correct, we are now witnessing a parade of comets produced by the passage of a star when our first ancestors began to roam the Earth in Africa.
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September 1, 2026 • 2 mins
A partnership of humans and computers will help to minimize the damage when asteroid hunters find a space rock with our number on it.
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August 28, 2026 • 2 mins
Looking into the sky at night with radio eyes you would not see the points of starlight forming the constellations instead you would see a very bright, colorful and wildly changing scene. In a desert valley near the Great Basin National Park Caltech is building the world’s largest radio telescope called the Deep Synoptic Array or DSA for short.
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August 25, 2026 • 2 mins
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.
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August 21, 2026 • 2 mins
Bill Gray is an astronomer who specializes in tracking objects in space which come near the Earth. In addition to natural objects like asteroids and comets Bill also tracks rocket boosters and space junk that humans have discarded. On several occasions he has helped asteroid hunters to not waste time following a piece of space junk which initially appeared to be a threatening Earth approaching asteroid. Recently Bill used observati...
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August 18, 2026 • 2 mins
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.
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August 14, 2026 • 2 mins
Recently on a Saturday afternoon a loud double booming sound startled residents of Massachusetts and Rhode Island as a large bolide meteor exploded high above. This type of space rock is a message from nature which reveals the conditions which existed when the planets formed.
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