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PODCAST

Travelers In The Night

Albert D. Grauer

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

science astronomy

All Episodes

2:01

305E-324-Newborn Planets

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/10/08

The ALMA radio telescope located in the Atacama desert of northern Chile is able to see the faint millimeter wave length glow emitted by gas molecules and dust particles in the disk of material surrounding the very young star named HD 163296. This solar system in formation is located about 400 light years away in the constellation of Sagittarius. HD 162396's age compared to our Sun is like that of a 3 day old human baby compared to a 65 year old adult.

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2:01

817-Interstellar Travelers In The Night

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/10/04

As astronomers learned to measure the distance to the stars and how the laws of Physics works with rockets, it seemed that travel between the stars would take so much energy and time to get there that interstellar travel is a remote possibility at best. On the other hand, objects have been discovered being ejected from our solar system by a close encounter with Jupiter.Recently a team of researchers identified a region of our solar system where interstellar comets, asteroids, and even rouge

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2:01

304E-323-Big Splash

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/10/01

To discover what would happen if an asteroid were to strike a large body of water, Dr. Galen Gisler led a team of scientists who used high performance computing facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory to calculate and visualize a 3-D model of an asteroid entering the Earth's atmosphere over one of the world's oceans. These efforts won them the Best Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase award at Supercomputing 2016. Reality is that what happens depends upon the mass, size, speed, angle of

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2:01

816-David's Close Approaching Comet

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/09/27

My Catalina Sky Survey Teammate David Rankin was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Pegasus with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, AZ when he spotted a faint fuzzy object moving through a set of his images.David’s discovery is classified to be one of the more than 30 Encke type comets. This family small solar system objects have orbital periods about the Sun similar to their namesake comet 2P/Encke’s orbital period of 3.3 years

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2:01

303E-322-Dust Stories

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/09/24

Collect your own beautiful micro-meteorite sample. It is estimated that several hundred thousand pounds of left over particles from the formation of our solar system enters the Earth's atmosphere every day with perhaps 10% of the of the total reaching the surface of our home planet. The individual grains of cosmic dust or micro-meteorites as they are also called range in size from the diameter of a human hair to twice the thickness of a dime.

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2:01

815-RADAR Observes Binary PHA

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/09/20

RADAR is very powerful tool since it can precisely measure an asteroid’s position and velocity as well as in some cases yield information about its size, shape, and other characteristics.

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2:01

302E-321-Dangereous Comet

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/09/17

Protection against a comet strike is worth considering. Every year, if we are lucky, several comets can come close enough for the Sun to warm and us to see the beautiful changing dust and gas clouds around them with binoculars or our unaided eyes. So far asteroids have gotten most of the attention as dangerous celestial neighbors, however, Dr. Joseph Nuth, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland recently pointed out "Comets can also deliver a heaping helping of

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2:01

814-Threat of Solar Storms

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/09/13

Solar storms on our home planet occur when bursts of visible, ultraviolet and other photons hit our atmosphere and/or streams of energetic particles in the solar wind interact with Earth’s magnetic field. Mild solar storms produce beautiful aurora while the most intense ones have the potential to do trillions of dollars in damage to power grids, pipelines, rail networks, aviation, mobile phones, banking, credit card users, GPS, satellite communications, spacecraft, and more.

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2:01

301E-320-WOW What a Ride

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/09/10

It's a good thing this one will miss Earth. Riding the surface of the asteroid that my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski recently discovered would be an incredible experience.

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2:01

813-RADAR Observations of Close Approacher

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/09/06

Astronomers measure an asteroid’s position on the sky using a two dimensional system similar to the latitude and longitude coordinates we obtain with our GPS. For the vast majority of asteroids, we cannot measure the third dimension, the distance to the asteroid directly.

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2:01

300E-319-Lost and Found

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/09/03

When asteroid hunters follow an object in the night sky for a few hours or a couple of days they are only able to observe a snippet or tracklet of the object's hundreds to thousands of days long path around the Sun. If we only have a short sample of an orbit we loose precision to locate the object as the length of time since the last observation increases. It is thus possible to lose the knowledge of where to find a particular asteroid.

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2:01

812-The Benu Files I

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/30

A recent scientific paper characterizes the 123 grams of the regolith or surface material from the asteroid Bennu which NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft brought back to Earth after a successful 7 year sample and return mission.Determining the chemical composition of asteroids like Bennu is essential to planning asteroid mining missions as well how to best mitigate the damage which would result from the impact of a large asteroid with our number on it.

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2:01

299E-318-Caves of Mars

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/27

Presently the surface of Mars is very dry and any liquid water that reaches it quickly boils away since the martian atmospheric pressure is what you could experience in your space suit 30 to 50 miles above the Earth's surface. However, since the martian gravity is about 1/3 that of the Earth, it's crust is less dense and more porous than what we find on our home planet. This situation leads Dr. Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory to state “I consider it likely

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2:01

811-Martian Meteroite Hunters

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/23

Perhaps someday humans will travel to Mars, walk the surface of the red planet, and collect meteorites. Recent studies suggest Mars to be an exciting place to find ancient relics of our solar system

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2:01

298E-317-Psyche Water

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/20

The asteroid Psyche may be one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the solar system. It is a small world about 116 miles in diameter and is composed of almost pure nickel-iron metal. It is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists find evidence that Psyche may be the exposed core of a planet which was destroyed by collisions as it was trying to form long ago.

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2:01

810-Humans Can

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/16

The James Webb Space Telescope or JWST for short is a superb scientific instrument which is revolutionizing our understanding of the structure of the universe and is providing a tool to help us to explore the possibility of life outside of Earth. It is also a testament to what humans can accomplish by working together.

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2:01

297E-316-Weird Centaur

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/13

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski was surprised to find a moving point of light on some his images which was more than 50 times brighter than a typical Earth approaching object he observes . He was even more amazed when it was not cataloged as a known object and he reported his observations to the Minor Planet Center. A couple of hours before Richard spotted it, scientists using the Space Surveillance Telescope in New Mexico had picked up this unknown object on some of their images

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2:01

809- How Close Can An Asteroid Approach

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/09

The Earth Minimum Orbit Intersection Distance or Earth MOID for short is the closest an asteroid can come to our home planet on it's current orbit.

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2:01

296E-314-Our Number

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/06

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard discovered, 2016 WJ1, a relatively large asteroid which can come close but will not hit the Earth. The extremely unlikely scenario of an impactor with our number on it would start the with the report of a fast moving point of light in the night sky. After a few days of data the Minor Planet Center would give it a name. Tracking the new asteroid, asteroid hunters would be alarmed as the chances that this object will impact the Earth starts to

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2:01

808-Global Auroras on Mars

Travelers In The Night ·

2024/08/02

When the Earth enters a stream of high speed protons and other charged particles in the solar wind or our home planet is impacted by a solar coronal mass ejection the Earth’s strong magnetic field acts a a shield. Mars on the other hand lacks an Earth-like magnetic field and thus has little protection from solar storms.

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1,224 results

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