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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

640-Rocks or Rockets

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/05/14

Asteroid hunters have discovered a curious object. It appears likely to be either a rock ejected from the Moon or a piece of space junk from a human designed mission to the Moon. Observations which reveal how this tiny object is effected by Sun light could tells us if it is a natural or man made object.

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2:01

128E-140-A Weird Orbit

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/05/11

The vast majority of asteroids orbiting the Sun do so on a path that is pretty much in the same plane as the planets. There is a lot of empty space in the solar system, however, we see asteroids with craters on them so we know collisions have occurred. It seems likely that an asteroid whose path is highly inclined to the plane of thesolar system was involved in a collision with another object causing a radical changein its orbit.

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2:01

639-Earth Approachers

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/05/07

During a recent 60 day period asteroid hunters discovered 29 space rocks as they passed closer to us than the Moon. These small asteroids averaged 30 feet in diameter and ranged in size from one that could fit under a basketball hoop to one the would fill the whole basketball court. Several times every year a small space rock bursts into fragments some of which strike human structures.

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2:01

127E-139-Next Step to Mars

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/05/04

A trip to our Moon is one of the great human adventures of all time. However, such a voyage is but a small step of about 30 Earth diameters into the vastness of space.NASA is proposing the next step on the path to Mars to be a mission to an asteroid or a boulder taken from the surface of an asteroid.

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2:01

638-Methane

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/30

How ET could know there is life on Earth.

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2:01

126E-138-An Inter-Planetary Visitor

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/27

Recently an inter-planetary visitor made a close approach to planet Earth. It is about the same size as the object which entered our atmosphere in February of 2013 injuring nearly 1500 people in Chelyabinsk, Russia. It can come to within 20,000 miles of us which is closer than our communications satellites.

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2:01

637-Martian Dust

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/23

After sunset in the spring and before sunrise in the fall, at a natural night sky location like the Cosmic Campground International Dark Sky Sanctuary in New Mexico, you will see a triangle of faint glow of light that extends from its broad base on the horizon to a point almost overhead. New scientific evidence suggests that this phenomenon is caused by sunlight reflecting from a Mars produced dust cloud between Earth and Jupiter.

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2:01

125E-137-Bad Seeing

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/20

Looking at the Universe from the Earth's surface is a bit like a scuba diver viewing our world from the bottom of a swimming pool. Don't get me wrong. I love our atmosphere. It gives us air to breath, keeps our body's fluids liquid, protects us from cosmic rays as well as space rocks, and performs many other functions which make life on our planet possible. That being said the blanket of air which surrounds us makes it difficult to view objects in the Universe.

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2:01

636-90 Inch

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/16

On Kitt Peak in Arizona, the Steward Observatory's Bok telescope's 90 inch light collecting mirror enables the discovery, study, and tracking of space rocks 3 or 4 times fainter then possible with any of our other telescopes. Over all our team, the Catalina Sky Survey, has used the 90 inch Bok telescope to discover 36 Earth approaching asteroids.

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2:01

124E-136-The Oceans of Ganymede

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/16

Ganymede was discovered by Galileo Galilei using his new telescope in 1610. He observed it to be a faint point of light orbiting the planet Jupiter. This discovery along with 3 of Jupiter's moons was the first instance of objects being observed to be orbiting another planet. Now that we know that Ganymede has a substantial salty ocean one has to wonder if some type of microbes might be living there.

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2:01

635-Exploring Mars

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/09

We are lucky to be alive in an age when anyone with an internet connection can participate in the exploration of Mars. Your unique brain-eye combination may very well enable you to notice a previously unknown meteorite on the surface of Mars. Give it a try.

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2:01

123E-135-Future Impact Possibilities

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/06

Recently, three asteroids were discovered which have very slight probabilities of impact with planet Earth between 2065 and 2117. My team, the Catalina Sky Survey found two of them and the Pan-STARRS group in Hawaii found the other one. These three asteroids are some of the most recent objects to be listed on the NASA Sentry Risk Table. So far so good. Maybe against the most incredible odds a small asteroid has our number on it. Maybe we will find it tonight.

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2:01

634-Meteor Goes Splat

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/04/02

On 28 February 2021 at 9:54PM a large slow moving fireball meteor was observed over England, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. The Wichcombe meteorite which this meteor produced is particularly valuable since it was found less than 12 hours after it fell leaving its interior untouched by contamination from its terrestrial surroundings.

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2:01

122E-134-Recycling Spacecraft

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/03/30

In the early days of space exploration when a flight component failed the mission was over. In recent history, there have been a few times when astronauts have repaired satellites and a number of instances of Earth bound engineers reprogramming malfunctioning spacecraft so that they could continue their scientific work. Since the cost of developing and launching spacecraft far exceeds the cost of operating them for extended periods of time, our ability to recover from malfunctions allows scientists

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2:01

633-Dress Rehearsal

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/03/26

The situation that asteroid hunters both train for and dread is the discovery of a large space rock on a collision course with planet Earth. Recently we got a chance to practice on a small harmless space rock named 2020 XK1 that eventually zipped past us. About once a month a small space rock like 2020 XK1 enters the Earth's atmosphere, creates a super fireball meteor, bursts into a cloud of fragments at 135,000 feet, and rains fragments of itself onto the ground for meteorite hunters to

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2:01

121E-133-2 Close Approaches

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/03/23

Slightly more than a day apart, my NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey teammates Richard Kowalski and Carson Fuls found two small asteroids. Both of them can travel to much closer than the distance to our Moon from planet Earth. It is possible that either of these tiny asteroids could enter the Earth's atmosphere in the distant future and release the energy of a small nuclear weapon. We might expect such an event every 27 years or so. There are likely to be several million space rocks of this size

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2:01

632-Couch Potato

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/03/19

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski is the first person in our group and perhaps the first person in the world to discover a potentially hazardous asteroid while sitting on his living room couch.

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2:01

120E-132-Kowalski's Forever Comet

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/03/16

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski has an instinct for discovering interesting objects. Recently he spotted a fuzzy looking moving faint light in the night sky. It was then observed by telescopes in Italy, New Mexico, and Texas and given the name C/2015 D5 (Kowalski). When Kowalski first spotted this comet it was traveling about 12 miles per second away from the Sun and was about 344 million miles from planet Earth. Comet C/2015 D5 (Kowalski) is likely to continue its cold lonely

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2:01

631-Greg's Comet

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/03/12

My Catalina Survey Teammate Greg Leonard was asteroid hunting with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he spotted a fuzzy object with a short tail moving through the constellation Canes Venatici. That Greg spotted his comet discovery some 472 million miles from the Sun leads us to believe that it may brighten to the point that C2021 A1 (Leonard) will be visible in binoculars and perhaps even to the naked eye.

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2:01

119E-131-Deafening Silence

Travelers In The Night ·

2021/03/09

More than 50 years of searching for signals from other civilizations in the Universe has produced a deafening silence. There is no evidence that aliens have visited the Earth or exist anywhere. There are many hints that life might exist in other places but there is no conclusive proof that it does. My money is on the concept that there are many planets which host living organisms. Recent discoveries indicate that there may be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in the Milky way alone. On

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