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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

840-Lunar South Pole Living

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/03/14

NASA has decided to make the lunar south pole the focus for human space exploration. It is a rough area consisting of high mountains, valleys, and craters.One serious problem is that the highest possible elevation of the Sun in the target landing areas is 7° making it akin to driving your car into the west at sunset. Such lighting conditions provide serious challenges to piloting landers, operating rovers, walking, operating tools, and just generally getting around.

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2:01

327E-346-Arctic Ice

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/03/11

Eliminating NASA's climate research programs is a bit like someone who has a CT scan which reveals a health problem demanding that the CT scan machine be destroyed instead of looking for a cure for themselves. On March 7, 2017 the Arctic Sea ice reached a record low wintertime maximum extent. The maximum Arctic ice cover in 2017 was about a half million square miles smaller than the average for 1981 to 2010. From the first satellite observations in 1979 till 2017 the Arctic sea ice cover has

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2:01

839-Dodged A Meteor

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/03/07

Recently , for the first time, the sight and sound of a meteor impact was recorded by a doorbell camera on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Fortunately the event occurred a few minutes after Joe Velaidum the home’s owner had been standing at the impact point on the way out to walk his dogs. Joe himself considers it to be a near death experience.

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2:01

326E-345-364days

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/03/04

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was using the University of Arizona's 60 inch telescope atop Mt. Lemmon when he discovered a 50 foot diameter asteroid with an orbital period around the Sun of 364.4 days. After the discovery observations were posted this small asteroid was observed by telescopes in Arizona, Illinois, Ohio, England, New Mexico, New Zealand, Japan, France, and Australia. Greg's new space rock, 2017 FZ2, follows a path which crosses Earth's orbit twice a year as it moves

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2:01

838-Webb-Asteroid-Discoveries

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/02/28

Using high powered graphics processing units, a team of 21 astronomers led by Dr. Artem Y. Burdanov of MIT used 93 hours of data from the James Webb Space Telescope or JWST for short to serendipitously search for asteroids which happened to be present in images taken in the of study planets circling distant stars. JWST and the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory will help to fill in asteroid hunters current blind spots. Better asteroid impact prediction will allow asteroid hunters to warn people to stay

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2:01

325E-344-Gnats

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/02/25

Near Earth Asteroids or NEAs which are accessible are those objects whose orbits bring them close to Earth at speeds which are reachable by our rockets. They are potential space mission targets for science as well as for asteroid mining to obtain the raw materials necessary for humans to colonize space.

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2:01

837-Weird Extraterrestrial Life

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/02/21

We will continue to search for life as we know it by studying the chemistry of the atmospheres of extraterrestrial planets and trying to detect signals from alien civilizations while being aware that alien life could be so weird that it is unrecognizable

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2:01

324E-343-Mars Window

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/02/18

Every 26 months a window in time opens up for travel between the Earth and Mars, as they achieve ideal positions in their respective orbits about our Sun.

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2:01

836-Jacqui's Comet

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/02/14

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jacqueline Fazekas was asteroid hunting with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when she spotted a glowing patch of light moving through the constellation of Cancer.By discovering her first comet Jacqui became the 483 person to discover a comet since 1758 when Charles Messier created a catalogue of diffuse objects to help fellow comet enthusiasts not be fooled by gas clouds and galaxies in their search for a new comet.

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2:01

323E-342-That's Close

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/02/11

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard discovered an asteroid, 2017 EA, which is so tiny that it could pass under a basketball hoop. It missed exploding in our atmosphere by only about 9,000 miles as it streaked between the communications satellites and the surface of our planet high above the eastern pacific ocean. After Greg discovered it, this small celestial visitor was tracked by telescopes in Arizona, New Zealand, and New Mexico before it disappeared into the Earth's shadow. When this

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2:01

835-Bok Impactor

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/02/07

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Vivian Carvajal was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Aries with the Steward Observatory 90 inch Bok telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona when she spotted a fast moving point of light in a set of her images. Nearly 10 hours later it entered the Earth’s atmosphere over Eastern Siberia north of Olekminsk

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2:01

322E-341-Ballooning to Space

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/02/04

To travel to the edge of space you can strap yourself into a capsule and ride atop of a carefully controlled explosion or you can enter a crew capsule and be gently lifted by a balloon into the stratosphere. Unlike a suborbital rocket flight lasting for a few minutes a ride under a balloon can give you several hours to enjoy the wonders of the Earth and its curvature against the back drop of space. Tucson based World View Enterprises is on track to take you on such a balloon ride to the edge of

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2:01

834-Dark Comets

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/01/31

From our vantage point on planet Earth asteroids appear as moving points of light which strictly follow the law of gravity as they orbit the Sun. On the other hand comets appear as gas clouds which sometimes deviate from their gravitational orbits when they burp bursts of gases as they are warmed by the Sun. Dark comets appear as points of light like asteroids but move through space as though they are influenced by small rocket like bursts of volatile materials in cometary fashion.

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2:01

321E-340-Carson's Comet

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/01/28

My team was excited when our Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered his first comet, C/2017 D1 (Fuls), when it was traveling between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter about 257 million miles from Earth. It is classified as a Jupiter Family Comet and orbits the Sun once every ten and a half years on a path that keeps it hundreds of million miles from both the Earth and Sun. It is likely that Carson's comet originally had an orbit out in the Kuiper belt far beyond Pluto.Comet Fuls was

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2:01

833-Will Asteroid Mining Payoff?

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/01/24

In the journal Planetary and Space Science Dr. Kevin Cannon and his two coauthors analyze the potential of asteroid mining as a source of metals for manufacturing here on Earth as well as a repository of raw materials for space colonists.These authors find there are less precious metals in iron meteorites than was previous estimated. However there are a small number of precious metals whose concentration in asteroids is higher than any ores found on Earth. In the future Earthlings may be wearing

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2:01

320E-339-No Need To Smile

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/01/21

The company Planet's, Dove satellites may not be spot you looking up, smiling, and waving when you are in the great outdoors but they could detect a car in your driveway.

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2:01

832-Backyard Comet

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/01/17

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate David Rankin has discovered 13 comets using our team’s professional telescopes. Recently he discovered a 14th comet as an amateur using a small, 11 inch telescope in his backyard Saguaro Observatory in Tucson, AZ.

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2:01

319E-338-Psyche Bound

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/01/14

When the material came together to form our home planet, gravity was strong enough to pull the heavy materials like iron to the center, giving our planet an iron core. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of known asteroids and comets orbiting our Sun are made of mixtures of rocks and ices of various substances. They do not have enough gravity to cause heavy materials to move to their centers. From scientific measurements the asteroid Psyche appears to be composed almost entirely of iron,

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2:01

831-Finding Dangerous Comets

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/01/10

Meteor shower data can provide an additional warning time for a potentially dangerous comet of from 1 to 12 years giving humans extra time to determine and carry out mitigation strategies.

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2:01

318E-337-Lucy

Travelers In The Night ·

2025/01/07

Jupiter's Trojan asteroids lead and follow the giant planet around the Sun occupying stable locations where Jupiter and the Sun's gravity balance each other. Humans have discovered only a tiny fraction of the million of them larger than one kilometer or about 3,300 feet in diameter that are suspected to exist. Upon NASA's selection of the Lucy mission, Dr. Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado commented “Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material

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1,169 results

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