My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Vivian Carvajal was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Cepheus with our small but mighty Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when she discovered 2025 JB1.Fortunately on its current path there is zero probability that 2025 JB1 will impact our home planet in the foreseeable future. Further asteroid hunters continue to search for any other large asteroids which might impact Earth so that mitigation efforts would be effective.
Jul 04, 2025•2 min
Recently, my Grandsons, Dane and Hank joined our asteroid hunting team at the Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon. The most interesting of our discoveries, 2017 KJ32 is only 16 feet in diameter, orbits the Sun once every 315 days, and can come closer to us than the communications satellites. 4 days and 16 hours before Dane, Hank, and I spotted it, 2017 KJ32 passed about 41,000 miles from the surface of Earth traveling at a relatively slow speed for an Earth approaching asteroid o...
Jul 01, 2025•2 min
In 2016 NASA created the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to manage the mission of finding, tracking, and studying asteroids and comets which could pose an impact threat to our home planet.The NASA documentary “Planetary Defenders” provides an excellent over view and can be streamed on the internet.
Jun 27, 2025•2 min
The mystery of Tabby's star began to unfold when in 2015 Dr. Tabetha S. Boyajian [boy-AA-jee-uhn] of Louisiana State University and her team published a paper describing the irregular dips in the light output of what otherwise would seem to be a garden variety star over the period 2009 to 2013. Subsequently a list of proposed explanations include swarms of comets, large asteroids, a debris disk, and even a massive alien megastructure.
Jun 24, 2025•2 min
Data are consistent with the hypothesis that the planet K2-18b is a Hycean planet with a warm liquid water ocean teaming with life and a thin hydrogen rich atmosphere containing methane and other molecules containing carbon. Scientists in an opposing camp point out what we might be observing is a rocky world with a hot life killing atmosphere.
Jun 20, 2025•2 min
When we find a planet which appears to have the chemical signs of living organisms in its atmosphere, the desire to take a close up look at it will be hard to contain. In a Scientific American article, Lee Billings describes Yuri Milner's 100 million dollar project "Breakthrough Starshot" which has been created to leap frog our current rocket technology's extremely long travel times to nearby planets. The plan is to put ultra light space probes on paths which will enable them to collect data as ...
Jun 17, 2025•2 min
In the search for life on Mars, Europa, Titan, and elsewhere in the universe astro-biologists are scouring the Earth for creatures tough enough to flourish under really difficult conditions. So far the leading species are the Tardigrades commonly known as water bears or moss piglets.
Jun 13, 2025•2 min
The good news is a Mars landing by human colonists and their equipment seems technically feasible given a large budget of cash and grit.
Jun 06, 2025•2 min
Recently Dr. Yossi Shvartzvald led a team which published their discovery of an Earth sized planet using microlensing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The newly discovered planet OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb orbits a small dim object about 13,000 light years from us. With only 7.8% of the Sun's mass the new planet's star may be a brown dwarf and not a star at all. At about the same distance from its star as we are from the Sun this new planet is likely to be an ice ball world colder than Pluto.
Jun 03, 2025•2 min
In a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy entitled “Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life” Dr. Peter Vickers and his team of 10 co-authors report the results of their survey of the lead authors for the past 10 years in the top three astro-biological journals. These researchers sought to measure if their sample group of scientists thought it likely that 1) simple life, and/or 2 ) life more complex than terrestrial bacteria, and/or 3) Intelligent life ...
May 30, 2025•2 min
When I discovered 2014 JO25 with the NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on May 5, 2014, it appeared as a single point of light as it moved past us. As 2014 JO25 approached the Earth from the direction of the Sun in 2017, no-one had any idea that it is really a double asteroid system nearly a mile in diameter.
May 27, 2025•2 min
Since there is a world wide market for meteorites some of which can be sold for millions of dollars, on line, the question of ownership becomes important.
May 23, 2025•2 min
When a fleet of interstellar spaceships leaves our solar system for a planet circling a nearby star the most important of all of the riches that human explorers will carry with them will be libraries of our planet's DNA and the seeds of plants. They are the connection between past life, the inorganic world, and future life.
May 20, 2025•2 min
NASA’s Europa Clipper was launched October 14, 2024 on a mission to conduct a detailed study of Jupiter’s Moon Europa. The space craft will travel some 1.8 billion miles and should reach Jupiter in April 2030. This mission will begin to tell us if life as we know it can occur relatively close to home.
May 16, 2025•2 min
The NASA Kepler Spacecraft has discovered more than 2,000 planets which have been confirmed to be orbiting distant stars. It performs this remarkable feat by imaging more than 145,000 stars simultaneously to observe and measure the tiny dips in light which occur as a planet passes in front of its star. Astronomers have long known that many of the solar systems in the Milky Way have more than one star. To investigate the possibilities for life in a double star system, Dr Max Popp a scholar at Pri...
May 13, 2025•2 min
On March 3, 2024 my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Kacper Wierzchos was asteroid hunting with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he spotted a fuzzy object in the constellation of Draco. After Kacper reported his discovery to the Minor Planet Center, observers in Arizona, New Mexico, and Tenerife confirmed it to be a comet and it was given the name C/2024 E1 (Wierzchos). Kacper’s discovery has a hyperbolic orbit indicating that after coming slightly closer to the Sun than the planet ...
May 09, 2025•2 min
On May 5, 2014 when I discovered 2014 JO25 with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona it was the brightest, fastest asteroid I had ever seen. In April of 2017, 2014 JO25 returned to come within 1.1 million miles of us at 21 mi/s. This rare, very close approach by an asteroid, of 2014 JO25's size allowed scientists at NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar in California and the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to obtain radar images of it....
May 06, 2025•2 min
My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Hannes Gröller was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Ursa Major with the University of Arizona 90 inch Bok telescope on Kitt Peak when he discovered a faint moving object surrounded by a tiny gas and dust cloud called a coma. May 19, 2028 comet C/2025 D1 (Groeller) reaches its closest point to the Sun some 14.1 times the Earth-Sun distance and thus sets the record for the comet which stays furtherest from the Sun.After rounding the Sun comet C/2025 D1 (Groe...
May 02, 2025•2 min
Using the University of Arizona's Large Binocular Telescope atop Mt. Graham in southern Arizona, Dr. Paul Wiegert of Western University in Canada, led a team of astronomers who have determined that a 2 mile diameter object bucks the solar system traffic by traveling in a direction backwards to all of the planets. In their March 30, 2017 article in the journal Nature, these astronomers confirm that 2015 BZ509, travels about Jupiter on a path in a direction opposite to nearly every other member of...
Apr 29, 2025•2 min
One little known and infrequently observed phenomenon in the natural night sky are “bright nights” during which observers have reported being able to read a book when both the Sun and Moon are both well below the horizon.
Apr 25, 2025•2 min
My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was observing with our team's 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon in Arizona when he discovered a relatively large space rock, 2017 FD157, which can theoretically come closer to the Earth's surface than the communications satellites. We don't have enough data to predict when it will make a very close approach to us. What we do know is that 2017 FD157's orbit and that of the Earth nearly intersect coming to about Earth diameter of each other. For 2017 FD15...
Apr 22, 2025•2 min
On a single February night my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Jacqui Fazekas reported the discovery of 5 Earth approaching objects using our small but mighty Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona.Rest assured that on any given night there are asteroid hunters on the look out for seriously dangerous space rocks.
Apr 18, 2025•2 min
Asteroid hunters have become aware of the many small space rocks which come near Earth because of improvements made to telescopes, cameras, and computer analysis software. Recently, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rose Matheny used her skills and a new camera to discover the second small space rock in 32 days which came between the communications satellites and the Earth's surface. Rose spotted her 10 to 12 foot diameter space rock as it approached the Earth more than a million miles away with i...
Apr 15, 2025•2 min
As the Earth travels in its orbit around the Sun it collides with objects called meteoroids traveling through space. These tiny members of the solar system range in size from dust grains to objects a meter in diameter.By becoming part of the GMN’s network , your data will help to discover and document meteor showers, aid in identifying the parent cometary objects, and in some cases help to identify locations to search for meteorites.
Apr 11, 2025•2 min
In 2013 a 56 foot diameter space rock exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia releasing the energy of 450 kt of TNT and filled local hospitals with some of the 1,500 people who were injured. Fortunately no one died. In 1908 a 200 ft diameter meteor exploded over a largely unpopulated region at Tunguska, Siberia knocking down trees over a 750 square mile area. If it had hit over a populated area it could have caused a million casualties. The approximately 250 people in the USA that NASA has working on ...
Apr 08, 2025•2 min
On 27 December 2024 the Atlas group in Chile discovered an object now known as 2024 YR4 which appeared to have a significant chance of impacting Earth 22 December of 2032. The most recent data indicates the chance that 2024 YR4 impact Earth is about 1 in 25,000. These data indicate our moon has about a 1 in 700 chance to be impacted by this space rock. Even so astronomers are preparing for 2028 when 2024 YR4 willagain come within the range of our instruments. Current data indicates 2024 YR4 will...
Apr 04, 2025•2 min
I was observing with the Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt Lemmon, Arizona when a fast moving object appeared on a set of four images of the same area of the night sky. After I sent the discovery observations to the Minor Planet Center this new object was observed by telescopes in Arizona, Germany , South Bohemia in the Czech Republic , Chile, Pennsylvania , Italy, Hungary, and France. 2017 FE101's unusual path about our Sun is inclined by 53 degrees to the plane where the planets and ...
Apr 01, 2025•2 min
My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Hydra with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona when a fast moving unknown point of light passed through a set of his images. After Greg reported his observations to the Minor Planet Center for the next 10 days it was tracked by observatories in Arizona, Italy, Hawaii, Australia, and Argentina. Citizen scientist H. A. Güler analyzed these data. The Minor Planet Center published the discovery of the...
Mar 28, 2025•2 min
A clear night with excellent pinpoint star images allowed me to discover 16 near Earth approaching asteroid candidates with the Catalina Sky Survey 60 inch telescope on Mt Lemmon, Arizona. This 9 hr period of time provides us with a snap shot of the kinds of objects which constantly zip past our home planet. Thirteen of the candidates turned out to fit the definition of an Earth approaching object, two were lost because of a lack of additional observations, and the other one is an inner main bel...
Mar 25, 2025•2 min
Astronomers have yet to discover any long lasting natural object, beside our Moon, which orbits the Earth, however, occasionally, a small space rock enters into a temporary dance with our home planet.
Mar 21, 2025•2 min
