Travelers In The Night – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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.

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 that there are deep pockets of water in the martian crust not yet detected”. Letting our imaginations run wild, if there are deposits of liquid water miles underground perhaps there might be subterranean lakes fed by volcanic tubes. Lava tube environments could be warmed by geothermal sources, have trapped, enclosed, pockets of liquid water, and be replenished by water flows up from the martian mantle. Even today these deep martian caves are theoretically likely to contain warm mineral rich liquid water in contact with a thermal energy source. It is intriguing to consider that deep inside Mars all of the necessary ingredients for life may be present together. On Earth we find this type of environment near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor to have rich biological diversity of living organisms. Perhaps there are martian organisms in deep underground aquifers that migrated there from the surface as conditions changed or maybe that has always been their home. The only way to know if any parts of this fantasy are true is to find and explore the deep caves of Mars.

During a recent 60 day period of time 23 space rocks came closer to Earth than our Moon

In less than two hours my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Allesandra Serrano discovered two small fast moving space rocks. Both of them passed through the Earth-Moon system unimpeded. Other space rocks are not so lucky.

The source of the Geminid Meteor shower each December is a strange little asteroid.

Carson Fuls, one of my Catalina Sky Survey teammates, is leading the effort that will allow you to join our NASA funded adventure in asteroid hunting and discovery. You will learn how to scan our nightly archival images to discover new small solar system worlds.Happy asteroid hunting.

Recently Dr. Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium and a team of astronomers hypothesized since that approximately 2/3 of the stars in our neighborhood are red dwarf stars some of them might host inhabitable planets. To test this idea the researchers began to carefully monitor some nearby red dwarfs with a robotic telescope in Chile to see if any of them the have regular dips in brightness which indicate the presence of planets orbiting them.
This team of astronomers were delighted when a faint star in an infrared star catalogue showed regular dips in brightness indicating the presence of three planets. Followup observations by the European Southern Observatories' 8 meter telescope in Chile confirmed the presence of three Earth sized planets orbiting a star now known as TRAPPIST-1. This extremely faint red star is only slightly larger than the planet Jupiter and puts out 0.05% of the energy of our Sun. Two of its Earth sized planets orbit every 1.5 and 2.4 days receiving four and two times the radiation the Earth receives from our Sun. They are probably two hot to be habitable. The third Earth sized planet orbits farther away and thus might have life permitting temperatures on its surface.
The discovery of three Earth sized planets orbiting the extremely, cool, faint red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 suggests the possibility of the presence of many more relatively nearby Earth like planets. The next generation of ground and space based telescopes will tell us about their surface conditions.

Hungarian astronomer and geography teacher Krisztián Sárneczky was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Lynx with 0.6m (24 inch) telescope at the Piszkéstető station in the Mátra Mountains when an unknown object streaked through a set of his images. It is the 7th such object to be tracked in outer space and then observed to enter our atmosphere. A tiny asteroid the size of 2023 CX1 enters the Earth’s atmosphere about once a month and gives asteroid hunters a chance to practice for a big one.

About 20 years ago Dr. Elizabeth Austin began to investigate Polar Vortex winds during the long winter nights near the poles. One of its components, the stratospheric polar night jet, can create 300 mph winds which in turn can project atmospheric mountain waves as high as 130,000 feet into the stratosphere.
The Airbus Perlan II is an engineless glider designed to surf stratospheric mountain waves in our atmosphere to the edge of space. Cruising at 400 mph at an altitude of 90,000 feet this glider with a wing span of 85 feet will become the highest level flying winged vehicle in history and will be able to travel above 98% of the Earth's atmosphere. The cabin of Perlan II is pressurized and is occupied by a crew of two who make their high altitude flights from a base in Argentina.
The Perlan II will carry a package of scientific instruments which will enable it to study the atmosphere without the presence of a polluting engine to bias the measurements. The results will provide important information about our atmosphere which will help humans to adapt to the climate change we have created.
At the highest point of its flight Perlan II will be flying in an atmosphere similar to what exists on the planet Mars.
In the future high flying commercial aircraft in our atmosphere as well as vehicles which will enable us to explore our neighbor Mars will benefit from the data obtained by the Airbus Perlan II.

An extremely wide field of view camera, the Zwicky Transient Facility, operated by Caltech on Palomar Mountain in California is able to take images of the entire northern sky every couple of days. This capability has enabled to astronomers to find nearly 8,000, Type IA supernova. A recent discovery SN Zwicky is unique.