385E-421-New Aten

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammates Carson Fuls and Greg Lenoard discovered an Aten asteroid which orbits the Sun once every 272 days and on a path that crosses the orbits of Venus and Earth a number of times each year. Atens account for only about 6% of the Earth approaching asteroids that asteroid hunters discover. They are relatively dim and difficult to discover because they spend most of their time inside the Earth's orbit with their sunlit side facing away from us. For example Carson and Greg's newly discovered asteroid, 2017 WJ16, is bright enough for asteroid hunters to track for only about 50 nights every couple of years. It is about 150 feet in diameter and travels on an orbit which can bring it to a bit more than three times the Moon's distance from Earth. When 2017 WJ16 is closer to the Sun than Earth it travels faster then we do allowing it to catch and just barely cross our orbit as we both travel about the Sun. In 2020, 2017 WJ16 will make one of it's closer approaches to us when it comes to about less than 5 times the Moon's distance from our home planet. At that time it will be traveling at 2.9 miles/second relative to us which is well within reach of our current rocket technology. I suspect that in the future if the pattern of colors which 2017 WJ16 reflects, reveals a high metal or water content humans will mine it to construct and operate their colonies in space.

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918-Auroras from Space

The northern lights or Aurora Borealis have fascinated humans throughout the ages. Today aurora watching is a multimillion dollar industry in places like Alaska, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Green...

25 Syys 2min

407E-448-Two PHA's

The large dangerous asteroids that we don't know about are what keep asteroid hunters going to the telescope.

22 Syys 2min

917-Space Dust

As the Earth orbits the Sun at 18.5 mi/s it sweeps up about 100 tons of micrometeorites and space dust every day of which some 14 tons eventually makes it to the ground. You can even find some of thes...

18 Syys 2min

406E-447-Nuking An Asteroid

Tonight, even though the chances are extremely slim, an asteroid hunter could find a sizable asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth. If we have decades warning, the potential impactor's arri...

15 Syys 2min

916-Past Glory

When accurately recorded historical observations do not agree with what we what we see today it is often very rewarding to find out why. In modern telescopes we see Theta Eridani to a be pair separate...

11 Syys 2min

405E-446-Asteroid Homestead

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles above the Earth's surface they...

8 Syys 2min

915-Raining Comets

The comets we observe generally start out as icy dirty snowballs of frozen gases like water and frozen carbon dioxide in the Oort cloud. If recent scientific analysis is correct, we are now witnessing...

4 Syys 2min