Travelers In The Night Albert D. Grauer

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Vivian Carjaval was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Ursa Minor with our Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow when she discovered, 2024 BR4, a two football field diameter Earth approaching asteroid.Vivian’s Apollo asteroid discovery poses no threat to humans since 2024 is as close as it will come to Earth in the next few hundred years.

During a recent 3 night observing run my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rose Matheny discovered 4 asteroids which can come to less than one half the Moon's distance from us. Interestingly one of them passed about 25,000 miles over the South Pole 2 days after Rose discovered it. Rose's four close approaching asteroids are small ranging in size from 15 to 60 feet in diameter. None of them are big enough to reach the Earth's surface and make a crater. However, the largest is about the size of the one whose air blast shock wave injured nearly 1500 people when it exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 .

Perhaps the most dangerous Amor asteroid is 2006 HZ51 .It was discovered by my team the Catalina Sky Survey.  Fortunately the closest 2006 HZ51 will come to our home planet is  June 11 of 2116 when it will pass us harmlessly 26 times the distance to our moon away from us.

Recently in the space of 28 hours my Catalina Sky Survey teammates Rose Matheny and Carson Fuls discovered two Potentially Hazardous Asteroids to add to the list of the more than 1700 which asteroid hunters have discovered. Fortunately, none of the Potentially Hazardous Asteroids are currently on a collision course with planet Earth.

P/1999 J6 (SOHO) was discovered 10 May 1995 by Mike Oates as part of the Citizen Science Sun Grazer Project in which volunteers from all over the world have the chance to discover a comet in images taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory or SOHO for short.RADAR studies of the daytime Arietid ( AIR-ee-uh-tids) meteor shower stream which peaks every June 7 indicates that  P/1999 J6 (SOHO) could be one of the potential parent objects.

More than 240 Lunar meteorites have been found in the Dhofar region of Oman, on the LaPaz Icefield of Antartica, and other locations on the Earth's surface. These space traveling rocks were blasted from the Moon's surface by the impact of asteroids and comets which accelerated them to speeds greater than the lunar escape velocity of 1.5 miles per second. Subsequently these interplanetary travelers in the night orbited the Sun for an extended period of time before entering our atmosphere and falling to Earth. We know these meteorites are from the Moon because they contain mixtures of atoms which are found on the Moon but not in Earthly rocks.