Episodes

  • 304E-323-Big Splash

    304E-323-Big Splash
    Oct 1 2024
    To discover what would happen if an asteroid were to strike a large body of water, Dr. Galen Gisler led a team of scientists who used high performance computing facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory to calculate and visualize a 3-D model of an asteroid entering the Earth's atmosphere over one of the world's oceans. These efforts won them the Best Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase award at Supercomputing 2016. Reality is that what happens depends upon the mass, size, speed, angle of approach, and composition of the impacting object. Galen's group of scientists documented the hunch that since an asteroid strikes the water at a single point, it only effects the immediate region around the impact point, whereas to create a tsunami, you need something like an under water landslide which disturbs an entire water column from the ocean floor to the surface.
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    2 mins
  • 816-David's Close Approaching Comet

    816-David's Close Approaching Comet
    Sep 27 2024
    My Catalina Sky Survey Teammate David Rankin was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Pegasus with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, AZ when he spotted a faint fuzzy object moving through a set of his images.David’s discovery is classified to be one of the more than 30 Encke type comets. This family small solar system objects have orbital periods about the Sun similar to their namesake comet 2P/Encke’s orbital period of 3.3 years
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    2 mins
  • 303E-322-Dust Stories

    303E-322-Dust Stories
    Sep 24 2024
    Collect your own beautiful micro-meteorite sample.
    It is estimated that several hundred thousand pounds of left over particles from the formation of our solar system enters the Earth's atmosphere every day with perhaps 10% of the of the total reaching the surface of our home planet. The individual grains of cosmic dust or micro-meteorites as they are also called range in size from the diameter of a human hair to twice the thickness of a dime.
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    2 mins
  • 815-RADAR Observes Binary PHA

    815-RADAR Observes Binary PHA
    Sep 20 2024
    RADAR is very powerful tool since it can precisely measure an asteroid’s position and velocity as well as in some cases yield information about its size, shape, and other characteristics.
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    2 mins
  • 302E-321-Dangereous Comet

    302E-321-Dangereous Comet
    Sep 17 2024
    Protection against a comet strike is worth considering. Every year, if we are lucky, several comets can come close enough for the Sun to warm and us to see the beautiful changing dust and gas clouds around them with binoculars or our unaided eyes. So far asteroids have gotten most of the attention as dangerous celestial neighbors, however, Dr. Joseph Nuth, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland recently pointed out "Comets can also deliver a heaping helping of calamity to Earth, and scientists and policymakers alike should start taking measures to combat the threat".
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    2 mins
  • 814-Threat of Solar Storms

    814-Threat of Solar Storms
    Sep 13 2024
    Solar storms on our home planet occur when bursts of visible, ultraviolet and other photons hit our atmosphere and/or streams of energetic particles in the solar wind interact with Earth’s magnetic field. Mild solar storms produce beautiful aurora while the most intense ones have the potential to do trillions of dollars in damage to power grids, pipelines, rail networks, aviation, mobile phones, banking, credit card users, GPS, satellite communications, spacecraft, and more.
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    2 mins
  • 301E-320-WOW What a Ride

    301E-320-WOW What a Ride
    Sep 10 2024
    It's a good thing this one will miss Earth.
    Riding the surface of the asteroid that my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski recently discovered would be an incredible experience.
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    2 mins
  • 813-RADAR Observations of Close Approacher

    813-RADAR Observations of Close Approacher
    Sep 6 2024
    Astronomers measure an asteroid’s position on the sky using a two dimensional system similar to the latitude and longitude coordinates we obtain with our GPS. For the vast majority of asteroids, we cannot measure the third dimension, the distance to the asteroid directly.
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    2 mins