Tag Archives: Asteroids

Asteroids and Balloons at Dunsink Observatory

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  Our planet being hit by an asteroid is a worrying thought and not much fun. However, this week I was reminded of the night I brought about 30 asteroids to Dunsink Observatory in Dublin.  A family audience packed the meridian room for my workshop Balloon Planets. Which partly involved learning about the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroid Day On June 30th this week we had Asteroid day. This is an annual reminder of the threat that asteroids hold for our home in space. We know that organisations are working on methods to deflect asteroids heading in our direction. We know that there are organisations on constant watch for these objects. The treat is real, the possibilities of a hit are real. Hopefully, more resources will be put into  research and defence activities to avert the nightmare scenario of a direct hit. Dunsink Observatory I’ve spent almost 14 years or so doing talks and workshops for various groups at … Continue reading →

Asteroids Named for Jesuits: An Update

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Two years ago, I wrote my first blog entry, entitled “Asteroids Named for Jesuits.”  It’s time for an update. What prompts this update is the news that the Vatican Observatory’s own Fr. Christopher Corbally has been honored with the naming of asteroid 119248 Corbally.  There are now six asteroids named for members of the Vatican Observatory. For those who don’t know him, Fr. Corbally is a member of the English Jesuit province. He joined the Vatican Observatory in 1983, and has played an important role in the research activities of our Tucson half of the Observatory. His astronomical studies include multiple star systems, spectral classification of stars, 𝜆-Boötis stars, and more. He has also studied human sentience in an evolutionary context, recently co-authoring a book on the subject: The Emergence of Religion in Human Evolution. He has served as vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson. He is president of National Committee for Astronomy in the Vatican … Continue reading →

ⓜ A month in the life, 2009…

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This entry is part 12 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… Continuing my “Year of Astronomy”, here is an entry from March, 2009 for the “Cosmic Diary” blog… it’s a trip down memory lane, from when I was putting on 100,000 air miles a year. I’d stopped that foolishness even before the pandemic hit. A few paragraphs of a paper I submitted in late 2007 were the basis for a talk I gave last summer at the Asteroids, Comets, and Meteorites conference. It was about how the porosity of meteorites, and the porosity of the asteroids they come from, seem to show an interesting pattern… increasing, so that stuff appears to get fluffier and fluffier as you go further and further out in the asteroid belt and beyond. The talk last summer got a nice, favorable response from the conference attendees and so I decided I should write it up for the conference proceedings. Deadline, December 1, 2008. By January 2009 – only a month after the deadline … Continue reading →

ⓜ A summary of my science…

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This entry is part 13 of 28 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… A couple of weeks ago (on April 2) I ran an article written for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009. This article also dates from that time; it was written for an “astroblog” set up by some IYA committee or another. No idea where it actually went up, but it’s a nice summary of where I was, scientifically, back in 2009… I’m writing this from the control room of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) on Mt. Graham, Arizona. Observing Centaurs, the proto-comets whose orbits cross Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn, is our project for this run; it consists of five minutes of doing nothing while the camera takes an exposure of these small iceballs, followed by a brief flurry of activity when the next picture comes off our CCD camera… a faint smudge moving from image to image across a background of stars and distant galaxies. Behind me, Bill Romanishin from the University of Oklahoma … Continue reading →

Observing Asteroids at VATT, Part 2

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Last April, my post was about doing Citizen Science from the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT). This is a follow-up article about our latest observing run in early December 2019. I would like to thank Mark Trueblood and Robert Crawford who make our observing the success that it is. I would also like to thank the staff of VATT who are on call all hours of the night to help us out when we need help with the telescope and equipment. As I said in my previous article about observing from the VATT, our goal is to observe Near-Earth Asteroids that might, some time in the future, collide with the Earth. “These asteroids might become ‘lost’ because of the uncertainty in their orbits.” By reducing the uncertainty in the orbits of these asteroids, we hope to remove them from the list of asteroid impactors. This five-night observing run was an experiment: Could we observe asteroids that had been discovered only … Continue reading →

Specola Guestbook: July 21, 1911 – Joel Metcalf

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This entry is part 24 of 49 in the series Specola Guestbook

Since its founding in 1891, many people have passed through the doors of the Vatican Observatory.  A quick perusal of our guestbook reveals several Names, including Popes, nobel laureates, astronauts, actors, and saints. Today’s guestbook entry is from July 21, 1911, when Joel Metcalf made a visit. Next to his name, Rev. Joel Hastings Metcalf (1866-1925) wrote “Winchester, Mass.”  He was a Unitarian minister and an avid amateur astronomer who specialized in hunting asteroids and comets. Between 1905 and 1914, he discovered 41 asteroids and several comets. He was a member of the visiting committees of the Harvard Observatory and the Ladd Observatory (Brown U.) The asteroids 726 Joëlla and 792 Metcalfia (both among the 41 he discovered) are named for him, and several of the comets he discovered also bear his name.      

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Across the Universe: Astronomy domine

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This entry is part 1 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet was first run in December 2018 December 2018 was a busy month in space. The Japanese Hayabusa II mission was orbiting Ryuku, a tiny near-Earth asteroid. A Chinese probe was about to place a lander on the far side of the Moon. NASA’s Insight mission had just arrived on Mars to measure marsquakes and the heat flowing from its interior. Virgin Galactic was testing a ship that can take tourists above the stratosphere. Of all these, my attention was on OSIRIS-REx. (The name is a typical NASA acronym; don’t ask.) This probe had also just arrived at a near-Earth asteroid, named Bennu, with essentially the same mission as Hayabusa II. It was the dream of the late Mike Drake, my first PhD advisor at the University of Arizona; after his death, the science team lead fell to Dante Lauretta, whose PhD director was my MIT classmate Bruce Fegley. And the rest of the science team … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The New Paganism

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This entry is part 99 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

The following column was published in The Tablet in November 2009; we ran it again here in 2016. This is the version I finally submitted of the column posted here yesterday… You will know the end-times by their signs, we’re told in the Gospel readings at this time of year. Given the nature of those signs, mostly dramatic events in the sky, you can imagine the kinds of questions that are typically addressed to those of us who study meteorite falls. The apocalyptic visions in the Gospels bear a certain resemblance to our understanding of the destruction that an asteroid impact would produce. Is it mere coincidence? Do I have any advice for the fearful? Yes: read the Gospel passages in their context as lessons on how to live, not how we’ll die. Meanwhile, quit smoking and wear your seat belt. That said, what does science tell us about the end of the world? We know that our solar system has … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Featureless Features

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This entry is part 95 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

At the end of September 2016, Rosetta finally ended its mission by crashing into its comet. This column, about an earlier aspect of the Rosetta mission, first appeared in The Tablet in October 2010; we first ran it here in 2016.   Back in July [2010], ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, en route to a comet rendezvous in 2014, flew past asteroid Lutetia, a 100 km pile of rock orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The result of that encounter was a hot topic of both the European Planetary Science Conference in Rome in September and a meeting of American planetary astronomers in Pasadena in October [2010]. Studying asteroids has always been challenging. Even in the largest telescopes they’re mere dots of light, too small to show any shapes, much less surface details. We can only infer their nature from the most subtle of hints: how their brightness varies as they spin, how much infrared light they radiate, their visible and infrared colours. Minerals that contain … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Relics of Space

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This entry is part 3 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet first ran there in September 2018… I have altered it slightly to bring it up to date. The famous American cynic H. L. Mencken once asserted that every question had an answer that was “neat, plausible, and wrong.” Science is no different. Our meteorite collections have reddish “ordinary” meteorites and black “carbonaceous” ones; meanwhile, in space we see some asteroids with reddish surfaces, while others are pitch black. The connection between the meteorites and the asteroids is thus neat and plausible. But is it right? The holy grail in asteroids is finding the ones with water and carbon. If we are going to be a space-faring species, we’ll need those chemicals to feed us and power our spacecraft. The cost to bring them up to space with us from Earth makes these materials far more valuable than platinum or gold.  We know that some carbonaceous meteorites have carbon and water; and they are distinctively black. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Key to the Sea and Sky

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This entry is part 32 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in July 2007; we first ran it here in 2015.   In Alicante, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, a group of us planetary astronomers held a workshop [in 2007] on how asteroids respond to the massive collisions that can lead to their catastrophic disruption. Just north of us, in Valencia, sailors from Switzerland and New Zealand were vying for the America’s Cup. The connection between elegant million dollar yachts and exploding asteroids. is the equations of fluid dynamics. I’ve loved sailing since my childhood. I spent my summers capsizing sailboards on Lake Huron and my winters reading too much Arthur Ransome. As a student in the early 1970s I competed on MIT’s sailing team (the Charles River was indeed “dirty water” especially back then), and attended lectures in their ocean engineering department on the challenges of designing the best shape for a hull that could slip through the water with a minimum of friction while … Continue reading →

In the Sky This Week – April 30, 2019

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This entry is part 94 of 154 in the series In the Sky This Week

Mercury, Venus appear very low in the eastern sky just before sunrise – if seeing Mercury was a challenge last week, it will be even harder this week. The waning crescent Moon joins the two planets until May 3rd. Saturn, Jupiter and the star Antares appear southern sky early in the morning. In this image, I have the light pollution set to high – this is typically what I can see from a close suburb to Detroit. This is the same patch of sky seen from a dark sky site. Mars and the star Betelgeuse are low on the horizon after sunset; the winter constellations will soon be gone. M-109 – “Vacuum Cleaner Galaxy” Messier 109 (also known as NGC 3992) is a barred spiral galaxy exhibiting a weak inner ring structure around the central bar approximately 83.5 ± 24 million light-years[3]away in the constellation Ursa Major. M109 can be seen southeast of the star Phecda (γ UMa). – Wikipedia Where did the name “Vacuum Cleaner Galaxy” come from? It’s … Continue reading →