Space News/UFO's Etc...(Discussion/Pics/Vids)

[ilan]

You can subscribe to the Daily Minor Planet. It sends alerts as these critters do their flybys. The email alerts usually give a heads up a day or two in advance, at the time the asteroids are discovered.

http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/daily-minor-planet

[ilan]

News just in of another one that will be about as close as the one Marley mentioned...

Asteroid 2017 BS32 was first observed by Pan-STARRS 1, Haleakala on 2017-01-30It will fly by Earth harmlessly on 2017-02-02 at 20:27 UTC at 0.4 times the distance to the Moon, at a speed (relative to the Earth) of 11.6 km/s. It is estimated to be 8 - 26 meters in size.

[ilan]

Newfound Asteroid to Buzz Earth Today: See It Live with Slooh
Samantha Mathewson, Space.com | 2 February 2017

A small asteroid the size of a bus will pass harmlessly between Earth and the moon's orbit today (Feb. 2), only a couple days after astronomers first discovered the object. It's one of many small asteroids that have recently sped past the planet, and one of three flying by today, according to NASA (the other two will be much further from Earth).

The near-Earth asteroid, called 2017 BS32, was first spotted on Jan. 30, and it follows on the heels of three other notable small asteroid flybys, the first of which passed Earth on Jan. 9. Slooh will offer a live webcast of 2017 BS32 starting at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) on Feb. 2, and can be watched on the Slooh website.

Astronomers estimate that the asteroid will come within about 101,214 miles (162,888 kilometers) of Earth during its closest approach at 3:23 p.m. EDT (7:23 GMT) on Feb. 2, according to a statement from the Slooh observatory. The asteroid is about 39 feet (12 meters) in diameter, according to NASA's Asteroid Watch program

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- Ilan:

There is a conspiracy theory afoot suggesting that an asteroid is slated to collide with earth next week. The story can be viewed here:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/massive-asteroid-due-collide-earth-9702155

[ilan]

Study Finds Micrometeorites on Rooftops
David Dickinson, Sky & Telescope | January 31, 2017

A recent study collected micrometeorites from urban European rooftops.


A sampling of the tiny micrometeoroids collected by Project Stardust.
Jan Braly Kihle / Jon Larsen/Project Stardust

Do you dread having to clean out those rain gutters this spring? Try rethinking what it is you're cleaning. Mixed in with the muck and debris may just be a few tiny micrometeorites, debris literally from out of this world.

A recent study out of Imperial College London, the London Natural History Museum, the University of Brussels, and a group known as Project Stardust has shown a silent cosmic rain is falling just overhead.

The rain consists of micrometeoriods, small dust particles slamming into Earth's atmosphere as our planet plows around the Sun at 30 kilometers (18.3 miles) per second. Micrometeorites are notoriously difficult to study in their pristine state, but Project Stardust has been collecting the sediment from urban rooftop gutters for the past seven years in a bid to find them. And they succeeded: the recent study recovered a fascinating array of micrometeorites from the urban rooftops of Oslow, Norway and Paris, France.

Urban Space Rocks

Finding tiny bits of space debris isn't easy. Project Stardust collected and filtered through 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of material from a total collection area covering 30,000 square meters. Of these, about 500 rocks passed stringent scrutiny.

To pick out these tiny needles from the metaphorical haystack, scientists first sifted through the collected debris with magnets, since most ordinary chondrite-type meteorites have a high iron content. Next, the scientists washed the remainder and then painstakingly sorted the rocks by size and shape. Finally, the final suspects are examined under a binocular microscope, where researchers looked for the luster and spherical shape indicative of ablation during atmospheric entry. Of the 500 particles collected, 48 were then embedded in resin and polished for further characterization.

The micrometeorites collected are tiny, most just 300 to 400 micron in size. The largest of them are just under half a millimeter across, barely visible to the naked eye.

Rain Gutter Meteorites: Fact or Fantasy?

The idea of “rain gutter micrometeorites” is a matter of minor controversy in meteorite-collecting circles. The idea became vogue thanks to a 1940 micrometeorite study by American meteoriticist Harvey Nininger. Howeer, later studies found that the abundance of magnetic microspherules dropped sharply away from urban areas, and modern pollution is full of metallic particulates that add a steady stream of false-positive “micrometeor wrongs,” confounding searchefforts.

Still, it's a fun and easy project to fit a bucket's bottom with an NIB (neodymium-iron-beryllium) super-magnet, place the bucket under the end of a rain gutter, and see what turns up.

In this study, the team specifically looked for micrometeorites that matched the mineral compositions of known samples, including deep-sea samples, as well as those from the South Pole Water Well in Antarctica, which also contain similar tell-tale iron-nickel and sulfide beads indicative of micrometeorites.

In addition to being the largest study to date of rooftop material, this also marks the first longterm measurement of the flux of incoming micrometeoroid dust. The team estimates that 100 tons of micrometeorite dust falls over Earth every day, with about one micrometeroid “hit” per square meter per year. Samples taken from the South Pole Water Well, Larkman Nunatak moraine, and Cap Prud'homme in Antarctica also chronicle the steady flux of micrometeoroid bombardment over the past million years.

[ilan]

Astronomers find a new class of black holes
John Wenz, Astronomy Magazine | Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Welcome to the astronomical world, intermediate-mass black holes.


Globular cluster 47 based on data from FORS1 ESO

Some black holes are small. Some black holes are giant. But oddly enough, in the cosmic fight between innocent passing stars and voracious black holes, scientists have never found a mid-sized black hole. Until now.

The star cluster 47 Tucanae, located about 13,000 to 16,000 light years from Earth, is a dense ball of stars. Hundreds of thousands of stars compacted into a 120 light-year span give off gamma rays and X-rays and more energetic events, but to date, no black holes had been found there. The center seemed ripe for opportunities to find one, but a lack of tidal disruption events and a jumble of stars hard to sift through obscured finding any lurking black holes there.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics turned to two tactics to find the black hole instead. First, they observed the motion of the stars in aggregate, and compared the rotation rate to what would happen if a black hole were present. Secondly, they observed the position of pulsars in the globular cluster.

Black holes are the densest objects in the universe. But neutron stars (which include pulsars) are a close second, as both can result from similar events in which a giant star goes supernova and its dense stellar core collapses (though a few other mechanisms can create black holes.)

If the pulsars were the biggest objects in the globular cluster, they’d be nearer to the core and act as a chief gravitational attractor. But instead, pulsars are scattered across the cluster rather than congregating in the center of the cluster.

This all suggests that a black hole of 2,200 solar masses is lying at the center of 47 Tucanae. Until now, though, astronomers have typically only found black holes of below 100 solar masses or above 10,000, the latter of which are the behemoths that power galaxies. These intermediate-mass black holes are believed to be seeds of supermassive black holes. As black holes feast, they gain mass.

The intermediate-mass black holes may form from several stars in a dense cluster collapsing, with the resulting black holes merging and creating a bigger black hole. They could also be black holes that have accumulated mass over time — and indeed, 47 Tucanae is 12 billion years old, giving plenty of time to slurp up matter. There is also a scenario under which, shortly after the Big Bang, certain areas of the expanding universe were so dense they formed black holes shortly after the event.

Finding more mid-range black holes can be hard. Black holes, especially larger ones, typically clean their general area of debris. But if an unfortunate star happens to cross paths with one, the resulting event could be detected by astronomers, allowing them to see an intermediate-mass black hole in action.

[crazed 9.6]

was surfing some documentaries , as I always do.
I came across this video and the more I watched it, the better it got.

You guys may have seen this already, I think it is over a year old now.

Nuclear power in Space.... the 'n' word

[ilan]

Atop Mt. Wilson, retired engineers keep alive astronomy's 'Sistine Chapel'
Louis Sahagun, LA Times | 12 February 2017

Dressed in parkas and knit caps, the three volunteers lug crates of power tools and spooled wire into the gleaming mountaintop edifice that some have called astronomy’s “Sistine Chapel” and immediately start tinkering.

In 1904, workers installed the first telescope at the still uncompleted Mt. Wilson Observatory. For much of the 20th century, astronomers with names like Hale and Hubble used it and the new telescopes it sprouted — the 100-inch reflector and three solar telescopes followed the initial 60-incher — as a figurative launch pad for exploration that changed our understanding of the cosmos.

Gradually, though, financial support waned along with the observatory’s cutting-edge status, and for the last 20 years its telescopes, still impressive by any standard, rely on the kind attention of a small volunteer team of retired space industry electrical engineers, most now in their 70s and 80s.

So it is that on a morning when parts of the San Gabriels are topped with snow, Kenneth Evans is on a ladder, his head lamp fixed on a new sensor switch for a 100-inch reflecting telescope that dominated the world of astronomy for more than three decades.

Nearby, William Leflang and Gale Gant test the wiring of a control console.

Dusting off his hands, Evans tells Leflang to “give it some power.”

He pivots to eyeball the sensor, which will improve the scope’s ability to track the movement of celestial objects, and with a grand wave of his grease-covered hands, says, “Works great.”

"Our volunteer engineers are heroes. They are keeping it alive." — Thomas Meneghini, Mt. Wilson Institute executive director

Satisfied smiles break out on the faces of men who seem confident that they were born to fix things.

The volunteers took up their cause in the late 1990s after the Carnegie Institution for Science, whose namesake had invested the initial funds for construction, transferred ownership of the Mt. Wilson Observatory to the nonprofit Mt. Wilson Institute.

Now, they shoulder much of the responsibility for keeping the observatory’s cluster of vintage telescopes from deteriorating into non-functioning museum pieces.

Other volunteers include John Harrigan, a former power distribution expert at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power; Richard Johnston, an information technology consultant, and his son, Eric Johnston, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol’s Center for Quantum Photonics. Taking on problems one weekend work party at a time, the team has solved hundreds of pressing issues at the 40-acre observatory complex.

They have patched holes in walls, strengthened ceilings and walkways with wooden beams, fixed broken water mains and used steel wool and solvents to scour rust and old axle grease off flywheels and gears at the observatory, which looks much as it did when it was completed in 1917.

Mt. Wilson aficionados still talk about how Evans and his brother Larry refurbished a 1911 50-horsepower 2-cylinder vertical Fairbanks-Morse Type “RE” engine with brass plumbing and 22,000 pounds of machinery so that it could be used in demonstrations.

Now they’re laboring to improve the giant reflector’s potential as an educational tool and tourist draw.

But money for maintaining the observatory remains tight, the institute says, and the fate of the reflector, hailed as the mightiest instrument in astronomy when it was built, remains uncertain.

For Thomas Meneghini, the institute’s executive director, the facility’s dual nature conjures a peculiar charm: rooms where Albert Einstein once bunked bunched around picnic grounds, a museum, hiking trails and vista points that offer views from Pasadena, directly below, out across Southern California.

“But raising funds has been a challenge. That’s why our volunteer engineers are heroes. They are keeping it alive. Without them and other supporters, these magnificent instruments would just be cold hunks of steel and glass.”

A 150-foot-tall solar facility at Mt. Wilson has already deteriorated to the point that it can be used only for school programs and public demonstrations. That instrument’s 1970s-era computer system is a shambles. Its magnetograph — an instrument allowing detailed observations of the sun’s magnetic fields — was shut down in 2013, a year after its tower received a new coat of paint funded with a $1.5-million federal grant.

A separate solar telescope installed in 1904 to make photographic images of the wavelengths of the sun’s light has come to be known as “Leflang’s baby.” That’s because he maintains that instrument, which is used only two weeks a year for educational purposes.

Mt. Wilson’s biggest draw remains the 100-inch reflector, which reigned supreme until completion of Caltech’s 200-inch telescope on Mt. Palomar in San Diego County after World War II.

While Los Angeles slept, astronomer Edwin Hubble and others used the reflector to discover billions of galaxies where none were known before, most of them speeding away from each other in all directions. These observations led to the Big Bang theory, which suggests the universe began in a single explosive moment.

Keeping it in reliable shape, however, has been a work in progress since 1985, when the Carnegie Institution for Science put it in mothballs due to light pollution in the Los Angeles Basin and a commitment to expand its Las Camanas Observatory in Chile, which was more suitable for focusing on distant faint objects.

The telescope was reopened in 1994, nine years after Carnegie officials transferred ownership to the institute.

But it needs upgrades to continue operating.

And so the unusual fraternity gathers, trash-talking one another in terms that perhaps only those who recite antique gas engine minutiae like baseball stats can appreciate.

“There’s a lot of epic history in here,” Leflang says, proceeding gingerly past colossal marvels of World War I-era engineering and astrophysics.

The 87-ton scope has 2,000 moving parts including a cast-iron worm gear 18 feet in diameter. Steel cables as thick as mooring ropes attached to a crane used to service its 9,500-pound primary mirror. A 450-ton dome rotates overhead on trolley tracks.

Framed photographs of Hubble, George Ellery Hale and other pioneer astronomers are displayed on walls and scaffolding studded with rivets, and in the drawers of a wood filing cabinet are hundreds of original blueprints of the facility dated Jan. 17, 1917.

It takes the team about an hour to complete the modification, which they accomplished without altering the telescope’s basic design or optics.

“Some folks refer to this scope as the grand dame of astronomy,” Gant says with a boyish grin. “We call it a complex beast.”

After a 10-minute breather, the team members give one another approving nods, load their pickups, and head back down the mountain.

[ilan]

NASA is enlisting the public to find Planet Nine
John Wenz, Astronomy Magazine | Thursday, February 16, 2017

Backyard World: Planet Nine can help you find a missing piece of our solar system from the comforts of your couch.

NASA is funding a new program to bring together data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to create miniature movies. These loops look for objects that move across the sky compared to relatively stationary background stars.

NASA is turning to crowdsourcing rather than algorithms to find real objects that might have been missed the first time around because they were marked as instrument errors.

Although it’s proposed as a way to find Planet Nine, the Backyard Worlds program may also help find asteroids near Earth, faint dwarf planets in the outskirts of the solar system, and failed stars within a few dozen light years of us, all of which appear faint to the naked eye but will still give off heat in infrared.

Be warned, your field of view will look a little like this:

To get started, visit the Backyard Worlds website. You may end up finding a planet … or at least a comet or two.

For a little primer on Planet Nine, here’s our editor-in-chief David J. Eicher:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtSsS_aFI98

[ilan]

Scientists narrow down list of landing sites for Mars 2020
Nicole Kiefert, Astronomy Magazine | Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Oh, the places the rover will go

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is the next major interplanetary mission that will be sent to the Red Planet to look for signs of past habitability, martian life, and will collect samples to return to Earth. The rover is set to land in February 2021, but where it will land no one yet knows.

Astronomers working on the mission have met a few times to narrow down the list of landing sites, and will meet a fourth time in mid-2018 to pick the final destination.

The final three candidates on that list, which was narrowed down from the previous list of eight sites, include Northeast Syrtis Major, Jezero Crater, and Columbia Hills/Gusev Crater.

Jezero Crater is of interest because of its dried-up lake that could potentially provide evidence of a previous microbial life form. Northeast Syrtis Major is in an area that astronomers thought was warm and wet at one point but now hosts a shield volcano near an impact crater. The area with the most mixed responses was Columbia Hills, where the Spirit rover had previously found volcanic ash, suggesting an old active hot spring and a chance to find past life on Mars.

“Mars 2020 is not a life-detection mission, but I think targeted to the right place we can make great strides toward finally answering the question about life on Mars,” John Grant, geologist at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and co-chair of the Mars 2020 Landing Site Steering Committee, told Scientific American. “It gets us down the road [to find out].”

Though this rover is very similar to the Curiosity, its software upgrades with make it operate quicker, more efficiently, and more independently.

Due to funding, Mars 2020 is currently NASA’s last confirmed mission heading to Mars. The lack of funding may have an impact on research on the Red Planet, but researchers are remaining optimistic.

[Capt.Kangaroo]

Good video.
Not ice particles.
Not swamp gas....
What ya think?