Podcast Episodes

93E-105-A New Chapter In The Human Exploration Of Space

The first unmanned test flight of the new NASA Orion Spacecraft went perfectly. It made two orbits of the Earth traveling as far as 3600 miles above the surface of our planet. Its path took it nearl…

Published on 5 years, 3 months ago

604-Comet Rankin

There may be as many as a trillion small icy objects in the Oort cloud near the outer edge of our solar system. Very rarely one of these frozen ice balls is jostled by the gravity of a nearby star ca…

Published on 5 years, 3 months ago

92E-104-Jupiter Trojan Confusion

Humans know of approximately half million main belt asteroids orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. We have also found approximately 11,000 Earth approaching asteroids. Members of these two gr…

Published on 5 years, 3 months ago

603-Discovering Alien Life

Our star is only one among hundreds of billions in the Milky Way galaxy which itself is only one of a hundred billion or more galaxies in the known universe. How can it be that humans are the only cr…

Published on 5 years, 4 months ago

91E-103-Small Asteroids In Earth-like Orbits

Four days after it made its closest approach to Earth, I found a 10 foot diameter asteroid with the NASA funded University of Arizona 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon. At that point it was 838,000 mil…

Published on 5 years, 4 months ago

602-Solar Flares

Some stars can have flares which can cause them to more than double in brightness in a few minutes. Fortunately our Sun does not do that and the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field protect humans f…

Published on 5 years, 4 months ago

90E-102-Little Asteroid On An Inside Track

2014 US7 is called an Aten [Ah tin] type of asteroid. The first of its type was discovered by Dr. Eleanor Key Francis "Glo" Helin in 1976. She was an American astronomer who discovered more than 800 …

Published on 5 years, 4 months ago

601-Phaethon's Child

Phaethon (Faith on) is a strange, 4 mile diameter, blueish asteroid. It travels on an orbit which comes so close to the Sun that its exterior is heated to 1,500 F. When you go out to view the Geminid…

Published on 5 years, 4 months ago

89E-101-Navigating The Earth Moon Dance

Published on 5 years, 4 months ago

600-Big and Close

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Hannes Groeller was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Pegasus with our 60 inch telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona when he discovered a Potentially Hazardous Aster…

Published on 5 years, 4 months ago