Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps. 535 & 536: Alone Or Not & Ultima Thule
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s 2 topics:
- Project Breakthrough Starshot is designing a marble sized reconnaissance SETI spacecraft.
- The New Horizons spacecraft is now sending back data on 2014 MU69, a strange snow man shaped object which orbits the Sun once every 298 years.
Bio: Dr. Al Grauer is currently an observing member of the Catalina Sky Survey Team at the University of Arizona. This group has discovered nearly half of the Earth approaching objects known to exist. He received a PhD in Physics in 1971 and has been an observational Astronomer for 43 years. He retired as a University Professor after 39 years of interacting with students. He has conducted research projects using telescopes in Arizona, Chile, Australia, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Georgia with funding from NSF and NASA.
He is noted as Co-discoverer of comet P/2010 TO20 Linear-Grauer, Discoverer of comet C/2009 U5 Grauer and has asteroid 18871 Grauer named for him.
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Transcript:
535 – Alone Or Not
In our Milky Way Galaxy alone there are probably 25 billion planets located within the habitable zone of its star where there could be air to breathe and liquid water on its surface. New large telescopes currently on the drawing boards will allow astronomers to carefully measure the colors of light that are present and missing in the light from an alien exoplanets atmosphere to find the life revealing signature of chlorophyll, oxygen, and the other elements necessary for life in its atmosphere.
Meanwhile, with 100 millions dollars in funding from entrepreneur Yuri Milner, Project Breakthrough Starshot is designing a marble sized reconnaissance spacecraft which could be accelerated to a substantial fraction of the speed of light by a sail pushed with powerful Earth bound laser beams and be propelled to reach the closest Earth like world, Proxima b in 20 years.
Other astronomers are scanning the Universe in visible light, radio waves, and other forms of radiation to discover signals which could have been created by mature civilizations elsewhere. Other scientists are looking around our solar system for trash left behind by alien spacecraft. Until the results of these experiments come, in you can take your lawn chair to visit a natural night sky location like the Cosmic Campground in New Mexico. There as night falls you will experience the age old sense of wonder that a human obtains by looking into a star filled sky and asking if we are alone.
536 – Ultima Thule
The NASA New Horizons spacecraft discovered weather and physical processes on Pluto and its satellites never imagined possible as it flew past these distant worlds in 2015. Traveling an additional billion miles beyond Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft is now sending back data on 2014 MU69, a strange snow man shaped object which orbits the Sun once every 298 years.
As the New Horizons spacecraft came within 2,200 miles of this weird 22 mile long object, scientists were amazed to see that it is made of a large flat 12 mile diameter lobe nicknamed Ultima connected to a smaller rounder 9 mile diameter lobe nicknamed Thule. These two components look like large lumpy fat pancakes connected together by a short neck and rotate about each other once every 7 hours.
Ultima Thule has a reddish color, contains organic materials, and is likely to be made of water ice, and rocky materials. Because of the extreme distance it takes 6 hours for New Horizon’s signals traveling at the speed of light to get back to Earth. At this distance the Ultima Thule data must be sent slowly and will not all arrive until the summer of 2020.
After its close encounter with Ultima Thule the New Horizons spacecraft continues to move deeper in to the Kuiper belt of distant objects at 33,000 miles/hour leaving scientists with mysteries to explore. The New Horizons is spacecraft is likely to continue its lonely odyssey until the end of time.
For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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