Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps.271 & 272: Dark Trails & Mars Impactor
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s two stroy:
- A faint shooting star or meteor streaking across the sky is produced when a tiny bit of rock or dust enters the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up some 60 miles above us. NASA scientist Dr. Marc Fries and his collaborators have used Doppler Weather Radar to track twenty meteor’s dark trails through the sky. In the past year or so they have used this technique to direct searchers on the ground to the probable location of freshly fallen meteorites.
- In 2015 the Earth was struck by at least 43 meteoroids which created bright fireballs. Their arrival does not seem to be correlated with the position of the Earth in it’s orbit about the Sun.Overall a given piece of ground on Mars is several times more likely to be hit by a space rock than is a similar sized area on Earth.
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:
For Travelers in the Night this is Dr. Al Grauer.
365 Days of Astronomy
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