Podcaster: Dr. Al Grauer
Title: Travelers in the Night Eps. 797 & 798: Recoveries & Destination Enceladus
Organization: Travelers in The Night
Link : Travelers in the Night ; @Nmcanopus
Description: Today’s two stories:
- It is essential that asteroid hunters keep track of potentially dangerous asteroids to make sure that their orbits haven’t changed as they encounter other objects in space to make them a threat to our home planet.
- Life on Earth appears to have formed in our oceans. Scientists are thus on the hunt for other worlds which have oceans of liquid water and thus potentially could be the home of fellow living creatures.
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:
EP. 797 – Recoveries
It is essential that asteroid hunters keep track of potentially dangerous asteroids to make sure that their orbits haven’t changed as they encounter other objects in space to make them a threat to our home planet. Recently, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate, Greg Leonard, used the University of Arizona Stewart Observatory’s 61-inch telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona to track 2015 FK36, which had not had its orbit updated for 8 years.
This several-football-field-diameter space rock orbits the Sun once every 2.25 years on a path that sometimes brings it close to Venus and Earth. In the far distant future, it is likely that 2015 FK36 will collide with one of these planets. According to the Earth Impact Effects Program from the Imperial College of London and Purdue University, an asteroid the size of 2015 FK36 enters the Earth’s atmosphere once every 40,000 years or so, begins to break up at an altitude of 235,000 feet, impacts the ground in a broken condition traveling at 8 miles per second, and is likely to create a crater 2 miles in diameter and 2,000 feet deep in sedimentary rock. Fifteen miles from impact, an observer would experience winds of up to 183 miles per hour, multi-story concrete buildings would suffer severe cracking, wood-framed buildings would likely collapse, glass windows would shatter, and up to 90% of the trees would be blown down and those left standing would be stripped of branches and leaves. Fortunately, the closest 2015 FK36 will come to us in the foreseeable future is on October 14th of 2114, when it will safely pass 49 times the Moon’s distance from humanity.
Ep. 798 – Destination Enceladus
Life on Earth appears to have formed in our oceans.
Scientists are thus on the hunt for other worlds which have oceans of liquid water and thus potentially could be the home of fellow living creatures. In our own solar system, Saturn’s 156-mile diameter moon Enceladus has an ocean of liquid water, a source of energy which organisms could use, and the chemical elements necessary for life as we know it. It is no surprise that the European Space Agency, or ESA for short, is planning a mission which will visit Enceladus as well as Saturn’s moon Titan and Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Don’t hold your breath. Space missions take a long time from conception to implementation and ESA will not be likely to fly the spacecraft until the 2040s. Closer to reality, NASA’s Europa Clipper is scheduled to be launched in 2024 and will perform 50 flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
This small world, about the size of our Moon, appears likely to possess an ocean of liquid water with twice the volume of Earth’s global ocean. NASA’s goal is to determine if there are locations below Europa’s thick crust which could support life as we know it. Just like Enceladus, Europa appears to have the chemical building blocks of life, chemical energy sources, and has had stable conditions which have remained similar for 4 billion years.
In the meantime, astronomers are using the NASA TESS satellite to find planets orbiting about distant stars and following up such discoveries with the NASA James Webb Space Telescope. Hopefully all this effort will find life elsewhere.
For Travelers in the Night, this is Dr. Al Grauer. Stay tuned.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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Until next time let the stars guide!