Travelers In The Night

If you set your mind to it, you can find and hold a sample of an asteroid, called a meteorite, which has landed on the Earth's surface. On the other hand, watching major meteor showers will allow you to see but not touch comet dust as it enters and burns up in the Earth's atmosphere.

A fascinating research paper suggests the possibility that there is an exchange of chemical elements, organic molecules, and potentially life’s precursors between star systems. Could it be possible that microorganisms or complex organic molecules could hitch a ride inside rocky meteorites ejected from a living planet? If so living organisms in our neighborhood of the Milky Way might be related to each other.

Theoretically, If an asteroid on a collision course with our planet could be slowed sufficiently it could be made to pass behind our planet as it orbits the Sun.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, also known as LSST, with its 8.4 m mirror, the width of a tennis court, and the worlds largest 3.2 gigapixel camera, roughly the size of a small car, will image the entire sky every 3 or 4 nights in such a way as to detect objects that change in position and/or brightness. It is estimated the LSST will discover one or two new impacting small asteroids per year and provide several days of lead time for follow up telescopes to track an impactor into the atmosphere to find meteorites whose chemical composition will tell us about where they originated.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard's discovery of, 2018 FO5, a three football field diameter asteroid that can come closer than our Moon is a reminder that we need to keep searching for the many thousands of Potentially Hazardous asteroids larger than 500 feet in diameter which are likely to exist.