Travelers In The Night

When accurately recorded historical observations do not agree with what we what we see today it is often very rewarding to find out why. In modern telescopes we see Theta Eridani to a be pair separated by about 425 times our distance from the Sun orbiting a common center of gravity. Detailed observations of the spectrum of one of these show it to be itself a pair of stars orbiti...

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles above the Earth's surface they would rendezvous with their asteroid mining spacecraft which will be their home for the next five years or so.

The comets we observe generally start out as icy dirty snowballs of frozen gases like water and frozen carbon dioxide in the Oort cloud. If recent scientific analysis is correct, we are now witnessing a parade of comets produced by the passage of a star when our first ancestors began to roam the Earth in Africa.

A partnership of humans and computers will help to minimize the damage when asteroid hunters find a space rock with our number on it.

Looking into the sky at night with radio eyes you would not see the points of starlight forming the constellations instead you would see a very bright, colorful and wildly changing scene. In a desert valley near the Great Basin National Park Caltech is building the world’s largest radio telescope called the Deep Synoptic Array or DSA for short.