Protection against a comet strike is worth considering. Every year, if we are lucky, several comets can come close enough for the Sun to warm and us to see the beautiful changing dust and gas clouds around them with binoculars or our unaided eyes. So far asteroids have gotten most of the attention as dangerous celestial neighbors, however, Dr. Joseph Nuth, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland recently pointed out "Comets can also deliver a heaping helping of calamity to Earth, and scientists and policymakers alike should start taking measures to combat the threat".

Solar storms on our home planet occur when bursts of visible, ultraviolet and other photons hit our atmosphere and/or streams of energetic particles in the solar wind interact with Earth’s magnetic field.  Mild solar storms produce beautiful aurora while the most intense ones have the potential to do trillions of dollars in damage to power grids, pipelines, rail networks, aviation, mobile phones, banking, credit card users, GPS, satellite communications, spacecraft, and more.

It's a good thing this one will miss Earth.
Riding the surface of the asteroid that my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski recently discovered would be an incredible experience.

Astronomers measure an asteroid’s position  on the sky using a two dimensional system similar to the latitude and longitude coordinates we obtain with our GPS.  For the vast majority of asteroids, we cannot measure the third dimension, the distance to the asteroid directly. 

When asteroid hunters follow an object in the night sky for a few hours or a couple of days they are only able to observe a snippet or tracklet of the object's hundreds to thousands of days long path around the Sun. If we only have a short sample of an orbit we loose precision to locate the object as the length of time since the last observation increases. It is thus possible to lose the knowledge of where to find a particular asteroid.

A recent scientific paper characterizes the 123 grams of the regolith or surface material from the asteroid Bennu which NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft brought back to Earth after a successful 7 year sample and return mission.Determining the chemical composition of asteroids like Bennu is essential to planning asteroid mining missions as well how to best mitigate the damage which would result from the impact of a large asteroid with our number on it.

Presently the surface of Mars is very dry and any liquid water that reaches it quickly boils away since the martian atmospheric pressure is what you could experience in your space suit 30 to 50 miles above the Earth's surface. However, since the martian gravity is about 1/3 that of the Earth, it's crust is less dense and more porous than what we find on our home planet. This situation leads Dr. Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory to state “I consider it likely that there are deep pockets of water in the martian crust not yet detected”. Letting our imaginations run wild, if there are deposits of liquid water miles underground perhaps there might be subterranean lakes fed by volcanic tubes. Lava tube environments could be warmed by geothermal sources, have trapped, enclosed, pockets of liquid water, and be replenished by water flows up from the martian mantle. Even today these deep martian caves are theoretically likely to contain warm mineral rich liquid water in contact with a thermal energy source. It is intriguing to consider that deep inside Mars all of the necessary ingredients for life may be present together. On Earth we find this type of environment near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor to have rich biological diversity of living organisms. Perhaps there are martian organisms in deep underground aquifers that migrated there from the surface as conditions changed or maybe that has always been their home. The only way to know if any parts of this fantasy are true is to find and explore the deep caves of Mars.

Perhaps someday humans will travel to Mars, walk the surface of the red planet, and collect meteorites. Recent studies suggest Mars to be an exciting place to find ancient relics of our solar system

The asteroid Psyche may be one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the solar system. It is a small world about 116 miles in diameter and is composed of almost pure nickel-iron metal. It is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists find evidence that Psyche may be the exposed core of a planet which was destroyed by collisions as it was trying to form long ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope or JWST for short is a superb scientific instrument which is revolutionizing our understanding of the structure of the universe and is providing a tool to help us to explore the possibility of life outside of Earth. It is also a testament to what humans can accomplish by working together.

My Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski was surprised to find a moving point of light on some his images which was more than 50 times brighter than a typical Earth approaching object he observes . He was even more amazed when it was not cataloged as a known object and he reported his observations to the Minor Planet Center. A couple of hours before Richard spotted it, scientists using the Space Surveillance Telescope in New Mexico had picked up this unknown object on some of their images but did not immediately report their observations. For the next 67 hours the new object was tracked by telescopes at 24 different observatories around the world. These observations allowed the Minor Planet Center to calculate an orbit, give it the name 2016 WM48, and classify it as a Centaur. Centaurs are named after the mythical beasts which were half human and half horse perhaps because they have characteristics of both asteroids and comets. Richard's object, 2016 WM48, is about a mile in diameter. We don't know if it has rings, tiny moons, or a gas cloud surrounding it as some other Centaurs do. 2016 WM48 must have had a catastrophic collision in the past few million years which put it on a very elliptical path which is tipped at 60 degrees or so to the solar system's plane. Centaurs do not have stable orbits. Their paths are changed as they come near to the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. A Centaur's fate is to likely collide with the Sun or a planet or perhaps even be ejected from the solar system