ʻOumuamua

Asteroids are rocky worlds revolving around the sun that are too small to be called planets. They are also known as planetoids or minor planets. There are millions of asteroids, ranging in size from hundreds of miles to several feet across. In total, the mass of all the asteroids is less than that of Earth's moon.

A meteoroid is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space. Meteoroids are significantly smaller than asteroids, and range in size from small grains to one-meter-wide objects. Objects smaller than this are classified as micrometeoroids or space dust.Most are fragments from comets or asteroids, whereas others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars.

The difference between asteroids and meteoroids is mainly one of size: meteoroids have a diameter of less than one meter, whereas asteroids have a diameter of greater than one meter

A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body whose orbit can bring it into proximity with Earth. By definition, a Solar System body is a NEO if its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 astronomical unit (AU).[2] If a NEO's orbit crosses that of the Earth's and the object is larger than 140 meters across, it is considered a potentially hazardous object (PHO). Most known PHOs and NEOs are asteroids

A meteorite is a solid piece of debris from an object, such as a comet, asteroid, or meteoroid, that originates in outer space and survives its passage through the atmosphere to reach the surface of a planet or moon.

Michigan meteor


Picture Legend

1. Artist rendering of a Near Earth Object
2. Indian ice-ball (don’t eat that yellow snow!)
3. Detroit meteorite
4. The Asteroid Belt and associated families
5. Spaceguard
6. Chelyabinsk fireball
7. Porous chondrite interplanetary dust particle.
8. Projected orbital path of Asteroid 2002 AJ129 on February 4th, 2018
9. Another view of 2002 AJ129‘s orbit relative to the Solar System’s orbital plane
10. The hyperbolic trajectory of Oumuamua through the inner Solar System with the Sun at the focus
11. Rama and the Solar Survey Ship Endeavor
12. Time exposed picture of ʻOumuamua
13. Simulation of ʻOumuamua spinning and tumbling through space, and the resultant light curve which was the only information available to infer ‘Oumuamua shape
14. Artist's impression of ʻOumuamua



January 13, 2018    Fazilpur Badli Village, India  2:38PM

   "There was big thud and people of the village came running out of their homes to find out what had happened," senior official Vivek Kalia told the BBC.
   "Some villagers thought it was an extraterrestrial object," he added.
   "Others thought it was some celestial rock and I've heard that they took samples home."
   It is extremely unfortunate that what these inquisitive villagers brought into their homes in the hope of making a rare and grand scientific discovery were pieces of a 26 pound chunk of frozen  human crap that had apparently dropped from an overhead airplane traveling at a high altitude.
   Although the airline industry states it is not a common practice to dump anything from their planes while in flight, sometimes, they say, urine and faeces forms around the plane's overflow outlet, turning icy as the craft cruises at high altitudes. Blocks of this stuff  then fall from the planes, but mostly break up before reaching the planet’s surface. Sometimes they don't however, and the resultant projectiles can cause serious damage to property or injuries to people and animals.
   "Villagers who kept it inside their refrigerators are disappointed and are now busy cleaning their houses," one resident told the Times of India.
   These icy shit-balls are not asteroids, or even meteorites. They’re just... icy chunks of frozen human waste.
   Very unfortunate.

January 17th, 2018  Detroit, Michigan   8:08 PM

   A real meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere above Detroit briefly lighting up the night sky. It was caught on several cameras, including NASA’s own meteor camera located at Oberlin College in Ohio.
   “I went to turn and I noticed a ball of flame coming at an angle,” Danny McEwen Jr. told the Detroit News. He said he was driving when “it just blew up into a bunch of sparks. I didn’t even know what to think. It was kind of odd how orange the sky was behind me and this blaze of flame out of nowhere.”
   NASA said on its Meteor Watch Facebook page that “we have calculated that this was a very slow moving meteor — speed of about 28,000 miles per hour.
   “This fact, combined with the brightness of the meteor (which suggests a fairly big space rock at least a yard across), shows that the object penetrated deep into the atmosphere before it broke apart (which produced the sounds heard by many observers). It is likely that there are meteorites on the ground near this region — one of our colleagues at Johnson Space Center (JSC) has found a Doppler weather radar signature characteristic of meteoritic material falling to earth.
  Bill Cooke from NASA’s meteoroid environment office in Alabama told The Detroit News he estimates the meteor was about one or two yards across, weighed more than one metric ton and traveled between 40,000 to 50,000 miles to get to Earth.
   But from where? That, my friends, no one is talking about.
   Ever since Arthur C Clarke destroyed the Italian cities of Verona and Padua, and sank Venice due to an astroid impact in his 1973 novel “Rendezvous With Rama,” efforts have been made to identify and track Near Earth Objects (NEOs). Clarke invented Project Spaceguard, which utilized advanced computerization and Mars based telescopes to keep an eye on the sky. The United States, in it’s efforts, first stole Dr. Clarke’s title (Spaceguard), then adopted this name to a number of real life efforts to discover and study Near-Earth Objects.
   A 1992 US Congressional study produced a "Spaceguard Survey Report" which led to a mandate that NASA locate 90% of near-Earth asteroids larger than 1 kilometer (0.621371 miles) within 10 years. This is often referred to as the "Spaceguard Goal." A number of efforts which receive money through NASA are all considered to be working on the "Spaceguard Project." (the initial Spaceguard Goal was achieved, although in slightly longer than 10 years. An extension to the project gave NASA the mandate of reducing the minimum size at which more than 90% of near-Earth asteroids are known to 140 meters (459.318 feet))
   One of those efforts is the NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program, which is a subdivision of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO).
   The Near-Earth Object Observations Program is responsible for finding, tracking, and characterizing NEOs, asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them within approximately 1.3 Astronomical Units (AU, the distance between the Sun and the Earth... approximately 92.96 million miles) of the Sun. This implies that they can come within 0.3 AU – about 30 million miles, or 50 million kilometers – of Earth’s orbit.
   Unfortunately NASA recently and for a third time chose not to fully fund a mission called NEOCam: a proposal for a powerful asteroid-hunting space telescope that could help keep track of asteroids that have the potential of impacting with the Earth.
   The work that the Near-Earth Object Observations Program and other entities associated with the Spaceguard Survey is impressive, and so far we’ve avoided colliding with large asteroids and comets.
   But Spaceguard hasn’t identified and tracked everything.
   On February 15th, 2013, (03:13PM UTC, 7:13AM PT) an asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia as a fireball and exploded above the city of Chelyabinsk during its passage through the Ural Mountains region. The object's air burst occurred at an altitude between 30 and 50 kilometers (19 and 31 miles) above the ground, and about 1,500 people were injured, mainly by broken window glass shattered by the shock wave. Two were reported in serious condition; however, there were no fatalities. Initially some 3,000 buildings in six cities across the region were reported damaged due to the explosion's shock wave, a figure which rose to over 7,200 in the following weeks. The Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to have caused over $30 million in damage. It is the largest recorded object to have encountered the Earth since the 1908 Tunguska Event, by far the best documented, and the only such event known to have resulted in a large number of casualties. The meteor is estimated to have an initial diameter of 17–20 meters (55 - 65 feet) and a mass of roughly 10,000 tons (on October 16th, 2013, a team from Ural Federal University led by Victor Grokhovsky recovered a large fragment of the meteor from the bottom of Russia’s Lake Chebarkul, about 80 kilometers west of the city).
   Space rocks falling from the sky is hardly unusual. It happens all of the time. It’s really just a matter of size. The larger the rock, the less frequently they fall to the surface of the planet.
   Extraterrestrial dust, ranging in size from a few molecules to 0.1 µm (micrometers), or 3.93701e-6 inches in size, with a mass between 10 minus16kg (0.1 picograms) and 10 minus 4 kg (100 milligrams) rain down onto the planets surface constantly.
   That might not sound like a lot to you but it adds up. The amount of extraterrestrial dust that falls to Earth each day is estimated to be 60 tons, or almost 22,000 tons a year. This is the main reason it is so hard to keep your car clean if you leave it parked outside.
   In the news lately are stories about the asteroid asteroid 2002 AJ129 which on February 4th  will fly closest to the Earth at around 1:30 p.m. PT, according to a press release by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
   NASA considers this asteroid (which is estimated to be between 500 -- 200 meters across (1640.42 -- 3937.008 feet)) "potentially hazardous" because it will pass within 0.028126 AU (4,207,600 kilometers; 2,614,500 miles)  from the Earth, and because of it’s relatively large size.
   2002 AJ129, with an orbital period (the time it takes an object to make one orbit around another celestial body, in this case, the Sun) of just 1.61 years (586.31 days), will come much closer to the Earth on February 8th, 2172, at a distance of about 0.00458 AU (685,000 kilometers; 426,000 miles).
   "We have been tracking this asteroid for over 14 years and know its orbit very accurately," Paul Chodas, an astronomer who manages NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL, said in a press release. "Our calculations indicate that asteroid 2002 AJ129 has no chance — zero — of colliding with Earth on Feb. 4 or any time over the next 100 years."
   Good news!
   There is one object that we know of that has no orbital period at all, which means it does not orbit the Sun, or anything in the solar system.
   Last year, on October 19th, astronomer Robert J. Weryk, using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii, discovered 1I/2017 U1, what would later be called ʻOumuamua, which turned out to be the first known interstellar object to pass through the Solar System, 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun.
   When Weryk first observed ‘Oumuamua it was approximately 33,000,000 kilometers (21,000,000 miles; 0.22 AU) from the Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon), and heading away from the Sun. It was initially thought to be a simple comet, and reclassified as an asteroid a week later. On November 6th it was finally deemed to be the first of a new class of interstellar objects.
   The name ʻOumuamua comes from the Hawaiian ʻoumuamua, meaning 'scout', (from ʻou, meaning 'reach out for', and mua, reduplicated for emphasis​, meaning 'first, in advance of' and reflects the way this object is like a scout or messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to mankind (and womankind too!).
   Before the official name was decided upon, the name Rama was suggested, the name given to an alien spacecraft discovered under similar circumstances (‘Oumuamua has the same hyperbolic trajectory (indicating that it is not gravitationally bound to the Sun) as Rama did) in the science fiction novel “Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke.
    This object may be referred to as 1I; 1I/2017 U1; 1I/ʻOumuamua; or 1I/2017 U1 (ʻOumuamua).
   ʻOumuamua is a relatively small object, estimated to be about 230 by 35 meters (800 ft × 100 ft) in size. It has a dark red color, similar to objects in the outer Solar System.
   It has no volatile compounds on it’s surface, like water or ammonia ice as it showed no signs  of a cometary tail despite its close approach to the Sun. It is an elongated object, similar to an oversized flattened out tree trunk. It is thought to be a metal-rich rock with a relatively high density.
   ʻOumuamua is tumbling (most likely, ʻOumuamua was set tumbling by a collision in its system of origin, and remains tumbling since the time scale for dissipation of this motion is very long, at least a billion years) rather than smoothly rotating, and it is moving so fast relative to the Sun that there is no chance it originated in the Solar System. It also means that it cannot be captured into a solar orbit (hyperbolic), so it will eventually leave the Solar System and resume traveling into interstellar space. ʻOumuamua's system of origin and the amount of time it has spent traveling amongst the stars are unknown.
   One week after ʻOumuamua's discovery, asteroid hunter Luca Buzzi tracked it from northern Italy with a 50-minute image exposure on October 26th. In an email, Buzzi said he fought thin cirrus clouds to barely pull the asteroid above the visual threshold using his 0.84-meter telescope and Planetary Society (an American internationally active, non-governmental, nonprofit foundation, founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman, and has over 50,000 members from more than 100 countries around the world. Bill Nye, is the current chief executive officer, and Neil deGrasse Tyson serves on its advisory council)-funded CCD camera (picture 12). He ordinarily uses the equipment to track potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids.
   Based on observations spanning 34 days, ʻOumuamua's orbital eccentricity (a parameter that determines the amount by which an objects orbit around another body deviates from a perfect circle. A value of 0 is a circular orbit, values between 0 and 1 form an elliptic orbit, 1 is a parabolic escape orbit, and greater than 1 is a hyperbola) is 1.20, the highest ever observed. An eccentricity above 1.0 means an object exceeds the Sun's escape velocity and is not bound to the Solar System, and may escape to interstellar space. While an eccentricity slightly above 1.0 can be obtained by encounters with planets, ʻOumuamua's eccentricity is so high it could not have been obtained through an encounter with any of the Sun's planets, known or unknown. Even undiscovered planets, if any exist, could not account for ʻOumuamua's trajectory any undiscovered planet must be far from the Sun and hence moving slowly according to Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Encounters with such a planet could not boost ʻOumuamua's speed to the observed value,  and therefore ʻOumuamua can only be of interstellar origin.
   ʻOumuamua entered the Solar System from above the plane of the ecliptic. The pull of the Sun's gravity caused it to speed up until it reached its maximum speed of 87.71 kilometers per second (196,200 mph) as it passed below the ecliptic on September 6th and made a sharp turn upward at its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) on September 9th at a distance of 0.255 AU (38,100,000 kilometers; 23,700,000 miles) from the Sun, about 17% closer than the planet Mercury's closest approach to the Sun. The object is now heading away from the Sun (towards the constellation Pegasus) at an angle of 66° from the direction of its approach.
   On the outward leg of its journey through the Solar System, ʻOumuamua passed below the orbit of Earth on October 14th at a distance of approximately 0.1616 AU (24,180,000 kilometers; 15,020,000 miles) from Earth, and went back above the ecliptic on October 16th and passed above the orbit of Mars on November 1st. It will pass above Jupiter's orbit in May of this year,  Saturn's orbit in January of next year, and Neptune's orbit in 2022.
   As it leaves the Solar System it will be approximately right ascension (RA) 23h51m and declination +24°45', in Pegasus. It will continue to slow down until it reaches a speed of 26.33 kilometers a second relative to the Sun, the same speed it had before its approach to the Solar System.
   It will take the object roughly 20,000 years to leave the Solar System completely.
   Unlike Rama ʻOumuamua is traveling too fast for any existing spacecraft to reach. Astronomers estimate that several interstellar objects similar to ʻOumuamua pass inside the orbit of Earth each year. If true, that would provide possible opportunities for future studies of interstellar objects, although with the current space technology, close visits and orbital missions are impossible due to their high speeds.
   As a teenager I read “Rendezvous with Rama” with rapt fascination, and wondered what kind of civilization would and could have built such a craft, and for what purpose. None of those questions are answered in Dr. Clarke’s novel.
   With all of the stale, reworked, superhero sequels, the umpteenth Star Wars episode (which are actually just fueled by a series of battle scenes), cop, doctor, and crime mysteries, mindless action films, and remakes of movies that shouldn’t be remade (Steve martin as Inspector Clouseau comes to mind) and the advent of Daddy’s Home  and Bad Santa 2, why in the world hasn’t “Rendezvous with Rama” been made into a movie (or Fountains of Paradise, for that matter. Childhood’s End was made into a television mini-series, and it was just awful)?! It has been said that both Morgan Freeman and director David Fincher wanted to make a film of “Rendezvous with Rama” but they were hampered by the lack of a good script.
   Really? I find this difficult to believe.
   It’s all there in the book! There is a reason the book is a science fiction classic. Just follow the book. Nothing more needs to be added or embellished (although there is a natural tendency to make films that are significantly different than their source material in Hollywood, like 2008‘s remake of the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, which in my opinion was a mediocre effort (although it made a lot of money)). It’s all in the book.
   Hell, I’ll write a script.
   In any case, we now have a real interstellar entity visiting our solar system. Let’s try and behave while it is still here so it will think kindly of us as it makes its way back to the stars.

Addendum 3-19-18 Proposal that Oumuamua was ejected from a binary star system

Addendum 5-22-18 Is Oumuamua really the only extrasolar asteroid to visit our solar system?

Addendum 6-27-18  Oumuamua was propelled by Cometary Jets

Addendum 6-27-18  Oumuamua is actually a comet

Addendum 9-25-18  Gaia finds four candidate stars that could be Oumuamua's home

Addendum: 11-20-18 6 Facts