Science
International researchers, Western University, detect fireball over southern Ontario
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In a truly out of this world sight, a small asteroid hurdling towards Earth was tracked by scientists for three hours where its trajectory brought it over the skies of southern Ontario over the weekend, according to London, Ont.’s Western University.
According to a press release from Western University, just before midnight on Nov. 18, the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona detected a small celestial object heading towards Earth.
A small asteroid, now named 2022 WJ1, was tracked by multiple observatories around the world for three hours as the object travelled towards Earth and traversed across the sky over southern Ontario, where it made impact over at 3:26 a.m. on Nov. 19.
The advance warning of the asteroid gave researchers of the Western Meteor Physics Group and the Institute for Earth and Space Exploration (Western Space) the opportunity to move outside and position themselves to watch the inbound fireball.
According to Western, David Clark, a geophysics doctoral student, drove to the predicted fall area in the early hours of Sunday, and parked near Niagara-on-the-Lake at the intersection of Highway 403 and Niagara Regional Road 55 where he witnessed the fireball with his own eyes.
“It passed right overhead at the predicted time and was distinctly green in colour,” said Clark in the release. “Several minutes later a noticeable sonic boom could be heard.”
The meteorite fall zone of a small asteroid that travelled across southern Ontario on Nov. 19, 2022. (Source: Western University)
Western’s All-Sky Camera also captured the fireball, first entering Earth’s atmosphere just south of Woodstock, Ont., where it then travelled eastbound until its end 20 kilometres north of Vineland.
According to Western, fragments of the meteor likely made it to the ground near the southern shore of Lake Ontario, mostly north of St. Catharines.
Paul Wiegert, a physics and astronomy professor, also managed to witness the cosmic event.
“I watched from Brescia Hill on the Western campus. Though cold and windy, the hill had a clear view to the east, where I expected to see only a distant flash. Then the fireball suddenly appeared, passing almost overhead. Wow! It was easily visible between broken clouds and noticeably orange-red,” said Wiegert in the release.
On Saturday, CTV News London received video captured from a viewer doorbell camera in London’s White Oaks neighbourhood that depicted a bright meteor streaking across the night sky.
Although this meteor was observed on the night of Nov. 18— the same night as the fireball detected by Western University — it is not clear whether the two events are connected.
Only six other asteroids in history have had advanced warning prior to their impact, and Western said this is the first predicted event to occur over a heavily populated area and within range of scientific instruments.
This discovery is something that has Canada Research Chair in Planetary Small Bodies at Western’s Peter Brown excited about what lies ahead.
“This remarkable event will provide clues about the makeup and strength which when combined with telescopic measurements will inform our understanding of how small asteroids break up in the atmosphere, important knowledge for planetary defence,” Brown said in the release.
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of … [+]
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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