It has been 20 years since the world woke up to the news that a half mile diameter asteroid, 1997 XF11, discovered by Space Watch on Kitt Peak, had a slight chance of impacting the Earth in 2028. The NASA and JPL's Center for Near Earth Object Studies or CNEOS (see-neos) for short maps space rocks orbits, predicts when they will come close to us, and reliably determines each one's chance of impacting Earth.

Imagine a spacecraft traveling at a speed that would take it from New York to Tokyo in less than a minute, a mere 4 million miles from the surface of our Sun, where it would be exposed to about 500 times the solar radiation we receive here on Earth. Not science fiction but science fact for the NASA Parker Solar Probe on one of it's final laps around our star.

In a few weeks ,as Earth and Mars moved closer together, a dust storm engulfed most of the red planet making it impossible to see its surface features.

A huge Earth approaching asteroid is discovered right before the 2018 monsoon rains settled into the American Southwest. This weather imposed break from observing provides the opportunity for asteroid hunters to make major equipment upgrades and perform routine maintenance.

Most Astronomers find it hard to believe that given perhaps a trillion planets in the Milky Way alone that our Earth is the only one which hosts living organisms. It is both exciting and terrifying to realize we have no concept of what living forms may exist outside Earth in the Milky Way.

Asteroid hunters have discovered a strange asteroid pair. How they came to be together and what humans would do if such a large double trouble object is heading for us remains a mystery.

An object is tracked in outer space, seen to explode in our atmosphere, and had a fragment of it discovered on the ground. Its analysis will help humans to prepare for and defend against a much larger object with our number on it.

On July 8, 2018 a beautiful fireball Meteor was seen streaking across the sky in evening twilight. So far the American Meteor Society has received more than 700 reports of this event , from observers in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Statistically, asteroid hunters are thought to have discovered 90% of our potentially dangerous celestial neighbors greater than 1 KM in diameter. Thus my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard was surprised to discover an unknown very large asteroid moving through the constellation of Persus.

Comet C/2018 M1 (Catalina) is eternal in the sense that it will likely wander the vast space between the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy until the end of time.