Travelers in the Night Eps. 867 & 868: Daytime Fireball & Inside Venus

Dr. Al Grauer hosts. Dr. Albert D. Grauer ( @Nmcanopus ) is an observational asteroid hunting astronomer. Dr. Grauer retired from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2006. travelersinthenight.org

From September 2025.

Today's 2 topics:

- Dr. Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office reports that on June 26, 2025 shortly after noon a beachball sized meteoroid traveling at approximately 30,000 miles per hour broke up about 27 miles above the town of West Forrest, Georgia.

 

- Astronomers have discovered some 1.4 million asteroids. Approximately 35,000 of these space rocks come near Earth. Less than 40 of them are classified as being Atira asteroids whose orbits lie entirely within the Earth's orbit about the Sun. Only one of these, asteroid number 594913 named 'Ayló'chaxnim (eye-LAW-chax-nim) has an orbit which is entirely within the orbit of the planet Venus. 

[Editor's note: ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim means 'Venus girl' in the indigenous Luiseño language[18] of southern California. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/594913_ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim]

 

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