URSID METEOR SHOWER: Earth is approaching the debris zone of Comet 8P/Tuttle, source of the annual Ursid meteor shower. Normally, crossing Tuttle's debris zone produces no more than 5 or 10 meteors per hour from a radiant near the North Star. This year, however, an outburst of Ursids is possible. Peter Jenniskens of NASA notes that Earth might cross a meteoroid filament on Dec. 22nd between 19h and 22h UT, multiplying the usual rates. Free: Meteor Alerts.
A ROCKET TRAIL WITHOUT A ROCKET: When the sun set on Wednesday evening, many people in central California were watching the sky, waiting for a rocket launch. A Delta IV Heavy was scheduled to blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying a spy satellite to orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office. Ten minutes before liftoff, however, the launch was scrubbed. This strange "rocket trail" appeared anyway:
Photographer Richard Sears of Atwater, California, was one of thousands of onlookers who watched the glowing plume twist hypnotically in the wind. "At about 5:36 p.m., this meteor contrail appeared. I didn't see a fireball, though, I was looking at my iPhone at the time trying to see if the rocket launch was going to be a go!"
Indeed, it was a meteor. Dashcam video broadcast by CBS news captured the instigating fireball. It appears to be a sporadic meteor--that is, a random meteoroid from no organized shower. The inner solar system is littered with such meteoroids that have, for eons, been chipped off of passing asteroids and comets.
Coincidentally, this meteoroid struck Earth's atmosphere over California just as the rocket was supposed to launch. No way? Random fireballs like this happen more often than you think.
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MARS DIRT FOR CHRISTMAS! Need a Christmas gift for a young scientist? Consider this: Mars Dirt. The technical name is "MMS-1 Mars Regolith Simulant," developed by NASA scientists to test the Mars Phoenix lander. Using space weather balloons, we have flown test tubes of this material to the stratosphere and returned them to Earth just in time for Christmas:
You can have a tube-full for $49.95. The samples flew 109,235 feet above the Sierra Nevada mountains of Central California. At that altitude, the test tubes experienced doses of cosmic rays, UV radiation, and low air pressure very similar to that on the actual surface of Mars.
Just add water to these samples to create your own Martian Mud. They can also be used for unique gardening experiments or as kickstarters for school Science Fair Projects. Flight data are available upon request to support young scientists.
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BE ALERT FOR MOON HALOS: The Moon is bright and growing brighter as it waxes toward full on Dec. 22nd. That means now is a good time to be alert for Moon halos. Paul Martini photographed this specimen over Bluff, Utah:
"The coyote sculpture seen here will be set aflame on the night of winter solstice," says Martini, who used a Sony A7s digital camera to take the picture.
Moon halos are created by ice crystals in high clouds, which catch rays of moonlight and bend them into a 22o ring. Bright full Moons are great at making these halos, so the nights around the solstice could be filled with lunar rings. Watch for them when you see wispy cirrus clouds drifting across the lunar disk.
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