A Year Before the Credits Roll A planet completes one full lap around its host, a complete year, start to finish, in 2.177 hours. Buy a large popcorn, sit through a feature film, and its year would be over before the credits roll. The measured orbital period, extracted from radio telescope data, is 7,837.024 seconds. … Read more
Thirteen and a Half Steps Thirteen and a half Moon-distances sounds threatening. It isn’t, it is roughly 5.235 million km of open space between Earth’s surface and a fast-moving rock, and the rock had been on the books for four years before it got there. Asteroid 2022 RK passed Earth on September 6, 2026, at … Read more
Nine and a Half Moons from Home A rock somewhere between 66 and 230 feet across swept past Earth at nine-and-a-half times the Moon’s distance, and a telescope in the Arizona mountains caught it on the way in, eighteen months before it arrived. The rock is asteroid 2025 CL3. On September 1, 2026, at 04:24 … Read more
Nearly Five Moon-Orbits Out, and It Still Makes the List The gap between an asteroid and Earth’s surface can be 142 Earth diameters wide and still earn a place in the catalog as a close approach worth watching. That is not a technicality. It is just the arithmetic of the solar system, where even your … Read more
