RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Asteroids can be the size of pebbles or mountains. Altogether, about 100 tons of these chunks of space rock enter the Earth's atmosphere every day, with most burning up before they reach the ground. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Meteors, not asteroids, enter the Earth's atmosphere every day. But asteroids, which are larger than meteors, have the potential to cause damage.]
In Kansas, one man has taken on the task of helping to track larger and more, potentially, dangerous asteroids from his own backyard - with a telescope he made himself. Kansas Public Radio's Bryan Thompson paid a visit to the aptly named Sandlot Observatory.
BRYAN THOMPSON, BYLINE: The small shed behind Gary Hug's house in the prairie hills, 12 miles south of Topeka, looks like an ordinary storage shed. But when the sun goes down, Hug flips a switch, and the roof begins to slowly slide off.
GARY HUG: And there it goes. It's on a rail system. If you look at the rail system, that's another thing I designed. So you have to be a little inventive and cheap, to try and do this.
THOMPSON: Once the roof is retracted far enough, Hug flips another switch.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHIRRING)
THOMPSON: A 22-inch reflector telescope slowly rises toward the night sky. Except for the optics inside, it, too, was also built by Hug, who is a machinist by trade. Gary Hug has a highly sensitive camera attached to the front of his telescope. To guide it, he steps into a room just inside the back door of his house, where two computer monitors are mounted.
HUG: All right. So here's the computer controller, and you can see the - you can hear the laundry going as we speak. There, now it's off. This is my telescope control center-slash-laundry.
THOMPSON: Don't be fooled by these humble surroundings. As an amateur astronomer, Gary Hug is making a name for himself. Hug spends most of his observation time tracking so-called near-Earth asteroids. He says most asteroids are discovered by professional astronomers.
HUG: They want to go out and find more. And they know that there's people like me, who are sitting here in this observatory going OK, well, I need to follow up on their previous night's discovery - so they can then use their equipment, to go try to find some others.
THOMPSON: The specialized camera Hug uses was bought with a grant from the Planetary Society. The society's Bruce Betts previously managed planetary instrument-development programs for NASA. Betts says Hug is making major contributions to near-Earth asteroid studies.
BRUCE BETTS: So it doesn't help you to know an asteroid's there if you don't know the orbit; if you don't know if it's got Earth's name on it. And in order to figure out an orbit, you need lots of observations. And that's something that these amateurs excel at.
THOMPSON: The last significant strike leveled 800 square miles of forest in an unpopulated area of Siberia, in 1908. Experts say events of that magnitude happen, on average, every few hundred years. University of Kansas astronomy and astrophysics professor Steve Hawley, a veteran of five space shuttle missions, says smaller asteroids can be hard to find.
STEVE HAWLEY: Every couple of months, we discover a smaller asteroid that we didn't even know was there. And often, we discover it a day or two before closest approach to Earth.
THOMPSON: And those are just the type of objects Gary Hug is trying to find and track: the ones that are relatively small and hard to see. So on any clear, dark Kansas night, it's a pretty safe bet he'll be pointing his telescope to the sky.
For NPR News, I'm Bryan Thompson in Salina, Kansas.
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