Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - 2012 DA14--Coming Soon to a Planet Near You!

Episode Date: February 11, 2013

The 45-meter Near Earth Asteroid flies by on February 15. NASA brought together asteroid experts to discuss it and others of its threatening kind.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

2012 DA14, coming soon to a planet near you and to Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It isn't every week that a 45-meter space rock nearly nicks our world. That's why we're focusing once again on Near-Earth Asteroid 2012, DA14. You'll hear highlights from a NASA press conference, along with comments from Bill Nye and DA14 random space facts from Bruce Betts. Emily Lakdawalla is looking elsewhere in the sky.

She's our planetary evangelist. Emily, a couple of very interesting things to talk about, both of them involving resources, one of which I don't think you knew existed. But first, tell us about these newsletters that go way back to the Galileo mission. That's right. This is actually my second blog post on the Galileo messengers. The first one was about a year ago, in which I covered the phase of Galileo's mission development from a blueprint to launch, which was a terribly difficult and challenging phase. Well, the next phase was from cruise to Jupiter arrival. And that was just as terrible and difficult because of course, this was a mission that had a high gain antenna that

was supposed to unfold like an umbrella and it didn't. And that was just one of many problems that it faced during its cruise from Earth to Venus, back to Earth twice, and then to Jupiter. And so this mission, it was difficult to read the newsletters, but in the end, kind of fun to summarize them. And now I'm looking forward to its orbital mission as chronicled in JPL's newsletters. So that's in the blog. It's a February 5th entry in Emily's list of blog posts. Let's go to one of the more recent ones, slightly more recent, from the 8th of February. It's a whole new resource. Well, not new really, but new to you, I guess. Well, it's new to me, and I guess it's relatively new to the web. And the wonderful thing about this space image resource is that the planet that we're looking at is Earth. The resource we're talking about is what's called the Landsat Look Viewer. Now, Landsat is a series of satellites that's been orbiting

Earth since 1972. They're about to launch, and maybe by the time you listen to this, they will have launched the eighth such satellite called the Landsat Data Continuity Mission. And the wonderful thing about Landsat is that its camera systems have remained fundamentally similar since 1972. So it's formed this amazing four decade long record of change in the way that the Earth's surface appears and the way that we have been using Earth's surface, the way that land has been put to use. I was inspired by a tweet from an astronaut, Chris Hadfield, who looked out his window and saw this really funky looking volcano. And so I looked up the same volcano and Landsat imagery. And I walked people through how you can get these Landsat data and how you can process them and make them into pretty pictures that you can share with each other. Is it difficult to use?

It's extremely easy to browse. It's wonderful because you can actually just type a place name into the browser and it'll take you right to that place. And it's very easy to go backward and forward in time, which is wonderful. You can see how the land has changed with time. You can see the ebb and flow of seasons. You can see different kinds of cloud cover, and the clouds are really fun to look at as well. It's a little harder to get the data out of it,

but it's certainly extremely easy to browse, and I think that everybody should go check it out. And Emily does give you a step-by-step guide to Landsat Look. That's what it's called. We'll give you the URL at planetary.org slash radio on the page for this show. But you can also just go to that blog entry at planetary.org, and she's got all the instructions there and some of the examples of this rather magnificent volcano from directly overhead. Emily, thanks as always. Thank you, Matt. She is a senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist, also a contributing

editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. And when you're on the blog, watch for her announcements of her upcoming Google Plus Hangouts. She does those every other week, alternating with Casey Dreyer, her colleague at the Planetary Society. Coming up next is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, the big news in space this week, you don't have to go very far. It's very close to our home planet.

That's right, Matt. It's 17,000 nautical miles. It's halfway to geosynchronous satellite orbits. This asteroid, 2012 DA14, was discovered last year by people in La Sagra, Spain, who received a grant from us at the Planetary Society for a camera that allowed them to photograph this thing that's moving relatively fast. This is 45 meters. It's big. It's half a soccer field. It's about the size of the thing that hit in Tunguska in Siberia in 1908. It blew

down trees over 2,000 square kilometers. I mean, people, if this were to hit Paris or Tokyo or New York or Oklahoma City, that's it. I mean, those places are wiped out, out, out. Our colleague Ed Liu, the astronaut and a former Cornelian, a fellow Cornelian, remarks it's like control alt delete for the economy. This is quite a thing. And you'll be able to see it. Skilled people will be able to see it with binoculars. Yeah, yeah. Just beyond what you could see with the naked eye, I suppose. And these things are like pieces of charcoal. I mean, they don't reflect very much light. So it's quite an achievement by our colleagues in La Sagra, Spain, to find the thing last year, last time we passed by this part of the Earth's orbit.

Thanks to that camera. That's right. So this really is a time for everybody to celebrate the diligence of space explorers who use telescopes from the Earth. And it's also a time, I strongly feel, Matt, for everybody on Earth to just take a second. Wow, we just dodged a bullet. And I know there's a lot of talk of bullets these days, but, I mean, this is serious business. If one of these things, and there are about 100,000 of them out there of comparable size and speed,

if one of these things were to hit us, man, it is serious biz. It's like ancient dinosaur kind of stuff. I'm excited about it, and I'm stroking my chin about the future. It's an important time. And we're going to hear more about this from the NASA media teleconference that took place last week. Some other very interesting thoughts about this pass by this rather large rock, which fortunately is not going to be hitting us.

Not this time. Not this time. Bill, thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. That's Bill Nye, the science guy. Music On Thursday, February 7th, NASA invited reporters, including yours truly, to join a media conference about Asteroid 2012 DA14.

It was just eight days before the near-Earth object would pass inside the orbit of some communication satellites. where the near-Earth object would pass inside the orbit of some communication satellites. The space agency gathered several of our planet's top experts on asteroids, including Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near-Earth Objects Observation Program at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. We have made a lot of progress over the decade in finding these objects. We probably would not have found DA14 10 years ago as we have and not known about this close approach. But we still have a lot of improvement to do in finding all of the hazardous asteroids.

Amy Mainzer is principal investigator for the NEO-WISE mission at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California. The NEO stands for Near Earth Object, but it also meant a new lease on life for a spacecraft that had already completed another mission, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer. In late 2009, NASA launched a satellite called WISE. WISE's primary mission was to just provide a survey of the whole sky in thermal infrared wavelengths. And these are wavelengths of light that human beings perceive as heat.

Now, it so happens that observing in thermal infrared is actually a good way to find near-Earth objects. Because they get close to the sun, they are warmed by the sun, and therefore they glow brightly at thermal infrared wavelengths. But because an infrared telescope is sensing the heat emitted by the objects, the dark asteroid appears just as bright to the infrared telescope. So that's one advantage of doing these surveys of infrared wavelengths. And furthermore, a telescope that's orbiting in space can observe objects that are interior to the Earth's orbit much more efficiently than ground-based telescopes can, because ground-based telescopes usually have to look at night.

So NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office has worked closely with the WISE team to harvest the data from this mission to search for new near-earth objects and to gather more information that's allowed us to estimate our progress toward the overall goal of finding as many of these potentially hazardous objects that we can. Aside from providing copious information about asteroids in general and near-Earth objects in particular, the NEOWISE project has really demonstrated the potential for a long-duration mission to search for smaller objects that might come close to the Earth. And these objects are interesting, of course, because not just the hazard that they might

represent but also because they may represent very attractive targets for future exploration, particularly with astronauts. There is another technique that astronomers can use to obtain very detailed physical measurements of asteroids if they come close enough to the Earth. So this is where we actually take a telescope and bounce radar waves off of an asteroid, and this provides us very precise estimates of an object's orbit, and in certain cases, you can actually see very detailed information about its shape and its surface properties. So these observations are made possible with funding from the NASA Near Earth Object Observations

Program, and they involve the use of radio telescopes at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and the JPL-managed Goldstone Telescope Complex in California. In addition to providing really improved orbital data, radar gives us really neat information about the shape and rotation of the asteroids. We can even observe the rotation directly. And these are some of the best data that you can get short of actually flying a spacecraft to an asteroid like this. So where are we today with our understanding of the population of hazardous asteroids? Well, over the last 10 years of ground-based observations, we've vastly increased

our understanding of the population of the largest objects. And, you know, our inventory of the main belt, the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, has really increased dramatically by about a factor of five. Amy Mainzer then introduced Edward Bayshore of the University of Arizona, Tucson. He's the deputy principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx. That's Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer, the rather strained acronym for an exciting mission still to come. You know, this is all really cool stuff we're hearing about. And the goal of these programs, especially the goal of the survey program, has been to find hazardous objects early enough so that we have time

to carefully study it and we can design a strategy to deal with the threat. And if time allows, we'll certainly want to launch a space probe to the asteroid to study it up close. It's a mission to launch a probe to a near-Earth object. We'll launch in 2016, and we think this is going to be a pathfinder for all future missions to asteroids the University of Arizona here in Tucson along with the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and the Lockheed Martin company in Denver have partnered together to develop and operate this mission

We call it OSIRIS-REx and it will arrive at asteroid 1999 RQ 36 in late 2018 will arrive at asteroid 1999 RQ36 in late 2018, where we will study it for about six months, and then we're going to carefully approach the asteroid to obtain a sample and return it here to the Earth in 2023. And by the way, this is going to be the largest sample of an extraterrestrial object returned to Earth since the end of the Apollo missions over 40 years ago. Edward Bayshore of the OSIRIS-REx mission. He'll return in a minute along with other participants in NASA's asteroid flyby briefing. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the

surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog,

and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're about to return to NASA's February 7 briefing on our encounter with Near-Earth Asteroid 2012 DA14.

Edward Bayshore is telling us about the OSIRIS-REx mission that will visit a different asteroid in 2018 and then return a good-sized sample of it five years later. Now, OSIRIS-REx is a science mission. RQ-36 is a primitive asteroid that we believe is composed of materials that are almost identical to those that were present when the solar system was formed about four and a half billion years ago. So with a sample, we'll be in a much better position to

address many of the fundamental questions about the original chemistry of the solar system, including the sources of organics and water that gave rise to life here on Earth. But our mission will also be pioneering some really important technical capabilities that we'll need to work near asteroids. The force of gravity from the asteroid that we're going to visit is very tiny. And for OSIRIS-REx, the force of sunlight pushing on the spacecraft will be comparable to the gravitational force from the asteroid. And so it's going to be kind of like trying to handle a small boat in the wind, and that's not always easy. It can complicate things. And so we're developing techniques and processes that we'll need to actually move around an asteroid and operate around an asteroid, particularly if we send a probe to an asteroid that might be on a collision course with the Earth.

And by the way, the target asteroid for OSIRIS-REx is also a near-Earth object, and it would be very useful for us to be able to improve our understanding of the threat that that asteroid represents and to improve our ability to predict the orbits of other asteroids, other near-Earth asteroids. And our mission will help us do that by obtaining a more precise understanding of something called the Yarkovsky effect. And it's really very simple. It's a force that's created by the absorption of sunlight and the re-radiation of that energy as heat. And the heat acts like a tiny rocket thrust that can literally push asteroids out of otherwise harmless orbits and initiate their transport into the inner solar system where they can become hazardous.

So aside from understanding how near-Earth objects are formed, the OSIRIS-REx mission should help us improve our long-range predictions of orbits of these objects and allow us to more accurately calculate the likelihood of a collision. And so in addition to the vigorous programs of discovery and close study of near-Earth objects that NASA's been conducting for over 15 years, the OSIRIS-REx mission will visit one up close to study the forces that make them dangerous in the first place, and will also bring back a sample for scrutiny here on Earth. Our adventure starts in 2016, and I invite you all to stay tuned for that. Amy Mainzer of the NEOWISE mission then rejoined Edward Bayshore

to provide some near-Earth asteroid basics, including a review of how these originally quite distant space rocks end up crossing the path of our planet. Most asteroids in the solar system are stable, and they are in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and they stay there for billions of years in most cases. But occasionally, some forces, some are gravitational and others are non-gravitational, like that slight push from solar radiation that Ed Bayshore described, the Yarkovsky force.

These can kind of act to drift objects in from the main belt, and sometimes they hit gravitational resonances, which act like little flippers in a pinball machine. And sometimes these can inject asteroids from the main belt into near-Earth space. And this process happens relatively rapidly. While the main-belt asteroids have been there for billions of years in most cases, the near-Earth object population is by comparison relatively young. Most objects that enter the space around Earth's orbit don't last there very long. They stay for maybe a few

million years to a few tens of millions of years. Now we know that that means because this population is so young and the main belt asteroids are so old, that means there must be a continual supply of objects feeding in from different places in the main belt. We also know that some fraction of the near-Earth objects are cometary in origin, so meaning they come from more distant parts of our solar system, and they also make their way into near-Earth space. And so we're really trying to understand the exact mechanisms by which these migrations happen, and that's one of the many reasons we like studying the near-Earth objects.

And this is Ed Bashore. I'm just going to chime in really quickly. As I mentioned before, one of the goals of the OSIRIS-REx mission is to measure this Yarkovsky effect much more precisely. Just about a year ago, one of our team members, Steve Chesley from JPL, did a really exquisite set of measurements using radar data and came up with a preliminary estimate for the kinds of forces on our asteroid, our Q36, that we're talking about.

And he equated it to the force that you feel when you hold a couple of grapes in your hand. But that force applied over millions of years can literally move these mountains of rock around. And so, you know, it's really quite important for us to make sure we understand this force much better because we believe it will improve our ability to predict the orbits of these hazardous objects. We'll close with a question I asked Tim Spahr about the so-called amateur astronomers at Spain's La Sagra Observatory who discovered 2012 DA14. LaSagra Observatory, who discovered 2012 DA14. Tim directs the Minor Planet Center, the clearinghouse for discovery and tracking of pretty much everything in our solar system that is smaller than a full-size planet.

My understanding was that for an object that is moving this fast, at least relative to the Earth, that it presents some special challenges, and that some of the amateur observers, like LaSagra, maybe sort of optimize their searches for these objects. Is that not necessarily the case? LaSagra, you know, I use the term amateur loosely. This is a bunch of highly skilled people with professional skills that originally were just paying to run their survey, and they also got a Planetary Society grant for the CCD. That's one thing to mention. They are currently doing work tracking space debris, which moves much faster than the average near-Earth asteroid along the sky. And so they are set up perfectly to do this kind of work.

The translation of amateur into some other languages has caused me some problems at the Minor Planet Center, and I would reiterate that these people are professional skill level people that are unbelievably impressive what these so-called amateurs do. I also need to address one thing. I went back and looked at my data set and no NASA survey had discovery type images of this object. And I suspect it was because it moved through the main survey window extremely rapidly, and this object ended up nearly over the pole of the Earth in the sky. And so it was not discovered, not picked up in a NASA survey as a discovery-type image, although I expect it will be this time.

Tim Spahr closing out our brief collection of highlights from NASA's February 7 media briefing about 2012 DA14. But wait, there's more. Bruce Betts joins me in a moment. Time for What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, to tell us what is up. What is up in the night sky? Hey, Matt, what you been doing

bruce knows that we delayed uh over 45 minutes because i could not tear myself away from watching the least competent leaf blower operator on our home planet who was working across the street and it was too loud for us to record i couldn't stop watching matt watch the leaf blower so it was it was just catastrophic it was like a bad movie late night in your hotel room and you can't tear yourself away you can't stop watching it i enjoyed that you kept giving play-by-plays and critiques of his of his work oh listen i as one of our colleagues said i should have put him on YouTube because it would have gone viral. Maybe with a little editing. Speaking of editing, so you have to do less. Let

me talk about the night sky. Jupiter is still the easy thing to see in the evening sky. Bright, bright, bright star-like object over in the southeast in the early evening. Mercury coming up a little higher through mid-February. Always tough to get Mercury. In this case, got to look low in the west in the early evening. Well, I'll come back in random space fact to the other object we keep talking about. Oh, yeah. Let's move on now to this week in space history it was 2001 this week that shoemaker near orbiter landed on the near earth object eros almost exactly one year after going into orbit and of course the amusing part

of the story is it was an orbiter that they went ahead and figured hey end of mission life what the heck let's see if we can land and they they did, and they lived. They got some cool data, particularly the fields data, that being close really helps you out. Was this a landing, a real landing, or was it more of a bump? It was more of a gentle rest. Yeah, okay. A rendezvous. Low, low, low gravity.

That helps you not go splat. All right, we move on to... Dun, dun, dun, dun. Random Space Fact! You really should be doing voiceovers for video games. One night only. Smackdown! February 15th, 2012. DA 14 versus Earth!

Can I say it? Please do. Be there! All right, we keep talking about 2012 DA14, but darn it, it's worth it. The asteroid having a closest approach on February 15, 2013 at 1925 UT. For those in places like Europe and Asia and Australia and Africa, or those in places like Europe and Asia and Australia and Africa. Not naked eye visible, but is visible, though challenging to track it across the sky with a telescope or binoculars.

It'll be 27,000 kilometers, about 17,000 miles away at closest approach. Here are some more random space facts about 2012 DA14. It will be moving about one degree per minute, or about two moon diameters per minute at closest approach. It will be closer than geosynchronous satellites. The encounter will alter the asteroid's orbit considerably. This will teach it to mess with Earth. It will shorten its period, its year, from 368 to 317 days. We expect an object on average to fly by of this size on average every 40 years to impact every 1,000, every 1,200 years. But as I mentioned, it could be tomorrow, could be 5,000 years from now.

Asteroids don't really respect averages. We asked you previously, near-Earth asteroid related, what is the largest known near-Earth asteroid, formal definition of asteroids that come within 1.3 AU of the sun, astronomical units, average Earth-sun distance. How did we do, Matt? And how well-timed it was. Lots and lots of entries, people using our new form. Our winner is Jim Elliott of Sanford, North Carolina.

First-time winner, as far as I can tell, who has been entering for a long time. He said it was asteroid 1036 Ganymede, not Ganymede, Ganymede, not to be confused with that moon much farther out in the solar system, at 32 kilometers in diameter. It's a healthy-sized beast. Yeah, Ganymede, although interesting as I was looking into this, Ganymede is the German spelling of Ganymede, the Trojan prince turned god, whom Zeus designated as the cupbearer to the gods.

So Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, is actually named after the same mythological character, but different spelling. By the way, he added, Jim Elliott did, a great interview a couple of weeks ago. This was with Deborah Fisher. He said, Dr. Fisher needs to be running programs at NASA. Faster, better, cheaper is right up her alley. I just thought I'd love that little comment. It is indeed.

But speaking as someone who's worked at NASA headquarters, it's probably really good to have Deborah out in the field doing science. Yeah. Jim, we're going to get you Bill Nye's voice on your answering machine. There's a cool prize. It's been very, very popular. I got a couple of other comments I got to read to you. Mark Wilson said, The near-Earth asteroid from the film Armageddon was the size of Texas,

and even after Bruce Willis broke it up into two halves at the end of the movie, both of those were much larger, so it's time to update our records. Wow, that is a really good point. I like Kurt Lewis's point even better. He wants asteroids with this type of orbit, approaching Earth and then returning to the belt. They should be used to ferry astronauts to Jupiter so that we can explore Europa. And he said, send Bruce Willis. So Bruce Willis gets two mentions in this week's show.

But you're going to love this one, unrelated, from Georgi Petrov. He wanted to know, if he wins, could he have your voice instead of Bill's? My voice? Yeah. Be there. if he wins, could he have your voice instead of Bill's? My voice? Yeah. Be there. I guess he didn't win, but he should have. Next time.

Yeah. Why aren't we giving away my voice? Lo, lo, lo, lo. Okay. Get on with it. We're late. All right. Here's a little bonus for those of you who actually listen to our show and don't try to cheat by just checking out the trivia contest on the website, this one is for you.

And that's the hint. Planetary Radio listeners. According to discoverer Jaime Noman, where was the human observer when the discovery of 2012 DA14 was made? And I'm looking for what type of place, not a specific geographic location. It was a place you would not typically think of an observer being at the time of an asteroid discover. Excellent question. You have until the 18th. That would be Monday, February 18, at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. Quick note, check out my introductory astronomy and planetary science class. Did the first lecture this last week.

To the solar system, go to planetary.org slash Betts class. And I look forward to joining you there. And what would it be on the 13th? For anybody who hears this very early on, you can catch the Bruce and Matt show. You can watch next week's What's Up being recorded on video, live. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Be there! All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky,

and think about leaf blowers. Thank you, and good night. I can't get it out of my head. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the Out of This World members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.