Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Second Earth, and OSIRIS REx is Go for Asteroid Bennu

Episode Date: April 22, 2014

Finally found: an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone. You’ll hear lead scientist Elisa Quintana make the announcement. Then OSIRIS REx mission Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta will tell us how the spacecraft will return a sample of material from the birth of the solar system.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Earth 2 and visiting asteroid Bennu this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Today we'll visit with the leader of the OSIRIS-REx mission that will rendezvous with an asteroid and bring a few precious grams of that space rock back to Earth. You'll also learn how you can send your name along for the ride. Emily Lakdawale is off this week as we prepare for Planetary Radio Live

at the USA Science and Engineering Festival. But Bill Nye and Bruce Betts will be checking in. First, though, a story we barely had time to include. NASA held a news conference on April 17th to announce... Well, here's lead researcher Elisa Quintana of the SETI Institute with the big news. On behalf of the SETI Institute, the NASA Kepler team, and many other collaborators, I present to you Kepler-186f. This is the first validated Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of another star.

We can now say that other potentially habitable worlds similar in size to our Earth can exist, and it's no longer in the realm of science fiction. So Kepler-186f is an M dwarf that is smaller and cooler than our Sun, and this whole system is at about 500 light years away from Earth. So the five planets are known to orbit the star, and they all have sizes that are less than one and a half times the size of Earth. The inner four planets orbit really close to their stars. They have orbital periods between 4 and 23 days. Kepler-186f is the outermost planet.

It has a size that is within 10% of the size of Earth. It orbits its star every 130 days. So at this orbital distance, it receives about one-third of the stellar heat that Earth receives from the sun. So this places the planet near the cooler edge of the star's habitable zone. Kepler measures a planet's size. It doesn't measure its mass, so we don't know its composition. We can still place constraints on the composition from theoretical models and from observations of other small bodies.

So thermal evolution models predict that planets as small as Kepler-186f are unlikely to be dominated by these thick gas envelopes that you see in Neptune and Jupiter, those which don't have a solid surface. So given theoretical models and what we observe in our solar system, it's likely that the planets that are the size of Earth, like Kepler-186f, are also composed of some proportion of iron, rock, and ice. Kepler-186f is special because we already know that a planet of this size and in the

habitable zone is capable of supporting life as we know it. Drake Equation, here we come. Congratulations to Elisa Quintana and everyone else on this team that may have discovered a second Earth. I bet Bill Nye would have had something to say about this story. Unfortunately, we had to record this week's segment just before the announcement. Bill, not everybody who hears this is going to be able to catch it before the USA Science and Engineering Festival, but we hope a lot of people will. This is a big deal, isn't it?

Oh yes, in Washington, D.C., this is something we did two years ago. And by we, I mean the Planetary Society. It was shortly after I took over. And it's this big, doggone celebration of science and engineering. And there's a lot of students there. I mean, 100,000 kids or young people come through the Washington, D.C. Convention Center, which is an enormous facility, as one might expect. And we talk about planetary science, get people excited about space missions and about the discoveries we're making in the solar system. And I will do some classic science demonstrations, which are really fun. We're pulling together the props for those as we speak a few days early here.

I'm also very glad that you're going to be around for Planetary Radio Live, because we're going to have, in addition to you... Are you kidding? A man can dream. Where else would you want to be? But what a panel! Bill Nye the Science Guy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Mike Rowe, the dirty jobs guy. That's a big deal. It is a big deal. That's a very strange but wonderful— By the way, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a Washingtonian. He's from the area. He went to DeMatha High School. He was a very good basketball player, and I presume a pretty smart guy who must love the planets and the solar system

and science. I'm looking forward to spending a little time. He's a very smart guy. I'm holding his book, What Color Is My World?, which is his tribute to the last history of African-American inventors. I think it's going to be a terrific time, and a few people will have the honor of meeting you in the Planetary Society booth. Oh, those lucky people.

No, it will be fun. So if you're in the Washington, D.C. area, the week after Earth Day, which is Tuesday the 22nd, which is the day after the LADEE spacecraft will be instructed to smash into the moon, the Lunar Atmospheric Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft will get one last datum out of it. We'll get one last datum out of it before we have our auger in. If you're there in Washington that week, please come by. It's really, it's an exciting event.

It's really, I mean, it goes on all weekend. It's an exciting set of events. The USA Science and Engineering Festival is Saturday and Sunday, April 26 and 27, and it is free. But find another way to get there. Don't expect to park nearby. Thanks, Bill. This is great. Look forward to having you on stage.

Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, which is also involved with the project that we're going to be talking about next with the principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bedouin. New worlds 500 light years away, but there is still so much for us to learn about our own solar system, and what we learn will help us understand more about those more distant Earths. That's largely what OSIRIS-REx is about. In case you're wondering, the acronym stands for Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer. This New Frontiers-class probe just passed a major milestone on the way to its launch

toward an asteroid recently given the name Bennu. According to Wikipedia, the Bennu bird is an ancient Egyptian deity linked with the sun, creation, and rebirth that may have been the inspiration for the phoenix. Dante Loretta of the University of Arizona is principal investigator for the mission. He joined me by phone a few days ago. Dante, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio, and congratulations. What is this milestone that OSIRIS-REx has just reached? Thank you, Matt. It's great to be here. OSIRIS-REx just completed its mission critical design review. That is the final approval from the agency to begin fabricating the spacecraft and get ready for launch. So what's it been, 10 years leading up to this point?

Yeah, February 2014 marked my 10-year anniversary on OSIRIS-REx. Back in February 2004 is when we first got together and decided to go after this mission opportunity. This being a principal investigator, it is a long-term investment of time, usually, isn't it? It absolutely is a long-term investment in time. The samples from Bennu are scheduled to come back in September of 2023, so it'll be just under 20 years of my career by the time we get that material on Earth. Sounds like, though, you're pretty convinced it will be well worth the wait. Absolutely. This is a great opportunity. It's, in fact, a great honor to be able to lead a project

like this for NASA and for the United States and really for all the world. I have an amazing team. They all work tirelessly towards this objective, and it's really a great adventure for all of us. Now, we're going to talk later during our regular What's Up segment with Bruce Betts, who I know you've been working with, you and other people on the Osiris-Rex team, about how people can send their names to Bennu. Some will stay, well, they'll all stay, and they'll all come back as well. The key to this is that it is sample return. Is that the main thing that makes this so exciting? Actually, Osiris-Rex has a lot of things that make it exciting. Sample return is the key driver.

That's what forces our design in a lot of areas of the spacecraft and in the ground system. We're going to go out to Bennu. We're going to study it in great detail. We'll do a global characterization. We'll study it as a planetary object to understand its geology and its dynamical evolution. We'll get very intimate with the surface as we characterize

and try to understand the best area where we can grab the sample from, and we'll get that sample back on Earth. But we have a couple of other very exciting science objectives. You know, Bennu is now the most thoroughly characterized asteroid telescopically. We've been using telescopes on Earth and telescopes in space to learn about this asteroid, and now we have a chance to ground truth all of that data with the spacecraft encounter and improve our ability to characterize asteroids throughout the solar system. BAND-AID was also a potentially hazardous asteroid with a relatively high probability

of impacting the Earth in about 150 years, and we're going to study the Yarkovsky effect, which contributes to changing its orbit over the course of time, and we're going to study the Yarkovsky effect, which contributes to changing its orbit over the course of time, and also understand all the physical properties that give rise to that effect. Now, I'm really glad you've brought that up, because I had not heard of the Yarkovsky effect, and it looks like basically an asteroid ends up doing what solar sails do. That's a good way to describe it. I mean, an asteroid like Bennu especially has a very low albedo that is the fraction of sunlight that it reflects back into space. For Bennu, that's 4%. So what that means is 96% of the energy from the sun is absorbed by the surface of the asteroid.

And it has a property called thermal inertia, inertia being, you know, resistance to change. So it takes a while to heat up and then to cool back down as it radiates that energy back into space. And in fact, when it radiates that infrared energy, that acts like a thruster on the asteroid and changes its orbit substantially in time. We need to learn about this because we may think we know the trajectory of an asteroid like Bennu, but we may not.

In fact, the orbital trajectory of Bennu is very complicated. You just can't take Kepler's laws and predict where the asteroid is going to be into the future. In addition to the Yarkovsky effect, there's a related effect called the YORP effect, and the Y in YORP stands for Yarkovsky, along with the other investigators who came up with this, and that changes the rotation state of the asteroid. It can make the pole move, it can speed it up, or it can spin it down, and there's a feedback back to the Arkovsky effect. So it's a nonlinear dynamical problem to try to understand

where this asteroid's going to be in the future. You really need to understand how it interacts with sunlight and infrared radiation. Now I'm going to put up a link to a terrific little instructional video. It's really fun, about the Yerkovsky effect. It's one of several that you link to from your brand new website. Yeah, we have asteroidmission.org is now the central location on the Internet to keep up with OSIRIS-REx. And as part of that, we've been producing student-led and student-directed little animations

using this whiteboard strategy to convey some key science ideas that are related to the OSIRIS-REx mission. I highly recommend it. Let me ask you more about this asteroid itself, because the website, and I know you have said a lot about how this asteroid is going to help us look way, way, how this asteroid is going to help us look way, way, way back into the, well, very nearly or maybe entirely into the birth of our solar system. Yeah, asteroids are the geologic remnants from the formation of our planetary system. So the Earth accreted from bodies like Bennu and other types of asteroids that are still existent in the solar system. But those are all, the record of those are wiped out

through the geologic activity are wiped out through the geologic activity of our planet over the past four and a half billion years. When we go to Bennu, it records that earliest stage of solar system formation. So we're looking at materials that were the first to condense out of the solar nebula, which is that giant disk of gas and dust that surrounded the early protosun, the grains that formed in that environment were incorporated into Bennu. Bennu probably also incorporated icy material and organic material that may have led to origin of life on Earth, the origin of the oceans on our planet, and basically the distribution of volatile material throughout the inner solar system.

That's OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Loretta. He has more to tell us about his spacecraft and asteroid Bennu on Planetary Radio. See you in a minute. 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 and 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. Your name carried to an asteroid! How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate.

That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're talking with University of Arizona professor Dante Loretta, who is principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission. His spacecraft will leave for asteroid Bennu in the fall of 2016, reach its destination two years later, and then return with a few chunks of Bennu in 2023.

So if all goes well, how much of Bennu is going to be returned? The baseline science requirement for OSIRIS-REx is to return 60 grams of material from its surface. That's about two ounces. We have a lot of margin on the design of our sample collector, and we can pick up about two kilograms or four pounds of material in a very successful sampling event. Is this the sort of holy grail that sample return is for, for example, scientists who study Mars? Yeah, I think sample return is the future of solar system exploration. We would love to get samples from other asteroids,

from the far side of the moon, like the South Pole Achen Basin, and indeed the surface of Mars is really what the planetary community has identified as the number one scientific priority for NASA. This is of great interest to you, not just because it's a rock in space, but because you, like so many others, would like to know more about the origin of our solar system. It's a major portion of your studies, right? Absolutely. I've been motivated to understand the formation of our planet, the formation of the other planets in our solar system,

and really to try to piece together the evolutionary process by which life originated on Earth, and through that to try to understand how common of a process is the origin of life throughout our galaxy and our universe. So what is the next milestone for this mission? Now that we've passed our mission critical design review, we're going to fabricate all of the flight hardware as components. So we'll build the instruments individually. Those will get delivered to Lockheed Martin, which is the

spacecraft provider in Denver, Colorado. And then we have a review in about a year, which is called the system integration review, where we'll look at everything that's been delivered and tested at the subsystem level, and we'll decide whether or not we're ready to go ahead and fabricate and complete the spacecraft, run it through a whole series of environmental tests to make sure it'll survive in the harsh environment of space, and then in May of 2016, ship it down to the Kennedy Space Center and get ready to launch it on its journey to Bennu. And then you get there relatively quickly compared to a lot of other missions that have traveled around our solar system. Yeah, it takes about two years to get from the Earth to Bennu, and that's when we'll first start surveying the region of space and

pick it up with our cameras. It'll take a couple more months for us to get into the vicinity of the asteroid. So late 2018 is when we'll get our first truly resolved images of the asteroid. What can people do other than us checking in with you every now and then from Planetary Radio? And I know you've done a couple of blog entries, blog posts at planetary.org, but there are a lot of other ways for people to follow this mission. Absolutely. We are active on Facebook and on Twitter. We've started on Instagram and Pinterest. I've been blogging at dsloretta.com,

and you can buy all kinds of great Osiris-Rex merchandise at osirisrexstore.com. I've got to check into that. Do you have any neckties? I need more space ties. No, but we do take requests. Anything for pets? I hear an asteroid fan in the background there.

I don't think so, no, but we have some cool beanie caps that might fit on a large dog. All right. Just one more question. You know that the Planetary Society was also joined, you folks, for this contest to name your destination. Talk a little bit about that

and the winner. Did you get to meet this boy? Yeah, that was a great opportunity. The Planetary Society did a great job coordinating the Name That Asteroid contest for us. It was a collaboration with the University of Arizona, my home institution, the OSIRIS-REx mission, and the Linear Near-Earth Asteroid Survey in Socorro, New Mexico, who discovered what we called 1999 RQ-36 back then. And we got thousands of entries from all

over the world. We narrowed it down to a list of a few hundred really great names. In fact, a lot of us were sitting around the table, couldn't believe that asteroids hadn't been named some of these things before because they're just so perfect. And we selected Bennu that was submitted by Michael Puzio from North Carolina. And then the Planetary Society hosted a Google Hangout where I got to talk to Michael and his father, along with Emily Lakdwala and others joining us online. Great fun, and much more in store. We're not done talking about OSIRIS-REx because, as I said,

we're going to pick up with Bruce Betts and tell people how they can send their name out there with your spacecraft. Dante, once again, thank you very much, and congratulations. Hope that spacecraft comes together really well. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. We've been talking to Dante Loretta. He is the principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx. That is the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer.

OSIRIS-REx. It's one of those NASA acronyms you know. Dante is a professor in the Department of Planetary Sciences, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Don't go away. We're just a few seconds away from even more with OSIRIS-REx as we visit with Bruce Betts for What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, a special edition of What's Up with the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts.

One of those projects that he directs is our relationship with the spacecraft that we were just talking about, OSIRIS-REx. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back. We'll take a couple of extra minutes today, maybe even three, to tell people about this opportunity that has been offered to them. I mentioned it at the beginning of my conversation with Dante Loretta, the principal investigator, who I bet you're getting to know reasonably well. Yes, indeed. the principal investigator, who I bet you're getting to know reasonably well.

Yes, indeed. As an official education outreach partner with the OSIRIS-REx mission, we've participated in various things from running the naming contest that led to the asteroid being named Bennu to now the opportunity for people to fly their names to asteroid Bennu and back and then also keep one copy of their names flying in space on the main spacecraft. Tell us how this works. It's pretty easy. All you have to do is go to planetary.org slash Bennu, B-E-N-N-U, and you'll be able to enter your name, get a certificate if you want, that will show that you're flying with us. And that's all there is to it. Just follow the instructions when you get there.

One of our cats is going to Bennu, at least her name. But only one of them. Yeah, I don't know why I didn't do the other one. I guess it's some subconscious grudge. You still have a little time left if your guilt gets to you. Did you print out a certificate? I did not. And give it to the one cat and make the other

cat angry? How can you tell? Anyway, we've gotten more than a quarter million names so far. Holy cow. Still collecting. We also will be flying the names of all Planetary Society members automatically. But if you've got anybody else

you want to add, feel free. Yeah, like Matt's other cat or cats. How many do you have now? Two cats. Two cats. No one should have one. What about dogs? One dog.

Well. Yeah, I guess. All right, all right. Anyway, go to planetary.org slash Benno and get your name flying. Tell your friends. Why do we keep doing this, he asked. Why do we keep giving people the opportunity to send their names to these far-flung places? Because it's fun and it involves people.

We get people to feel a part of the mission more. And obviously lots of people like it since we get hundreds and thousands to millions of people. And so by people taking a fairly small action, they can really literally, you know, at least in a digital sense, be part of the spacecraft. This will actually, in this spacecraft, will probably, names will be engraved on a little tiny chip or flown in some other manner. And so you're actually going out there participating. Get people excited. Get them inspired. That's what we do. Okay. Let's inspire them with what's up in the night sky, including that asteroid Bennu, although I don't think there's much chance they're going to see it.

No, I don't think so. Although I thought I saw it, but it turned out I just hit my head. Were there stars or birds? Asteroids. That's what happens when a planetary scientist gets hit on the head. So Mars, we're just a little past opposition and closest approach. So it's looking lovely early in the evening over in the east, looking bright and red and star-like. And then Saturn coming up a couple hours later in the east looking bright and red and star-like.

And then Saturn coming up a couple hours later in the east. Early in the evening, you've got Jupiter high in the south. You've got Venus dominating the east in the pre-dawn. It's a planetary party. An annular solar eclipse is coming up on April 29th, visible in portions of Australia. Road trip. I'm ready. I'm ready.

Move on to this week in space history. It was this week in 1990 that the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed. Amazing. Still working. Good Lord. It's had some fixes and some detailing, but it's still going. It is quite amazing and something for all of us to be very happy about. And hopefully it'll keep hanging in there until at least the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, joins it up there.

So for our next segment, you got something special or shall I just belt it out? No, we do have somebody special and it's someone you know. Hey, Bruce, this is Jim Bell, president of the Planetary Society and your boss. So listen, dude, when you're done giving people this random space fact, maybe you can get back to some real work. This is work. I told him that.

I really did tell him that. You have to work with Matt all the time. You'd feel that way too. Oh, come on. This is the best part of your week. It really is. Yeah, me too, actually. this is the best part of your week it really is yeah me too actually that is so sad so here's a random space fact the word comet derives uh if you trace it back to the greek word for wearing long hair are you serious yes no it doesn't sound like it doesn't from the old english cometa from the Latin, cometa.

And in turn, it's a Latinization of the Greek word I don't know how to pronounce because it's written in Greek, meaning wearing long hair. Or the hair of the head, basically referring to the tail of the comet instead of a tail as hair, long hair. Yeah, it took only moments for it to make perfect sense to me. And thank you. That's a very good one. Shampoo your comment. I like to put in the highlights. That's the eye on tail, the eye on hair.

All right, we move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, who was the tallest astronaut to fly in space, and how tall was he? How'd we do? Well, this was great fun. there were a few people who came up with two guys because there was astronaut richard hybe who started at six three six foot three but grew to six foot four in microgravity cool isn't that great but it was actually jim weatherby who started out the tallest and among the many people who gave us that answer, Random.org chose Mark Schindler, I believe a first time winner in Honolulu, Hawaii. So aloha, Mark, we're going to give you a lovely Planetary Radio t-shirt to stick in the closet among all your aloha shirts. Jim Weatherby, I wonder if he got taller up there as well.

Probably most people do. My back yearns for that. Yeah, yeah. We did get one other answer, and I should have checked this with you to see if this was an acceptable winner. And this came from Mark Wilson in San Diego, as many entries that we get do.

The real answer to this question could be found by watching the James Bond movie Moonraker. Richard Kiel played the supervillain known as Jaws. He was seven foot one and a half inches. Yeah, that's different. He rode the space shuttle owned by Hugo Drax and, you know, eventually I think got shot out of the sky by the coolest space shuttle ever, the one with the laser in the nose. Oh, they all have that as standard equipment. Oh, see?

There's so much we don't know, or at least we're not told. All right. How about next time? Well, in class I've been talking trans-Neptunian objects. You know what that means? An excuse to say quaw-waw. Quaw-waw-waw-waw-waw. Easy for you to say.

Here's the question for next time. What is the name of the moon of the trans-Neptunian object? Quaw-waw-waw-waw-waw. Normally said more like quaw-waw. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. more like Quarwar. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. You have until the 29th, April 29th at 8 a.m. Pacific time.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about your favorite fish food. Thank you and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. And I hope next week in our special program from the USA Science and Engineering Festival, will be joining us via Skype to have a live version of the trivia contest while we're out there. And there's nothing fishy about that. Thanks, Guy. I hope you can join us next week at the USA Science and Engineering Festival, where I'll be talking with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the members of the Society. Clear skies. Thank you.