Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - All-Star CalTech Panel Discussion: Moving an Asteroid

Episode Date: October 17, 2011

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Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. When we talk about asteroids, it's often about how we're going to deflect a giant space rock from hitting our vulnerable home planet. Why would you want to bring one closer? Both of those topics were recently taken up at a workshop sponsored by the Keck Institute for Space Studies. We'll hear highlights of a public event connected to that workshop that featured a couple of scientists,

two astronaut scientists, and our own Bill Nye. Later, we'll check in with newly minted dungeon master Bruce Betts. Who knew you could see the night sky from a dungeon? Up first, though, is our not-so-secret agent for planetary science, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, it's not often that we get a story that involves intrigue or at least imaginary intrigue. But now we have two. And it encouraged me to start our conversation with this. So shaken, not stirred. You even found a picture of Ernst Stavro Blofeld with his cat in his lap. Florida, but it's this tiny sort of cylinder with veins on it. And it looks exactly like the kind of thing that a Bond villain would want to steal and use it to hold the world hostage. And it does have plutonium in it, which probably gets people's imagination excited. I do want to state very clearly that the plutonium that is inside MSL's power supply is not the same isotope that can be used for bomb making. And you can't even make the same isotope that you use for making bombs

by the same process that you use to make the plutonium-238 isotope that is used to power spacecraft. So Blofeld need not apply to actually steal this thing, but it just got my imagination going. Oh, damn you, Bond and Emily. These are great photos. It's an October 11 entry in the Planetary Society blog showing some of the final assembly of the Mars Science Laboratory as it prepares for its imminent launch. Let's move on to, well, really back to your attendance at DPS and a story that you weren't comfortable talking about, although you probably could have.

talking about, although you probably could have. This story has to do with something that's come to be known as the Engelfinger rule, which is, I suppose, what made you think Bond? Because, yeah, anyway. Blofeld and Engelfinger, it was just too good to pass up. Right. Engelfinger was the editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the very prestigious journals of medicine. And why do we care about that? Well, the reason is because he kind of pioneered this rule at prestigious journals where they say that if you have published any material anywhere else, it can't be published in our very prestigious journal. So since scientists really want to get their stuff published in the most prestigious journals in their field, they're often afraid

to even talk about some of their current research. You know, it's kind of stifled scientific discussion to have this rule. And recently, some of the more prestigious journals like Science and Nature, being two of the big ones in our field, have very clearly stated that, in fact, scientists can talk about current research at conferences and not fear that other scientists might discuss it or that journalists might write about it, that as long as the material that's published comes from something that's stated at a conference, they may still publish the same subject in science or nature. But still, a lot of scientists are really frightened of this rule. And as a result, they don't want to talk about their current research. They tend to keep it a secret. And this all came up right now anyway,

because of a little video that you have an October 12 entry in the blog that shows us or actually doesn't show us Eris but it shows us evidence of Eris. That's right you know one of the most exciting fields in planetary science right now is studying the stellar occultations of some of the most distant objects in the solar system. A stellar occultation means that one of these bodies, like Eris, which is a trans-Neptunian object, very tiny, very cold thing, very far from us, you can't really resolve its shape with a telescope. But what you can do is watch it pass right in front of a background star.

And because you know exactly how fast it was moving, and if you have a very precise and accurate clock, you can actually get a really good measure of its diameter by timing stellar occultations. And if you get two telescopes that manage to see the same occultation, then you can actually get a very good estimate of its shape and determine whether it's spherical or elliptical and so on. So stellar occultations are really the way to go and this one determined that Eris' size is almost precisely the same size as that of Pluto.

Within the error, you really can't tell the difference between the size of Eris and the size of Pluto. And there you go. Now it can be told. It, again, is an October 12 entry in the Planetary Society blog. And we're out of time. Emily, I'll talk to you again next week. Looking forward to it, Matt. Emily is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Back in a moment with highlights from a recent public presentation at Caltech about why we might want to bring an asteroid closer to home. The Keck Institute for Space Studies is based at Caltech in Pasadena, California. That's where the institute, often called KISS, recently offered a workshop that considered a topic that would have been pure science fiction not many years ago. The discussion of how humans could retrieve an asteroid attracted some of the most prominent planetary scientists and engineers, as well as leaders of the effort to protect our planet from these sometimes malevolent visitors.

Back on September 28, five of the participants gathered with an overflow crowd to talk about moving an asteroid. Five of the participants gathered with an overflow crowd to talk about moving an asteroid. The moderator was Lou Friedman, Emeritus Executive Director of the Planetary Society. Joining Lou in the auditorium were Space Shuttle astronaut, scientist and author Tom Jones, Professor John Lewis of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, current Executive Director of the Planetary Society Bill Nye, and Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweikart, who also heads the B612 Foundation that is dedicated to helping humanity avoid the fate of the dinosaurs.

Dr. Friedman got things started with a look back in history. In 1950, I was in school. There was less than 50 asteroids known. Today, we're discovering 3,000 a month there's literally tens and tens and hundreds of thousands of them known, millions of them

will be known and we are finding out so much about and changing our view of the solar system, the world, and our neighborhood. This is our neighborhood, the near-Earth asteroids, and a tremendous population changing the way we think about things. We're in the middle of a workshop here, and this is on the idea of moving an asteroid. Some people have heard about these ideas about moving an asteroid away from Earth.

It's a little different study this week. We're studying about moving an asteroid away from Earth. It's a little different study this week. We're studying about moving an asteroid a little closer to Earth. The idea is that we can now even think about these things and do these things is tremendously exciting because asteroids are turning out to be an incredibly interesting and important subject. There's now a great deal of interest in sending humans to an asteroid, not as the end goal for human exploration, but these are natural stepping stones to move out into the solar system. We don't know yet if this is a good idea. We don't know if it's a safe idea. We don't know yet what's required to actually implement this idea. But the Keck Institute is devoted to

these kinds of studies to think these things through and at least find out what's required and then think about how it might be accomplished. Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweikert is one of the most knowledgeable and forceful voices in the campaign to protect the Earth from the next big asteroid with our name on it. Rusty warned that the job will take more than just brute force. And one of the things you want to do is have a precision end result. So while you may use a blunt instrument like an axe to get the primary job done, the fine work you want to do with a scalpel, a gravity tractor being an example, where using gravity, just hovering in front of an asteroid with a little bitty spacecraft,

you very slowly and weakly pull it toward you. And so you can get a very precise change in the orbit for the final part of a deflection using a technology of this kind. I point out that both of these technologies are currently available. In order to protect the earth from most asteroid impacts. We do not have to develop new technology. We do need to prove this technology by demonstrating it, but it is, it exists already, so we have the capability physically, technically to protect the earth from asteroid impacts.

The implication of that, I want you to think about for a moment. We have been hit millions of times in the 4.5 billion years, and life would not exist without the impacts of asteroids and comets over the history of the solar system. But once life emerged, then asteroid impacts have from time to time wiped out large percentages of life. And since we're now on the top of the totem pole, we care about that. Generally speaking, not everybody, let me say, but generally speaking, we do. And what I'm going to tell you is that with our technology combined with our brains, which have generated machines at the level we are now in our evolutionary state of life here

on this planet, in this corner of the solar system, we are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival. And that's the fundamental reason that we're here now in this workshop. But that's a reality which says we human beings have the arrogance and the capability to say we're going to stop a process which has gone on for 4.5 billion years. From Rusty Schweikart, the discussion turned to fellow astronaut Tom Jones. Tom has thought a lot about how to get humans to an asteroid and, just as important, how they'll manage to conduct science when they get there.

It takes six months, which is well within our free-fall medical experience on the space station. It's probably okay to expose humans to deep space, galactic cosmic rays, and solar flare hazards for about six months, counting on good luck to avoid any fatal events during that time, and some shielding preparation on your spacecraft. So that's probably the kind of doable mission profile we're thinking of. Now when you get to an asteroid and you have got two weeks to explore it and do some field geology, you want to pay attention to how you deal with the challenges of the asteroid. It's rotating on a period of probably several hours. You've got to get from your cruise vehicle, it's too big to land on the asteroid, so you've got to get over here to work. So do you have a jet pack on your space suit? That's what I thought

would be the easy case just a couple of years ago. And then you would find yourself in placing an anchoring system and just clambering around like I did on the space station. And you do your field geology work that way, essentially exploring on your fingertips in this very low-gravity body. But that's very fatiguing, and I can tell you that from experience. And if I'm going to get maximum return science-wise and resource-wise from this two weeks, I want to have better productivity than a spacesuit can give you with all its encumbrances and stiff gloves and shoulders and arms.

So NASA, I think very wisely, has been thinking about adapting lunar rover-type vehicles that usually have wheels on the bottom and then giving them a propulsion package and the ability to fly in space in free fall and then putting a couple of people inside a space exploration vehicle. This is 2001, A Space Odyssey, which I watched as an eighth grader and was just stunned by. And maybe that will actually come true in this version

where you have manipulator arms to anchor you to the asteroid. You can work in shirt sleeves. You can go out there for 10 or 12 hours, take a lunch break while you're hanging on with a robot arm, and then go back to your field geology, and you tuck your samples into a bin on the vehicle and go back to the mothership. So a lot of advantages to working in your shirt sleeves,

and this might be the way to go. And we should test this design on the space station in the next five years. Astronaut and planetary scientist Tom Jones. We'll hear from more members of the recent Caltech panel discussion about moving an asteroid when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine,

and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary

Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Today we're presenting highlights from a September 28 panel discussion titled Moving an Asteroid. It was sponsored as part of a four-day workshop by the Keck Institute for Space Studies at Caltech. John Lewis is an expert on asteroid composition. He's a professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Dr. Lewis talked about two types of asteroids that have little in common other than the essential materials each offers for creating large space structures, such as solar power satellites. Some of them were formed under rather wet conditions. These meteorites are called carbonaceous.

They are black in appearance, very low reflectivities. They contain up to 6% by weight of organic polymers. They contain up to 20% by weight of water. In fact, these meteorites, as they fall on Earth, looking like lake bottom sediments, have up to 40% by weight of easily extractable volatiles, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and so on. This means that they are potential sources of large quantities of water, of hydrogen and oxygen from the electrolysis of water, of carbon compounds for space habitats, for agriculture in space, for sources of nitrogen, for the atmospheres in space habitats. So these volatile rich meteorites make up a small percentage of the near-Earth population,

but they are there, and they do fall on Earth. We have many samples of them in our collections, but they are there and they do fall on Earth. We have many samples of them in our collections, but they are weak material, quite weak. So weak that if I had a fragment of one that I could hold between my thumb and my finger, I could crush it just by squeezing it. The smallest known metallic asteroids contain more metal than has been mined on Earth in the entire history of the human race. The smallest known. If one of them were to hit Earth it would penetrate the atmosphere as if it were a sheet of paper and it would blast a sizable crater in the ground. So we have these

nearby asteroids and the fragments from them ranging in composition from lake bottom mud to stainless steel. If we see an asteroid approaching Earth it would be of great interest to us to know which it was because if it's a chunk of carbonaceous chondrite it will explode high above the ground and unless it's really huge the blast effects won't do much to us here on the ground. On the other hand, if it's made out of stainless steel, that is an armor-piercing bullet. And that will pass right through our atmosphere and impact the ground at essentially the same velocity at which it hit the top of the atmosphere. In fact, in some cases higher,

because the energy picked up in falling to Earth through the atmosphere more than compensates for the energy lost to friction by passing through the atmosphere. Let's suppose we had a fully recycling society using the resources of the near-Earth asteroid swarm, powered solely by solar power, and indeed the only input is solar power. How many people could you support? And the answer is we could support a population of 10 billion people indefinitely until the sun dies. Most near-Earth asteroids come in near Earth into the terrestrial planet region and an aphelion go out into the asteroid belt.

So once you establish any kind of a facility on a near-Earth asteroid, it serves as a traveling hotel and traveling gas station to take you out to the asteroid belt. There you can jump off, adjust your velocity to rendezvous with a belt asteroid, and suddenly you have access to a larger mass of material. How much mass? One million times as large as the total mass of the near-Earth asteroid swarm. There is no shortage of resources out there at all. Professor John Lewis of the University of Arizona.

Bill Nye was the last of the participants to speak about moving asteroids. The science and planetary guy covered several proposed efforts, including one that would rely on a swarm of tiny spacecraft. Bill Nye, NASA's Space Science and Planetary Research Center, NASA's Planetary Society, one of the little things we fund is a study with the mirror bees. And the word bee is just charming because they kind of resemble a swarm of bees. And these would be mirrors in space around an asteroid. You'd shine enough bright sunlight on it to volatize the surface,

cook it to the point where it boiled off, and then the reaction of that gas or material being ejected from the asteroid would nudge it off course. But once again, my friends, this will only work if you get there early. You can't show up late. You've got to get there a decade or so early. But wouldn't that just be cool? And by the way, no nuclear propulsion required,

no controversy about sending radioactive material into space. This would be probably sent by conventional rockets, probably deployed in a way not unlike we use cell phones with distributed computing among the spacecraft. They would get themselves organized and they would cook the asteroid and just give it a little nudge off course. It would be a very cool thing. You say, well, when are you guys going to build these? Well, we're working on it. If an asteroid or if an object is identified soon enough, I'm sure we will all want to rev this up.

And this is the kind of thing, if you want to, as I say, if you like to worry about things, you're living at a great time. The moving an asteroid discussion closed with questions from its big audience. I like to worry about things. You're living at a great time. The moving and asteroid discussion closed with questions from its big audience. Perhaps it was inevitable that someone would ask about a human asteroid mission, not to study it, but to blow it up. Think Deep Impact and Armageddon. Rusty Schweikart answered with help from Bill Nye.

You don't need old astronauts to go up and save the world. Everything that we're talking about here, not Tom's stuff. What Tom was talking about was the human missions to asteroids and related to asteroids. But in terms of planetary defense, this is all robotic, and you really don't want people around. That makes a mess, whether they're Bruce Willis or Tom Jones. The other thing is, you guys, momentum is conserved, or what have you.

If you blow it up, then the whole giant spray of rocks is coming at the Earth instead of one. So only a couple of cases is it really a good idea to blow it up, is that accurate? Yeah, the international debate that I talked about earlier, which is going to go right up to the moment of impact would be far more intense if what you're proposing is to use a nuclear explosion. At the same time, if what you care about is the technical issue,

and Tom and I have dealt with this for years in the United Nations, if what you're talking about is technically getting the job done, forget the geopolitics. If you're talking about technically getting it done, there is a very small possibility that we could be challenged the first time by an object too large to use a kinetic impact. And the only thing that would work would be a nuclear explosion. Uh, so we always state very carefully that nuke, the potential use of nuclear explosives for deflection cannot currently be ruled out, but it is an

extremely low probability that they would be needed. And I'll tell you the real challenge challenge which is going to force them to be needed, it's not the size of the object. It is the length of the debate. I'm going to just close by saying that one of the upbeat things that really came through this evening was the great amount of human ingenuity and ideas that have been expressed here, and I think we all want to thank the panel very much for doing that this evening was the great amount of human ingenuity and ideas that have been expressed here,

and I think we all want to thank the panel very much for doing that this evening. Lou Friedman, closing panel discussion at Caltech about moving an asteroid. We thank the Keck Institute for Space Studies for allowing us to provide these highlights. You can hear the entire event at the KISS website. We've got the link at planetary.org slash radio. What's Up is up next. Bruce Betts is here. Well, he's kind of here. He's here virtually via Skype,

and that means it's time for What's Up. How are you? Doing well. How are you doing? Very well. Spent the day with my parents out in the desert. I hear that you spent it as a dungeon master. I did indeed. Dungeon mastering for my heroic children and their friends. Yeah, I'll have to watch sometime. I've never seen this actually happen. You'll have to join in. We can have the Planetary Radio Dungeons & Dragons game.

It'll be a massive nerd fest. That sounds so... What's the word I want? Awesome. Okay. By the way, what's up? I've still got Jupiter dominating the evening sky coming up over in the east. And you can check out Mars rising in the middle of the night in the east and high up overhead in the pre-dawn.

If you look on October 21st, you'll see it's the reddish star-like object near the moon. Makes it a little easier to find. We move on to this week in space history. This week in 1967, Mariner 5 flew past Venus, became the first successful Venus probe. Wow. Okay. Long time ago. It seems like yesterday. We move on to... Random space fact! This is just getting creepier and creepier. I don't know who that was.

Peter Lorre last week, and this one just really, really eerie. That's my goal. Neutron stars. I love neutron stars. They're so weird. Even though they are more massive than the sun, a neutron star is about 60,000 times smaller in diameter than the sun. All right, let's go on to the trivia contest.

And a couple weeks ago, we were hanging out at the AIAA Space Conference in your home hangout of Long Beach. Where will the 2012 AIAA Space Conference be? That's the question we asked you. How did we do? I hope these people realize that we're not giving away the book, The Beauty of Space, until next week, because we really did have a lot of responses. Maybe they were just excited. It may be. Only one person got it wrong, and that was somebody who said Anaheim, so not too far off, because it's going to be in Pasadena, the hometown of the Planetary

Society. And that's the answer that we got from Antonio Redfern Pucci, a longtime listener and enterer, but first-time winner of the contest. So, Antonio, you have won the Planetary Radio t-shirt that you'll be able to wear around Thunder Bay, Ontario, at least until you need a sweater, which probably happened a month ago. We are proud to award that to you. Keep it for the summer, at least, please. Enter-er-er. Congratulations.

I got some other interesting responses. John Gallant, he wants to know if the Planetary Society is going to be offering bunk space for out-of-town visitors. Yeah, maybe what? $250 for a piece of floor, I'd say? There you go. New fundraising. And then this from Randy Bottom, who seems to be really into redoing acronyms at the moment. He says, oh yeah, the AIAA,

the Association for Invisible Alien Abductions in Space. He's not supposed to know that's what it stands for. No, Randy, it's not for another week that I'm going to New Mexico. Did you know I'm going to New Mexico and I'm going to pass through Roswell doing some other stories, including crawling around in caves with interplanetary cave, would-be cave explorers? No, I didn't. So you're pretty much living the Dungeons and the dungeons and dragons i guess so yeah watch out for the goblins it does make your uh your voice earlier today that uh that wonderful voice uh even more appropriate yeah imagine that when you're in

the cave no i did not know you were going to do this festive activity yeah i'll tell you more about it maybe next week how exciting i got a good trivia question for you this time. Speaking of next week, yeah. Something more out of your bailiwick, and I just am glad I used the word bailiwick. What moon in the solar system is named for a drunken butler in a Shakespeare play? A moon in the solar system named for a drunken butler in a Shakespearean play. I don't know why I repeated that. You said it perfectly well. Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Find out how to enter. And this time you have until the 24th. Yes, the 24th of October, 2011 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. All right, everybody go out there, look up the sky, and think about paladins and rangers. Thank you, and good night. That's some obscure D&D reference, right? Maybe a listener will set me straight. The solar system, that's his bailiwick.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Join us next week for a Saturn update from Cassini mission project scientist Linda Spilker. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.