Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - An Imminent Asteroid Encounter

Episode Date: February 4, 2013

Spain’s La Sagra Observatory discovered Asteroid 2012 DA14 just a year ago. Now it’s nearing Earth once again. Jaime Nomen of La Sagra is back to prepare us for this very close flyby. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A close call with a big rock 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. Jaime Noman returns to our show days before an asteroid called 2012 DA14 returns to the immediate vicinity of our vulnerable planet. Jaime is with La Sagra Observatory in Spain, the discoverer of this very near-Earth object. We'll talk with him in a few minutes. Bruce Betts gives us another take on that 40 or 50 meter asteroid, along with his usual update on the night sky, a random space fact, and a new space trivia contest.

And Bill Nye will provide more evidence that we are entering a new era of commercial space development. Let's get underway with planetary evangelist Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, great to talk to you again, although the first topic that we have is a tribute to one of the saddest events that has taken place in the history of space exploration. Yeah, so last Friday, I posted an article about a panorama from the Spirit rover in honor of the Columbia astronauts. And the reason that I was posting something from Spirit is because shortly after Spirit landed, they named some hills that were on the distant horizon for the seven astronauts who were lost to that disaster,

which is something that people do. They name things after fallen heroes. I find that I'd rather have the heroes than have things named after those heroes. What Spirit eventually did, was Spirit climbed the central hill on that line of mountains, the one named for Rick Husband, who is the commander of the mission. And I think that is so much cooler because that's an example of Spirit doing something that Spirit was never intended to do. The rover team decided that what they really needed to do for science was to try and get to those mountains, even though they had no expectation that Spirit would really make

it there. And as a matter of fact, not only did Spirit make it to the mountains, but Spirit summited the mountain about 18 months later and took this amazing view, this panoramic view of a whole landscape that had opened up in front of her because she was able to explore to the top of that mountain. And I think that's a much more fitting tribute to our intrepid explorers than just naming some distant hills after them. Yeah, it's a February 1st entry by Emily in the blog at planetary.org. And you can see that and also see some great images, including one of your favorites, you said. Yeah, there's there's something that's emotionally arresting

about seeing photos of our spacecraft, the artifacts that we built at distant worlds. And this is one of my favorite of all time. It was taken by the Philae lander, which is still bolted to the side of the Rosetta orbiter. It's a European spacecraft that is eventually going to go into orbit around a comet. In order to get there, they did this gravity assist flyby of Mars. And while they were passing by Mars, they took a photo with one of Philae's cameras that shows Mars below the spacecraft. But it has this view shot down the solar panel.

And Rosetta's solar panels are huge, and it just expands kind of into the distance. It's tremendously foreshortened. And it's just, it's an amazing view. It's like looking out the airplane, down the airplane wing at the landscape below you. It's absolutely an amazing photo. It really is, and it's one to be very proud of. And you've got some other stuff that you're going to be posting momentarily? Yeah, coming up, speaking of photos of spacecraft in space, I've

got a couple of pretty amazing ones of Curiosity coming up soon, one taken from orbit and one taken by Curiosity itself, so stay tuned for those. One of those self-portraits. All right, Emily, thanks very much. We'll talk to you next week. All right. Senior Editor for the Planetary Society and Planetary Evangelist, that's Emily Lakdawalla, who is also a contributing editor to Sky and

Telescope magazine. Here is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Hey, Bill, welcome back. Planetary Radio. You just completed a trip up to Stanford. I don't know much about it. Yes, I went to the Stanford International Entrepreneurship Forum on space policy. It was cool, Matt. I mean, Lori Garver, deputy administrator of NASA, was there. George Neald, who's from the Federal Aviation Administration, was there. And they talked about this emerging space business. That is to say, space tourism like Virgin Galactic and the Lynx, the X-Core rocket plane, these will enable cheaper missions to Earth orbit, let alone SpaceX, Space Exploration Incorporated and Sierra Nevada Corporation. These guys are building rockets to take things into orbit.

And so they argued in very compelling fashion, how this is lowering the cost of all space missions. And that then, in my opinion, would allow or enable NASA, ESA, JAXA, Roscosmos, the national space agencies to send missions farther and deeper to look for signs of water and life. It's an exciting time. I mean, the Federal Aviation Administration is going to monitor rocket flights. I mean, this is Aviation Administration is going to monitor rocket flights. I mean, this is not NASA monitoring or the Air Force. This is commercial spaceflight. It's cool. And more and more, it sounds like an idea whose time has come. Also, Ed Liu, who, unlike many of us, is an astronaut that flew in space on the International Space Station for six months.

No bone loss, he said. the International Space Station for six months. No bone loss, he said. Working with the B612 Foundation, which is this organization trying to track every asteroid that crosses the, every significant asteroid that crosses the Earth's orbit. And this is an exciting undertaking. He makes the case where if you don't do it, we'll go the way of the ancient dinosaurs. And these people all spoke at this entrepreneurship forum. This is to say, the business of space. And it was very exciting. Ed Liu is getting funding to have a privately built space telescope specially made just to look for asteroids, which have very low albedo, very low reflectivity. It was just a cool day. And I spoke also as the representative of the

Planetary Society, looking for the answers to the two questions, where do we come from and are we alone? And now, very briefly, because you're just about out of here, you're headed back to DC for something a little more broadly concerned with science. Fellow board member Neil deGrasse Tyson and I got invited to speak to the Bipartisan Science Caucus, which is a new group. And we are going to emphasize the importance of science to investing in science to the economy, that science drives the economy, creating new products, new ideas, doing more with less by understanding nature, by knowing science. This is an exciting time. And a bipartisan caucus.

All of this is making me hope that things are looking up. Yeah, we're going to get some things done. Well, Matt, thank you very much, but I've got to fly. Indeed he does. He's the science guy. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society, and he'll join us again next week. Up next, though, a conversation with Jaime Noman of the La Sagra Observatory. And it's their asteroid, 2012 DA14, which is just about to fly rather close to our home planet.

On February 15th of this year, an asteroid will pass within 27,000 kilometers, or 17,000 miles, of our cozy home planet. That's inside the orbit of most communication satellites. There will not be an impact, but if 2012 DA14 did hit us, it would look like a good size nuclear bomb had gone off. We can thank La Sagra Observatory in Spain for its discovery and initial tracking. Jaime Nomen is one of the amateur astronomers at La Sagra, and he has also served as its spokesperson. In a recent somewhat technically challenged Skype conversation, I asked Jaime to thank and congratulate his colleagues on behalf of the Planetary Society. Yes, I told you the last time that we're very lucky discovering this object. We are really, really happy now and expecting this very, very close approach. expecting this very very close approach. Remind us of how this discovery was made because this was a an asteroid that many other observatories I think might

have missed. Oh yes it was if I remember it was at the end of the dark run so when the moon was still starting to grow and we changed it a little bit the way we were surveying so trying to get the shorter images and trying to discover the fastest objects we were talking advantage of the new ccd camera about thanks to the planetary society grant and this camera has a very fast readout, so this allows to take images one after the other, and thus this avoids that the object can move out of the field of view. Also, taking very short exposures, it's possible to detect such kind of very fast objects. This camera, because it's so fast, was vital to discovering a fast object like this asteroid now called 2012 DA14. Yes, of course. Last year we discovered around 15 NEOs and most of them were discovered precisely by this camera and not by the others. I think it's important to take this feature of those cameras

and to take advantage of them in order to try to detect the fastest objects. Tell us a bit more. Remind us of this story of how this asteroid was discovered by your team and tell us a little bit about La Sagra Observatory. We started in Mallorca Observatory on the island in the Mediterranean. Mallorca has a lot of light pollution also high humidity because

it's a sea level. So around eight years ago we decided to move one station or one part of the observatory to better skies in the south of Spain to try to develop this program of track and discover astro and NEOS.

We had a good sky there, but most of the observers were remotely observing. The problem was to try to develop a remote system for controlled telescopes, but even more important to try to process the images remotely because it was completely impossible to try to download all of them and check visually if any new object was on them. The thing was that most of us were traveling in different jobs and most of the observations of the Lassara are really done from several places. So I'm passing a lot of time in trains during the week, so many of the

observations and the processing of images and even sending data to the Minerva Center are done from the train. And one thing that maybe nobody knows is that this acid was discovered from a sailboat in February. That's wonderful. I'm

just trying to think of astronomers of not that many years ago being able to do their work from a train or a sailboat. It's quite amazing. This is true. And in this case, fortunately, we were sailing during the night quite close to the coast because the problem is the internet connection. So if you go far from the coast, then you cannot connect through wireless line. So fortunately, we're only about two or three miles from the coast. On this night, you process these images, you and your team. What do people say to each other? Do they point this out? They see that this object has moved from one image to the other. What kind of conversation goes on when you begin to suspect

this is a new object, one that no other human has ever seen? Oh yes, but at the beginning, you see that it is moving quite fast and then you are detecting that the object for sure is not too very far from the Earth, but at that moment you have no idea about if it is really going close or more or less close. So it's only after many other observations are coming, follow up, that then a preliminary orbit is found and then you can have some rough idea about the capabilities that the

object could be more or less coming close to the earth. But the compensation in this case is more or less, if you remember, is as some of the times that we find a moving object is that one of us is checking small crops of the images remotely and then, wow, this seems interesting. I'm going to check if it is really new. And we check and we start to be excited because, wow, it seems really, I'm going to check if it is really new and we check and we start to be excited because, wow, it seems really, really new object

then one of us normally through Skype say to the other, okay try to start the tracker tracker is one of the telescopes that are usually remaining in La Sagrada only for two confirmations and, okay, the friend then takes the control remotely of this other telescope

in order to try to track the object and confirm before to report to the Minerva Center. That's Jaime Nomen of Spain's La Sagra Observatory, discoverer of asteroid 2012 DA14. He'll rejoin us in a minute. 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 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. 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. La Sagra Observatory discovered 2012 DA14 not quite one year ago. We knew soon after that that this rock that is half the size of an American football field would return for another encounter with Earth on February 15th of this year. Jaime Noman of La Sagra is giving us an update, including a description of how the asteroid was found and reported to the MPC in the United States. You mentioned this group called the Minor Planet Center,

and they're the ones who keep track of all of these objects, and also would be the ones who would say, yes, indeed, this discovery has been made by La Sagra. Yes, but the most important thing is to find the new object, you need to report fast because then you must consider that the day comes here in Spain, the night starts in the United States. In the States, there are a lot lot of many many good telescopes and good teams that are not only discovering most of the asters, more of the neos, but also they carry out most of the follow-up observations and in short time it's possible to miss the object because sometimes could be missed. Also because the first preliminary orbit can be extracted and then to try to know

also because the first preliminary orbit can be extracted, and then to try to know the behavior and the capabilities of this object to collide or to cross close to the Earth or whatever. So there really is this friendly competition among observatories, astronomers, amateur and otherwise, all over the world. It reminds me of a football game, or we would, as you know, we would call it soccer. Oh, yes, more or less. But we need to understand that as a contribution. It's fun, but also we need to understand that as a contribution to try to make the goal,

to find most of the objects that have some possibilities to collide in the earth in the future. So this is not really a competition. have some possibilities to glide the Earth in the future. So this is not really a competition. And we can compete, of course, because the vast majority of the objects are from the big U.S. surveys, and we are only contributing a very, very small percent. So this is not really a competition. Nevertheless, you never know. It could be, now, as we know, this asteroid is not going to strike the Earth,

but it's going to come awfully close inside the orbit of some satellites. It could be, who knows, tomorrow night that La Sagra or some other group of amateur astronomers would discover the rock we on Earth may have to do something about if we don't want to go the way of the dinosaurs. Is this something that you sort of have in mind during this search? It's almost impossible to try to discover a big object. Most of the big asteroids, bigger than, larger than one kilometer, most are discovered. And if they are not discovered, possibly will be discovered many, many years ahead

before the impact. So it could be really, really odd to find an object bigger than one kilometer or so that is going directly to the Earth in a few months. So this is really difficult to happen. What could happen is objects like this one, like 2012 DA14, that the size is ranging from maybe 20-30 meters to maybe 150 or so, that as they are very small, sometimes they only come visible a few days before the closest approach, and sometimes they are disappearing after five or six days later because they're fading very, very fast because they are small.

days later because they're fading very, very fast because they are small. So the real problem is to try to find and to not miss those objects that also have many, many of them, maybe half a million. So help us look ahead a few days to February 15. What will you and your team be doing in the days leading up to this flyby of 2012 DA14 and on the night of the 15th? Two days before here in Spain, we are making a nice event. Maybe 200 people will come and we're talking about the circumstances and the things related to this close approach. At the beginning, we thought to make some live streaming to the people that will be there.

But we thought maybe if bad weather and things like that, people will be expecting to see something interesting. Then this is a problem. Also, we thought, no, no, better we make this talk and contact with media. And then the next day, we will relax it to the observatory to track and follow the event. So on 15, most of the team, the La Sagra team,

will go to the observatory to try to enjoy this flyby and also to try to make some observations. And we have some experience. We are sharing observations also from space debris. And we've got some experience tracking very, very fast moving objects as satellites. So we try to work with different strategies in order to track with high resolution these objects in order to take some information about high precision astrometry in the closest approach, and also maybe to try to do some photometry light core. We simply wish you the best of luck with those observations and in the celebration

of this close flyby by an asteroid which has been made possible because it was discovered by your observatory at La Sagra and as you know, we at the Planetary Society hope to celebrate with you and I hope that you will be joining us for some of the activities that we have planned as well. I would be really, really happy to try to participate in those events.

And I take advantage now to give thanks to many of the people who are contributing and who are members of the Planetary Society for their help in our project. And somehow they allow us to discover these interesting objects. You bet. Thank you once again, Jaime. And please pass along our highest regards to everybody there at La Sagra. And I very much look forward to talking to you, hopefully in the next few days as we celebrate this flyby. We've been talking with Jaime Nomen of the La Sagra Observatory in Spain, the discoverers of 2012 DA14, this good-sized rock,

which will be coming inside the orbits of geostationary satellites on the evening in Spain of the 15th of February, 2013. Somebody else who knows a lot about that flyby, we'll be talking to him in just a moment. It's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, with this week's edition of What's Up. Bruce Betts is here with us via Skype. He's ready to tell us all about the night sky in this week's edition of What's Up? And we're going to give somebody Bill Nye's voice on their answering machine once again. Third time for this.

It's proven to be a very popular prize. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back. So how do the stars look for the Super Bowl, which, as we speak, is about to happen? They look bright and shiny. The stars are shining for the Super Bowl. What a game.

What a game. And I'm pretty sure at least one team will win. Yeah, and I loved that commercial for the Planetary Society. It did air, didn't it? Yes, sure. Yeah, we just temporarily took the name of a beer company. We thought that would be much more effective. I'm sorry.

I'm throwing all this stuff at you. You didn't have a clue I was going to do. Like, that's never happened before. No. Tell me about something you do know about, like the night sky. February 8th. Mercury and Mars hanging out super close together. Hard to see, as I mentioned before, but low in the west, really cool if you can see it shortly after sunset.

Mercury looking like a white star and Mars like a reddish star. Very close together, and the Moon will be above the pair three days later. That'll be February 11th. You can check out Jupiter, of course, anytime that you don't have clouds, looking very bright in the south-southeast in the early evening. And we've got Saturn coming up later in the evening in the east and high overhead in the pre-dawn. Also, I want to mention again our 2012 DA14, which people may have heard of. Yes, and they'll be hearing more about because we'll be providing lots of coverage at planetary.org.

In fact, you already have a little video primer up on the website that people should look in on for lots of background on this asteroid, how it was discovered, and just how close it's going to come. Because it really is historic in recent times. We haven't had such a large beast coming by. It's about 45 meters that we actually have known was coming this close by. So closer than geosynchronous satellites. Check it out. Check out my video. We'll get a FAQ up shortly with some more information as well.

All right, we move on to this week in space history. In 1971, there occurred the only golf game ever played on the moon. That's right. Apollo 14. Yeah, it was just a lot of lost golf balls, oddly enough. Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball during the Apollo 14 mission. It's a long-duration exposure experiment on the surface of the moon. That would be really cool to find the golf balls. All right.

We move on to... Which is taken right out of our Super Bowl commercial, I think. It is. You recognize that. Yes. The trans-Neptunian object Sedna has a very elliptical and distant orbit. Its aphelion, or farthest point from the sun, is about 937 astronomical units. 937 times the Earth-Sun average distance.

That's 31 times Neptune's distance. And a perihelion of 76 AU. Really elliptical. It's just a strange and groovy object. And we'll come back to that in the trivia contest. And we moved to the trivia contest, but talking about the one we did previously, I asked you what pilot flew the most flights in the X-15. How'd we do, Matt?

People are responding to this very well, and most of them seem to be enjoying our new form for entering the contest, and we'll give you the URL for that in just a moment. Still getting lots of great comments, too, but first let me tell you, it's a past winner who picked it up this time, Ilya Schwartz in Concord, Maryland, who said that the winner, and this is what most people said, happens to have been the X-15 pilot named Robert A. Rushworth, who flew 34 X-15 flights. They nearly added one of those flights, counted as a space flight. His maximum speed was Mach 6.06, 4,017 miles per hour, and a maximum altitude of 53.9 miles. Does that all jibe with what you have come to believe?

Very, very jibe-y. And yes, Rushworth flew 34 of the 199 flights, so a good chunk of them. Interesting mix of answers on this. I guess not all the sources agreed, but Ilya, we are going to be very happy to provide Bill Nye's voice going out over your answering machine.

We got a number of answers, not answers, but comments like this. This one from Chris Wilson. Because you know that Chris Campbell last week, yes, the winner who said that he was looking forward to getting Bill's voice on his answering machine so he could pick up chicks. Well, Chris said, I'm married, so I won't be picking

up any chicks with Bill's voice on my answering machine, but there's no harm in impressing a few. The nerdy ones, that is. So, Chris, enter again. We want to help you out with that. Keep your wife informed about all this. What do you have for next time? Okay, here's your question. In Earth years, how long is a Sedna year? I remember to say in Earth years this time, because of course,

we had the smart Alex last time, who would have just answered this, one Sedna year. So, in Earth years, how long is a said in a year? It's really very impressive. Go to that place you're going to tell them to go to. Yeah, here it is, planetary.org slash radio contest. What could be easier? Planetary.org slash radio contest. Fill out the form and you'll be entered to get Bill's voice on your machine.

Oh, and you have until the 11th of February at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about gold mining 49ers watching ravens fly overhead. Thank you, and good night. I really watch it for the commercials. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects

for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week, even Super Bowl week, here on What's Up. By the way, the Space Trivia Contest prize for this week is a gray hoodie with the Planetary Society logo right over your heart. Sorry, we've only got a large. Here's yet another contest. Tell us just how affordable space exploration is by putting the amount in terms everyone can understand and maybe even get a laugh out of. For example, Americans spend more on dog toys each year than NASA's budget for planetary science. Much more. Submit your comparison and source at planetary.org slash howcheap. Ten lucky winners

will get signed copies of our Bill Nye the Planetary Guy comic strip posters. 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 marvelous members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.