Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Asteroid Day! Earth Plays Defense

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

We Earthlings are making progress toward defending our planet from near-Earth objects, which is reason enough for the annual Asteroid Day celebration. Co-founder Danica Remy tells us what to expect, while Detlef Koschny, acting head of the European Space Agency’s Planetary Defence Office, reviews ESA’s expanded efforts. Planetary Society chief scientist Bruce Betts oversees the Society’s deep involvement before he shows us the current night sky. There’s more to discover at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-danica-remy-detlef-koschny-planetary-defenseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Happy Asteroid Day, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. June 30th is Asteroid Day each year. Not having been hit by a big one is reason enough to celebrate, but we'll hear that there's much more to this United Nations-sanctioned event from one of its co-founders, Danica Remy. Then we'll turn to past guest Detlef Koschny, planetary scientist, impact expert, and acting head of the European Space Agency's Expanding Planetary Defense effort.

Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts is another passionate defender of our world. He'll join us for a special What's Up segment that could also be called What's Not Coming Down, at least not yet. I've got headlines from the latest edition of The Downlink waiting in the wings, but there have been a couple of fresh developments we should mention. Our first visit to a metal asteroid won't be launching this year. The software challenges we heard about from Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton a couple of weeks ago have proved to be too complex to solve during the 2022 launch window. Our sympathy and best wishes go to Lindy and her team. The other news story is a Planetary Society scoop contributed by our correspondent, Andrew Jones.

Andrew writes about China's plans for a nuclear-powered Neptune orbiter. Make that nuclear reactor-powered orbiter. Details are at planetary.org. You can also see the mission profile for China's plans to return a sample from the moon. That story is in the June 24 issue of The Downlink that is also available for free at planetary.org. And NASA has decided that the latest stress rehearsal for Artemis 1, the launch of an uncrewed Orion capsule to the moon,

and the first ever launch of that big Space Launch System rocket, was successful enough. The agency may now be hoping for an August or September countdown. Anyone who doubts the awesome, destructive power of an asteroid or comet has probably not heard what happened in Tunguska, Siberia, 114 years ago. They're probably also unaware of the annual event that marks this airburst that obliterated more than 2,000 square kilometers, or 830 square miles, of remote forest. Estimates put the explosive power in the range of a modern ICBM-launched hydrogen bomb. Danica Remy might say it's this lack of awareness that inspired the creation of Asteroid Day. Danica and Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweikard,

Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May, and German filmmaker Grieg Richters pulled together the first one on June 30, 2015. It has been growing ever since. With another Asteroid Day upon us, I invited Danica to tell us about this global event. Danica, welcome to Planetary Radio. Happy Asteroid Day, a few days early as we speak. Happy Asteroid Day to you too, Matt. It's great to be on the show.

I am so glad to have you here. My only regret is that as this episode of Planetary Radio is published, the day before Asteroid Day, June 30, 2022, I'm sorry that maybe a lot of our listeners, I hope, will have time to tune into some of the other events, including the big sort of home event, which is why you're talking to me from Luxembourg right now. Can you give us an idea of what's in store? I mean, actually, I guess as people hear this, it's already underway. That's correct. That's correct. So Asteroid Day was founded in 2014. The Planetary Society was one of our

founding partners, along with the Association of Space Explorers, B612 Foundation, and the California Academy of Science, and a few others. And when we created it, we really modeled it after Earth Day. So no one owns Earth Day. No one owns Asteroid Day. Already happening all around the world are hundreds of events happening in different countries delivered in their language with their asteroid experts, their space mission experts, through local astronomy clubs. Some countries like Brazil and Chile have almost month-long activities that end around Asteroid Day. Chile has had a national writing competition every year for fourth graders to write something that is the exact number of years since the asteroid blew up in Chelyabinsk on June 30th, which is why June 30th is asteroid day. I'm sorry, in Tunguska

on June 30th. So these events happen all over the world, just like Earth Day. But here in Luxembourg, where our headquarters are for the Asteroid Foundation, we bring in a lot of astronauts and experts to talk to the public through our broadcast. So I'm glad you made that slip of the tongue and mentioned Chelyabinsk because that was a pretty good reminder of why Asteroid Day and all the activities that go on around planetary defense, why this is so important, right? That's correct. And in fact, when Chelyabinsk happened, that got several of us talking about what can we do to help educate the world? I mean, asteroids are really interesting, right? I mean, they're fantastic celestial objects. They've got a

great story about being able to hopefully in the future really tell us a lot about how we came to be here as human beings and the rest of our beautiful home planet. And occasionally they hit our home planet, which we'd like to have not happen. The idea of Chelly events really made it clear that we needed to figure out how to start a global movement to educate the world more. And that's what started the conversation about Let's Create Asteroid Day. And what a success it has been ever since the founding. And my feeling is it probably just continues to grow. I mean, you're seeing so much activity around the world, as you've already said.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things is like, we don't require people to always tell us when they're using our logo or our brand. And so, you know, groups register at our website and, you know, for your listeners around the world, you can go to www.asterday.org, not that you need the www anymore these days, and search on events and see if there's, you know, one registered in your local area, in your country. But what we find after Asteroid Day, like last year, we found over 600 events that didn't register, right? Because they don't have to register. So the idea has really taken flight and people are interpreting Asteroid Day in so many incredibly wonderful ways. I love this kind of structure. I mean, it's similar to, you know, another event that I look forward to every year, Yuri's Night, where there are events around the world. And, you know, they may or may not report into Yuri's Night Central and say, yeah, we're doing something over here in Serbia or whatever.

It just seems so brilliantly and purely democratic to make it work this way. Yeah, we like to call it, really, it's an open source concept. And everything that we publish, we publish toolkits, we publish lesson plans, we publish event reports. The whole idea is take our idea, please, and do it in your way, right? And the organization behind this is the Asteroid Foundation, right? Which is what keeps you busy, at least on this side of your life, not just getting ready for Asteroid Day each year, but what else is the Asteroid Foundation up to? So the Asteroid Foundation was created in 2017, two years after we had our first Asteroid

Day event. And the Luxembourg government had laid out a pretty grand strategy for space resources utilization in 50 years. And it's not very often where I see the word asteroid and funding next to it. And so I hopped on a plane to this tiny little wonderful country and started chatting with folks saying, you know, hey, we already started this worldwide educational movement, and maybe it needs a home. And so with that, the Luxembourg government, now the Luxembourg Space Agency, and a company called SES, which is the largest satellite operator in the world, came in as a partner. And so we formed the foundation in 2017. And really,

our goal is to provide asteroid education, all aspects of it, but also to support sort of the new emerging space economy that's happening both here in Europe and around the rest of the world. So we do programs where we bring astronauts and asteroid experts to schools in Romania, to schools here in Luxembourg. We do webcasts with some of our experts with schools in Chile and Africa. So we do that kind of educational activity on a year round basis. But our biggest program is what's happening in six days when we have over 10 events in schools. We're doing a big event for the Ukrainian refugee community. We do a global broadcast for four hours. We have a gala.

I mean, I don't know how many scientists have a gala, but we have an asteroid day gala here in Luxembourg, complete with an asteroid cake. Yes, every year we have a fabulous cake to celebrate all of our asteroid scientists around the world, but those that come to Luxembourg. I want to see pictures of that asteroid cake. We had a Mars cake once for Ray Bradbury's birthday.

So we've had four versions of our asteroid day cake, and you can find pictures of them on our website. I will check that out. And of course, we will put the website up on this week's Planetary Radio episode show page at planetary.org slash radio. Hey, for those who can still catch it, what can they expect to see in that big four-hour broadcast that's taking place, like I said, just less than a day after this show is published? So you can watch the show on asteroidday.org, and we'll also be streaming it through SES satellites. So the satellite tune-in instructions are on our website, and we'll also be streaming over Twitch TV.

And you can expect to see a lot of really leading scientists who are working on asteroid missions. We've got an exciting mission in Europe called HERA that's set to go off and visit the asteroid that the DART mission, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test Mission, is going to be crashing into at the end of this year, which we're all really excited about. So we have a series of astronauts who are coming to see us, Ron Guerin, Ed Liu, Michelle Togini, Jean-Francois Clairvoy, and Doran Panaria. So I think we have five astronauts or cosmonauts with us. And so those folks are fantastic because we get to send them out to schools, but they'll also be talking on the broadcast. And then we've got engineers and scientists that are helping build the guts of either our understanding or some of these mission technologies. So we go everything from education

to characterization, to scientific exploration, to the kinds of tools that are helping us understand asteroids, as well as what's happening in the new space world. I'm just going to add into that list my old friend Phil Plait, who's listed on that lineup for this big broadcast of 2022. There's somebody else, another one of those astronauts that is sort of near and dear to me. Rusty Schweikert, one of your co-founders of Asteroid Day. What does he bring to this table? I know he's been dedicated to planetary defense for a long time. Yes. So Rusty really is the ultimate networker and brings together amazing ideas. So before we talk about planetary defense, you know, we should highlight the fact that Rusty was really the co-founder of and the sort of lead architect of the Association of Space Explorers. That organization was brought

together when the US and Russia were not very good friends. And, you know, the notion that space travelers look at our home planet very differently than people who sit here on the ground. The ASC came together with Rusty's leadership 40 years ago, maybe. I'm not sure, maybe 50 years ago, something like that. Rusty got the ASC to sort of think of themselves as a community and a club and that they have some obligations to take care of our home planet and encourage other people to take care of our home planet. And so, you know, a lot of our astronauts, cosmonauts, tigernauts, et cetera, you know, really talk about the importance of taking care of our little island in our solar system, our home planet. From there, he realized that this issue of asteroid impacts, which do happen, needed to have some attention.

And so he worked with Dr. Ed Liu, also an astronaut, and several other astrophysicists to create an organization called B612 Foundation, named after the asteroid that the little prince lives on, not a vitamin. And so that organization is dedicated to protecting the planet from asteroid impacts. And I serve as the president of that organization today. But back to Rusty's work, from there, he recognized that the place that we needed to have the real conversation about planetary defense was at the United Nations level. And so through the ASE, he instigated along with others, the creation of what's called Action Team 14, that took, I think, 15 years through the UN process to develop really the first report, which they delivered in 2014 to the UN, and the UN accepted this report that led to the creation of the International Asteroid Warning Network, a UN body, and the Space Mission Planning

Group, another UN-based body, to help us, you know, work together, should we and when we find out that there's an asteroid heading towards us. And so Rusty's been quite instrumental in all of these sorts of asteroid conversations. And I have had such fun conversations with Rusty over the years, along with Ed Liu, you already mentioned, his fellow astronaut. I know they're good buddies. I mean, he's the executive director of the Asteroid Institute, which is a program of B612 Foundation. You mentioned the United Nations. Hasn't the UN basically smiled on Asteroid Day? Aren't you an officially sanctioned activity? We are. And we were very lucky because that work had been done by the ASC at the UN level. So when we created Asteroid Day, when the Planetary

Society and B612 and the Association of Space Explorers says, we're going to name a day and we're going to pick a date, which is what we did at the end of 2014. Bill Nye was there and, you know, a lot of other notables who said, we need a day to celebrate and learn about asteroids. And then Doran Panario, who was heading up this team, the first and only Romanian cosmonaut, took this recommendation from the ASC to the United Nations. And by 2016, two years after we said it needed to be, the United Nations recognized us. Absolutely outstanding work. And I don't want to give short shrift to the other terrific partners. You have a long list of partners on the website for Asteroid Day. And, you know, again, people can check that out at the website. But I'll just

say again, I am so proud that the Planetary Society is and continues to be a partner in this worldwide effort. I'm sure you know that planetary defense is a core initiative of ours. It's so exciting to see this work happening, not just among the scientists and engineers who actually get to be in the forefront of avoiding this avoidable disaster, but to making the world aware of it and seeing how we can all come together to prevent it. Do you see progress in that area? Do you see growing awareness? Yes, the answer is absolutely yes. And I often say to people that I feel like we're entering

into the decade of asteroid discovery. I mean, we have so, we've got two fantastic missions with Haibusa 2, OSIRIS-REx, we've got Lucy and Psyche, and a couple of more coming out of both China and the UAE. This is the decade we're going to learn a lot about these celestial objects. You know, that's progress, right? It's progress of knowledge. It's progress of investment. It's progress of learning new things about our closest celestial objects. We want to see more progress. And it was part of when we launched Asteroid Day, we launched with a declaration called the 100X. And the 100X was a call to action that in a decade that we should be finding 100,000 new near-Earth asteroids a year. And we knew it was a stretch goal. We knew it was a stretch goal. And the second thing that we called for in the 100X was to encourage governments, institutions,

and philanthropic organizations to fund asteroid research and planetary defense efforts. And so we've seen a huge increase in funding to the Planetary Defense Coordination Office's budget at NASA. We've seen ESA step up with the supporting of the HERO mission, standing up of the NEO CCA, I always get the acronym wrong. Yeah, which we're going to talk to Detlef Koshny about in just a few moments. I'm standing up of the, the Neo CCA. I always get the acronym wrong. Yeah. Which we're going to talk to Detlef Koshny about in just a few moments. That's great. Yeah.

Detlef is fantastic. You know, he's been such a leader along with Rusty or, you know, in this area of planetary defense. What we want to see more of and part of what we wanted the public to do, and you all at the Planetary Society do it, right? In the United States, we have a mechanism to go lobby our Congress. We can lobby for there to be money in the budgets for things that are important. And we as people can say that. The rest of the world isn't structured that way.

And so the public support, the call to action, letting your elected officials know that asteroid science and planetary defense is important is why we created Asteroid Day. So increase the rate of funding for these kinds of missions, including something like NEO Survey that NASA has proposed. And then the third thing that we had on our 100X declaration was to create an International Day of Education and Awareness called Asteroid Day. And we've done that one. And how? So we're still working on number two and number three. Of course. And I'm sure that work will continue, in part because of this worldwide awareness that you

and others like the Planetary Society are generating. Danica, thank you so much for this work. Have a great time next week. I got to ask you one other question because I noticed, and I'm going to bring yet another organization into this because you are a very busy person. I saw that you're involved with something called the Long Now Foundation, which I am just awestruck by the mission of that group and by that clock that is coming together, that 10,000 year clock that is coming together in the desert that someday I'm going to hike over to and see if I can wind it a little bit. We don't have time to go into great detail there.

the next 10,000 years, seems like a pretty good idea to make sure humanity is going to be around and not wiped out by an asteroid to be able to enjoy asteroid day in another 10,000. I do joke with my colleagues on the board that the problem set that we're working on with asteroid day and at B612 is exactly the poster child of thinking long-term, we're thinking about tomorrow, because it could be either. Yes. Yeah. For your listeners, Long Now is dedicated to fostering long-term thinking along the 10,000 year continuum, that which is beyond sort of our lifetimes and more at an ecological scale, and has been really trying to help foster a new network of people who think beyond an

election cycle, who think beyond a decade, where we're really starting to think about legacies that go beyond what we currently think about when we think about long-term thinking. Danica, once again, thank you for thinking not just about our present challenges, but those in the distant future. Have a wonderful time at that big worldwide party. We'll be with you in spirit, if not in person. Thank you for having me, Matt. That's Danica Remy. I'll be right back with Detlef Koschny,

leader of the European Space Agency's Planetary Defense Program. Will you help defend Earth? The Planetary Society is advancing the global endeavor to protect our world from an asteroid impact. It's the one large-scale natural disaster we can prevent. But we're not ready yet. Please, become a Planetary Defender and power our crucial work. You can double your support for Planetary Defense when you make a gift today. When you do, a generous member of the Society will match your gift up to a total of $15,000.

It's a great opportunity to make a difference. Visit planetary.org slash defend earth. Thanks. We last heard from Detlef Koschny in 2015. He was among the all-stars at that year's Planetary Defense Conference in Frascati, Italy. And he joined us on stage for Planetary Radio Live from the headquarters of the Italian Space Agency. We've got a link to that special show on this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio,

along with his 2019 article for the Planetary Society. It's about the European Space Agency's planetary defense program. A lot has happened in the years since. Detlef, who is now acting head of ESA's efforts, is a planetary scientist who has been part of missions including Rosetta, Venus Express, BepiColombo, Cassini-Huygens, India's Chandrayaan-1, and even Mars Pathfinder, the mission that is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Detlef teaches

a course about near-Earth objects at the Technical University Munich. Detlef, welcome back to Planetary Radio. I bring you greetings from your old Caltech classmate, Bruce Betts. He says hi. Yeah, Matt, great talking to you, even though this time it's not in person. And please give my best regards back to Bruce. I will be happy to, of course. So let's get right into it. How would you describe humanity's progress toward being able to defend itself from these space rocks, asteroids, comets, near-Earth objects that want to kill us?

That's actually the good news here. I think the progress is really good. We are making a lot of progress. When I started in this whole business, that was, let me think, it was like 15 years ago. I remember a statement by somebody who I will not name now, but a famous scientist in our field who I respect highly. And he was saying, we're basically unprepared. I think that changed significantly over the last 15 years. We're still not quite there. There's still a bit of way to go, but we have observational capabilities, which are at least in the basic setup, fulfilling our needs. We know whom to talk to if something happens. Who do we actually warn and things like that. So it's not 100% there.

I would say we're 70% there, but it's much better than 15 years ago. I'll say, yeah. And I hear this from so many people. And we'll get into some of those details. You wrote a great article for our website, the Planetary Society website, back in 2019, that described, at that point, ESO, the European Space Agency's planetary defense work. We'll link to that from this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio, along with some other great resources. But I found a more recent article that says ESA stepped up its game last October, including things like a new near-Earth object coordination center in that great little town of Frascati, Italy.

Tell us what this means. Take us through this. We already had a large presence of colleagues at our Italian location, which we call ESRIN, which stands for something. I forgot it's an acronym, but it's one of our ESA instantiations in Europe. And we've been there for a while now, and we already had something we called Nearest Object Coordination Center, but it sort of was more the people that were there. Now we actually get a fantastic building with it. We have a small building. It hosts 15 people max, but it's super modern. It has this moss from Iceland on the wall, which is making the sounds quality fantastic. The climate in the building is great. So we really have a center

there with big screens on the wall. And that's where most of our people are located now that deal with this topic of observing asteroids, computing their orbits, and warning the emergency response agencies. It was clear from this article that ESA is doing much, much more than creating this coordination center. Can you take us through some of these activities? I think one of the important steps that we did last year was that we really became independent in terms of orbit computation. You know that the, I would say, the cradle of orbit computation tools for asteroids, to me, is in PISA in Italy. At the university there, Professor Milani, a long time ago, developed this concept that we need to compute orbits into the future

and how complicated that is, he found out, and he solved many of these issues. Until last year, still, we were relying in a lot of our ESA orbit computations on the group in PISA. We are working closely with them, but now we have our own orbit computation system. It's called AstOD, and we will give it a nice fancy name probably on asteroid day. It will be announced then. That is now really on par with, say, the JPL Sentry Computation System, which does essentially the same thing. And always we have been coordinating and double checking, talking to each other, comparing

results. But now we can say we're really truly independent. And it's good to hear. You don't want, I would think, just one major group determining these orbits because it is notoriously difficult, right? It takes an enormous amount of computing and there are so many factors to consider. Nice to have you guys being able to compare results and data. It's always been like that in a sense between the group in PISA and JPL. That was always there. Now, we try to bring this long-term stability of rather than having a university or a small company doing this, we now have another agency that's really behind that. And I think that's really the big step forward. Well, kudos to the folks at the University of Pisa for being the real pioneers in developing this work. I'm also thinking of, I mean, ESA has so many other activities underway.

The search for, the characterization of, and the tracking of these objects. I'm also thinking of the other research that's underway. I mean, just to determine what happens when one of these objects strikes our planet. Isn't that something that you've done a lot of work with in your own research? Indeed. I mean, me personally, I started out with doing impact experiments. That's when I was at Caltech in 1988 with Tom Ahrens. I always kept doing this. I'll go back even doing more already next month back to my old university in Munich. So that is something where also we now have much more involvement of the agency of the European Union

and also national funding to support this research. Part of that is triggered definitely by the American DART mission, which will impact asteroid Didymorphos in September this year. And ESA is building a follow-up mission called HERA, which will go to the same asteroid and then look in detail what really happened there. And that motivated a lot of funding agencies in Europe to put money into this question, what happens if you have an impact? Makes a big difference, right? I mean, depending on the angle of attack, but also what that asteroid is made of. I mean, I think of those big metal asteroids like the one the Psyche mission will hopefully be leaving for, can probably do a lot more damage, right, than

one of these fluffy ones? Exactly, this is correct. The question really is, how do objects behave when they enter the Earth's atmosphere? To me, the big puzzle is still, I was told a long time ago, okay, you know, any rocky object, say, larger than, sorry, smaller than

40, 50 meters, it will completely fragment in the atmosphere. That's why we don't see an impact crater from the Tunguska event, for example, or from Chelyabinsk. But then there was this strange event in Peru in 2007, I think it was, where an object came down all the way to the ground, made a 15-meter-sized crater. It was 1.5 meters in size, and it was made of rock. So there are still things which we do not understand.

There are still many things that we need to look into more. Wow. Always room to develop models further, I suppose. I'm so glad that you brought up HERA, and I hope that you can say a little bit more about that mission because it's just fascinating that it's going to go out and take a look at this big rock, Dimorphos, that DART will have slammed into, what, a couple of years before, or more like four years before, I suppose. What's the current progress? And is it safely headed toward launch in 2024? Yes, it is. Everything is on its track with the usual hiccups that sometimes there are delays.

But of course, we're used to that. It's planned in. I saw models, engineering models already of some of the instrumentation. We have some in the corridor downstairs where the HERA office is located. And I often go there just to see what kind of new hardware they have. Tests are ongoing also in our facility on instrument level for the HERA mission. So that is proceeding nicely. A little bit more about DART, because it is so intriguing to think of this first test of actually being able to deflect an asteroid. It is a NASA mission, of course,

but it sounds like ESA is taking great interest. Well, we're, of course, following this interest, what's happening there, because, you know, if it fails, then, of course, the question comes up, why the hell do we go there? So it's a very critical thing. Now, I'm convinced it will not fail, of course. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have started with the HERA mission. But no, seriously, there are also a lot of European scientists already involved in the DART mission. So ESA per se is not directly participating in the mission. But of course, on the science level, there is a lot of collaboration. Also, on the technical level, there is exchange. It depends a bit, like, for example, what size you would expect the crater to be. That would drive the resolution of your imaging system. So it's

important that we talk to each other, and I can happily report that this is indeed the case. We do talk to each other a lot. Let me ask you about something else that we hope at the Planetary Society and a lot of other folks will happen in space, and that is this long-proposed, long-in-development NEO Surveyor Infrared Telescope that will hopefully be finding many more of these dark objects that cross the path of our planet. Does ESA have a position on that mission, which has struggled a bit to find

the funding it needs to get up there and start doing its work? We think it's really the next logical step. Some people even say it should have been the first logical step before even thinking about a deflection mission. You know, we want to find these objects before they find us. Some of our old JPL colleagues was coining that phrase. Now, it looks like the Neo Surveyor mission will happen, and that's good news. We talked about that a lot with our NASA colleagues a couple of years ago when we were doing an internal study on whether we could actually contribute to that mission. It turned out that was for technical reasons, actually not something which we followed further. detailed study, including industrial studies on a similar space-based infrared mission, which we will propose to our delegates, those people that make the money available for ESA.

And there's a high interest there in the ESA member countries to pursue that project. And that could be the next big mission after HERA that we also in Europe have an infrared mission. Now, would that be a duplication or redundancy? No, because we go in a similar direction as we do with ground-based telescopes. The big surveys are currently all NASA-funded. We are building something which we call the FlyEye telescope, which is focusing on the close objects, on those that might hit in three weeks or in six weeks. We're not aiming at surveying the complete solar system,

but we're focusing on the objects which are close, but there we want to see all of them, even if they are smaller than 140 meters. We came up with a similar scenario for our European infrared mission, which is currently called NEO- MIR, which just stands for Neo Mission in the Infrared. The idea there is similar, that NEO Surveyor would scan the whole solar system. It's like the deep survey.

And our mission focuses on the vicinity close to Earth, on the space close to Earth, to discover those objects that come from the direction of the sun. They're difficult to see from the ground, and they will hit or could hit the Earth in the next few weeks. We have seen recently, right, how difficult it is to catch these objects. I mean, there have been some successes recently where they've been discovered in some cases, what, just days or hours before they impact? Yeah, the last one was just a few weeks ago, or now it's already a couple of months, I think. It was the fifth event ever where an asteroid was discovered in space, predicted to impact the Earth,

or actually, let's call it enter the Earth's atmosphere, because it didn't hit the ground, it was too small for that. And that was just a few hours before that happened. Interestingly enough, it was not discovered by one of the big surveys, but by a group of amateur astronomers in Hungary. And then we did follow up observations, you know, all over the world that happened, and then we could quickly determine the impact location. And there is even ground based video evidence for the light flash that happened when this asteroid generated a fireball. It's not a direct image of the fireball, but you can see the reflected light of the fireball, you know, in some webcam images of the surface that happened north of Iceland. Interesting

event. We think this will happen more and more often. So ESA is actually planning a workshop to prepare how do we inform each other. There will be a workshop in December on that topic, but that's a different story. I think this also indicates the continuing importance, even as we talk about observations from space, of ground-based telescopes by not just amateurs, but by professional astronomers at perhaps some of the larger observatories that we have down here on the surface. Do you also see it that way, that this is going to be an important partnership between space-based and ground-based telescopes? Definitely, yes. Because, I mean, space-based, you don't have many telescopes. Now, something like NEO Surveyor, or let's make that two, if we get the funding for our European mission, I mean, that's even in an earlier stage than NEO Surveyor, then we might have to, but they have a limited field of view. They can only look at one direction at a time.

If I now find something which is in some other direction, we will not change the survey strategy of this mission and then point somewhere else because we're constantly pointing randomly in space. That's where the ground-based telescopes come in. That's why we need them. If it's possible to see the object from ground, they would be much easier redirected in pointing. So yeah, there is a lot of synergy that will happen there. I want to go back to one of the points you made toward the beginning of this conversation.

So let's say we have this network of space-based and ground-based resources, telescopes, and they find a threat. It sounds like there has been pretty good progress about, okay, now what do we do? And I'm thinking of that group started, I guess, put together by the UN, the International Asteroid Warning Network. Tell us about that. Correct. There are two groups that we established, if I remember correctly, 2013 or 14, something like that. After six years of discussion, the International Asteroid Warning Network is a network, as the name says, of basically everybody who is involved in observing asteroids, predicting their effects if they enter the Earth's atmosphere,

orbit computers. They also have the task to inform, say, affected countries, for example. There's a second group which works in parallel, which is called Space Mission Planning Advisory Group. The acronym is SMPAG. We pronounce that same page. That's just nicer to pronounce. And that's now a group. It's not a network where only invited participants are discussing. And they come from space agencies.

So that's an advisory group where the space agency representatives discuss how would we deflect an asteroid? And the good thing is both these groups are working together with the secretariat, which is the office of outer space affairs, which is located in the United nations. So if we really had say a warning where we would say, okay, something happens over a country ABC and we don't have any direct relations to that country,

we can simply inform the Office of Outer Space Affairs and they have official political contact with all the member countries and they would then inform. So that's the mechanism that we have set up. This is where I said we're not yet 100% there. We still have to exercise that. Right now it's defined, but we are currently working on exercising this whole thing. Let's take an example case and really play it through and inform somebody always saying, okay, this is just a game right now. I nevertheless find it extremely comforting that these international structures are being put in

place, that there actually are plans to deal with this, not if it happens, but when it happens. I mean, it could be tomorrow, it could be in a thousand years. But we know it's going to happen. There was a great fictional depiction of what could happen, sort of very much a worst case situation not long ago. Did you see the movie Don't Look Up? I saw it three times. And it's not just me. Actually, my wife asked to see it several times. She really liked that very much. When I say like, I have to say that doesn't mean

it's just a funny movie. I think, unfortunately, there are many points in there which made me start thinking, oh, is it really like that? And unfortunately, most of the time my answer was, yeah, it's really like that. Definitely a movie to watch. And I will be giving a short presentation about asteroids and everything in Berlin next weekend. And I was asked to refer to that movie. And my reference is, yes, planetary defense offices exist. And this is the logo of the European version. I love that shirt. I love that shirt. For the radio audience, it's an ESA shirt with a terrific logo, planetary defense logo, showing our beautiful pale blue dot all of this activity underway at the European Space Agency.

I have just one other question for you. Did your own fascination with the sky start with stolen, pardon me, borrowed binoculars? We told you that. You can find many, many interesting things online. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I was 12, and I read in the newspaper – well, actually, I didn't read. I saw a picture, a circle with dots in it.

And it turned out there is – in the local newspaper we had, there is a monthly star chart. And then somebody writes, okay, you can see in the constellation Orion or whatever, Andromeda, you can see the Andromeda galaxy. And it's visible with a pair of binoculars. And I thought, gee, that's cool. I wish I had a pair of binoculars. Next weekend, my father opens the cupboard in the living room. And what do I see in there? A pair of binoculars.

And I said, can I borrow those? And he said, nope. Okay, guess what happened the next evening when it was clear? I sneaked into the living room, took these binoculars, went outside. I have to admit it took me two weeks to find the Andromeda Galaxy, but I was hooked. I'm not surprised. What a great story.

From one space geek to our audience full of space geeks sneaking into the home cupboard not to steal alcohol, but to grab a pair of binoculars to go on a personal voyage of discovery. Detlef, I am very glad that you and others like you at ESA are still on that voyage of discovery that, you know, who knows, may someday just save the world. We will never stop with our voyage here. Thank you so much, Steph Leff. Great to talk to you again. Thank you for having me, Matt. It is time for What's Up with the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts. You know, that also means that he runs all of our programmatic type planetary defense stuff.

So I imagine you're pretty happy to hear that that has been the topic already today. I am. I'm a passionate believer in asteroid defense, as is the Planetary Society. It's one of those things that doesn't happen very often, but it will happen. And here's the key point. We can actually do something about it. Can't stop a hurricane, but we can stop an earthquake if we work at it. I should tell you, because you haven't heard the conversation yet.

Detlef Koshny, I told him that you sent your greetings as a former Caltech classmate. And he was very nice. He smiled and said, Bruce who? No, actually, he was very nice. He smiled and said, Bruce who? No, actually, he was very nice. He said, give you his regards. Well, to be clear, he was a postdoc. I was a graduate student. He's looked down on me ever since.

Then again, most people do, and it has nothing to do with that. So never mind. No, no, I enjoyed Detlef. He's a good guy. Oh, and I also wanted to say how happy I am with our involvement with Asteroid Day. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, yeah. It was very nice of Danica to bring that up as well.

I appreciate hearing what's going on in the night sky too. Not much of a segue, but the best I can do, it's hot here. Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's hot. You look like you're on Venus. Speaking of Venus, there, see, that's a segue. That's a segue. Speaking of Venus, Venus is low in the east in the pre-dawn. All those planets, all five planets you can see with just your eyes, are still there,

although they're spreading out across the sky, and Mercury will be setting soon. there, although they're spreading out across the sky and Mercury will be setting soon. But in the next few days, you can pick up Mercury if you've got a clear view to the eastern horizon before dawn and Mercury is below Venus. And they're all in nice little order, though, still going across the sky, like the order from the Sun with going Mercury to Venus, go up higher. Well, you can look down and look at your feet and see the Earth. But then you look up and you see reddish Mars, which, by the way, will be brightening significantly over the coming months. So keep an eye on it. And then we've got those other planets, you know, bright Jupiter, yellowish Saturn, but they're really starting to spread out. In fact, we've got Saturn rising in the late evening now and Jupiter rising in the

middle of the night, and they'll just keep rising earlier and earlier. On one other point, July 4th, the Earth is at Aphelion, our farthest point in our orbit from the Sun in our somewhat elliptical orbit. Does that shift a bit from year to year? Does Aphelion come on different days? a bit from year to year? Does aphelion come on different days? Not much. I mean, leap day affects it more than anything. It does over long periods of time as the orbit precesses, rotates, whatever. Anyway, it does. But basically, it's a similar date every time. And it's that proof that, yes, indeed, for the northern hemisphere and Matt sitting there sweltering in the heat, the summer is not dominated by how close we are to the sun, but the angle of our axial tilt compared to where the sun is. But we all knew that. Right, Matt?

Yeah. All right. On this week in space history, you may have noticed that in 1908 was the Tunguska impact. June 30th had something to do with something. Asteroid day. That's it. More recently, 2005, deep impact slammed into a comet. That was cool. We did Comet Bash.

We did a program, and it was live, and it threw material out, and it was live and it threw material out and it was good stuff. The 1997, 25th anniversary of the Pathfinder landing on Mars, Pathfinder and the first rover on Mars, Sojourner. And we celebrate that in the June solstice issue of the Planetary Report. We talked about that, was it last week or a couple of weeks ago? Last week, I guess, that you'll find at planetary.org, looking back over that 25 years of extraordinary Mars exploration. TPR. Yes, the restart of Mars exploration.

On to... Random Space Fact. That would have been my line, I guess, because it really is hot here. We can see video of each other. Matt just keeps, he's like doing a Louis Armstrong with the handkerchief or something and blotting his head out. I see fields of green. I've got a good random space fact. I'm really proud of this one.

This is something I dug up. I was looking at Apophis, the large asteroid that will do a close flyby but not hit Earth in 2029. And it turns out the longest side of Apophis is about the same length as the height of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park in California. And so if you turn it on its long end next to Half Dome, it would roughly be the same height as Half Dome is above the valley floor. If you aren't familiar with Yosemite and Half Dome, take a look online. It's impressive. Around 440, 450 meters.

I am very familiar with Yosemite and Yosemite Valley where Half Dome sits. And that really brings home how big that space rock is. Because Half Dome is no shrinking violet. It's big. It's big. Take my word for it. It's really big. Have you free climbed to the free solo up to the top?

No, not without a jet pack. But I have hiked up to the top of Half Dome. Nice job. That was strenuous enough for me. I've seen it from the valley floor. Very impressive. It's much more impressive than if you hike up. That's what I heard. We move on to the trivia contest quickly. And I asked you, who is the first woman to fly in space twice? I'm going to give you the answer from Jean Lewin first. Jean Lewin in Washington. Not only did she fly there,

she took a stroll about the heavens, a three-plus-hour EVA, a female first from Salyut 7. She's held many records, a hero of the USSR, Svetlana Savitskaya, first woman twice to touch the stars. Indeed. Indeed, that is correct. Svetlana Savitskaya. She was amazingly accomplished. Do you have some of the stuff about her?

I mean, I got it from some of the listeners, of course. Well, I rely on our listeners for all of that. Share with us. Norman Krasun, I rely on our listeners for all of that. Share with us. Norman Krasun, I don't know his source. Norman in the UK said, without the knowledge of her parents, Savitskaya began parachuting at the age of 16. Her father realized her unknown extracurricular activity upon discovery of a parachute knife in his daughter's school bag. Over the next year, she led record stratosphere jumps, 13,800 meters, 14,250 meters. Over the course of her flying experience, Savitskaya achieved three world record jumps from the stratosphere, 15 world record jumps from jet planes. In her flight experience, she became the first woman to reach 2,683 kilometers per hour in a MiG-25. An experienced and highly educated female in the Soviet space program,

she was reportedly an extremely serious, unbending, steely-eyed woman. It sounds like it. And I believe she's still around. Yes, she is. And she was also, I should note, the second woman in space after a 20-year gap from the first woman, Tereshkova, and shortly before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Mark Little added, Mark, in Northern Ireland, that she held 14 world records in aviation at that time, of course. Pretty impressive. That's amazing. How many do you hold now, Matt? Oh, I think she's got me beat. Last I checked, I think it was 12.

But most of those have to do with things you can do in an airline cabin. Yeah. And there's that thing with Jell-O. But I never really understood that one. Anyway, go on. Here's our winner. He's a first-time winner, and it was his first attempt, his first entry into the contest.

You're making other people weep out there. I know. They're tearing their hair out, I'm sure. Todd Barn in Arizona. Todd said, yeah, Svetlana Savitskaya, 82 and 84. He says, first time I'm actually entering the contest, even though I'm a member of the society and have been listening for years. I just really want a copy of this book. Well, Todd, you're going to get this book from Psyche Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman.

Got a lot of nice compliments on that conversation that I had with Lindy a couple of weeks ago. It really, it was very special. And we are sorry to, we were sorry to learn, as we mentioned at the top of the show, that it looks like Psyche is not going to be launched this year. They're not going to be able to work out those software problems yet. But space is hard, right, Bruce? Oh, it sure is. Believe me. I know. Ready for the next one? Yeah. What are the names of the two cameras on Lycia Cube, the Italian CubeSat companion to the DART mission? What are

the cameras named? I enjoyed the answer. So that's why I'm sharing. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 6th. That'd be Wednesday, July 6th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And here's the prize once again. Another really good book. Why? It's by Dr. Bruce Betts.

It's solar system reference for teens. Oh, yeah. We had another signed copy. I neglected to mention that last week. This will be a signed copy. He's already signed several copies. A fascinating guide to our planets, moons, space programs, and more. And who's it published by?

I don't have it open to that page. Rockridge Press. You're right. It is published by Rockridge Press. Give that man an asteroid. Yay! Yeah, we're done. It is published by Rockridge Press. Give that man an asteroid. Yay! Yeah, we're done. All right, everybody. Go out there, look

up the night sky, and think how we can help cool Matt off for the rest of the summer. Thank you, and good night. Everybody, look for my Kickstarter to buy Matt a window air conditioner. Just kidding. Just kidding. I can't trust you people. Somebody out there might

start one. That was Bruce Betts, who I'm looking at in his air-conditioned home up there in Pasadena, near the headquarters of the Planetary Society. He is the chief scientist of the society who 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 its members who are heroes of planetary defense. Make an impact with them at planetary.org's last join. Mark Hilverda and Ray Paletta are our associate producers. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra. Osh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra.