Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Can Laser Bees Save Earth? Exploring Asteroid Deflection With Alison Gibbings

Episode Date: March 5, 2012

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Space Bees with Lasers, 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. Someday those laser bees might just save our planet. We'll talk with one of the researchers developing them. So much more on this week's show, so we better get started by talking with Emily Lakdawalla about what's happening around the solar system this month. Emily March has come in like a lion.

I think it's time for you to give us an update on what's up. Yeah, and actually there's a lot of activity going on across the solar system. I think the main mission milestone to happen this month is that the twin Grail spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, are going to begin their science mission this month, beginning to map the gravity field of the moon. The Messenger mission is completing its primary mission at Mercury, but it's already won a one-year extension, one Earth year that is, it's four Mercury years. It'll start the mission extension, and we'll also see a large data release from that mission. So that'll be a lot of fun. The amateurs will get to play with much more Mercury data. Toward the end of the month, it's going to

be Mars's solstice, which isn't just a calendar thing. It's very important for opportunity. When winter solstice passes, the sun will begin coming back to the south and will begin to shine on the solar panels for longer and from a better angle each day. So we should see opportunities activity picking up. And the rover also very recently got a little cleaning event. So she's got more power to work with than she's had for a couple of months. And I think that the team is sounding very happy. It's going to be great to see opportunity there to actively greet Curiosity in August. Yeah, and perhaps scoop Curiosity on the chance to see CLAES first on Mars. Of course, Curiosity is coming with a much better instrument package than old Opportunity

has, but it's quite a coup for that little rover to have lasted this long and to get to a completely different kind of rock on Mars that's actually more like the ones that Curiosity wants to see. And how. The other one that we might want to talk about, and this is a great lead-in to your snapshots from space video series, are some more pretty pictures from Jupiter that nobody's ever seen until recently. Well, I wouldn't say that nobody's ever seen them, but certainly nobody has ever seen them look this nice.

Yeah. It's an example of the amateurs digging into some old data that hasn't been looked at for a really long time and just finding gorgeous images of Jupiter with swirling clouds. And my favorite one shows a small section of the northern hemisphere of Jupiter. And there's this little tiny storm with a little even tinier black dot in the center of it where you can actually see through Jupiter's clouds. Well, that little tiny black dot is 150 kilometers across. So Jupiter's a really big planet. There's a lot of activity, and there's so much to see in the Voyager data that we just

haven't appreciated before. And you can see more of what Emily is talking about in last week's snapshots from space. We're just about, as we speak, to post the new one. What do you talk about? Well, this time I talk about how we might all die from an asteroid impact, but we can prevent it. And what a great topic. And there's some terrific images in this one as well. It's fun. You'll find it right where you're listening to this radio show at planetary.org slash radio or on the Planetary Society YouTube channel. And we'll put up a blog entry about this as well. Emily, thanks so much. And I'll talk to you again next week. Look forward to it, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye is up next. He's just back from TED-ing. So Bill,

technology, entertainment, and design. How was it? That's the TED conference. It was great. It's really, it is fascinating. Saw people from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration with the flying mechanical hummingbird. Oh, yeah. I was on Scientific American. Saw talks by really people who have given a lot of social issues a lot of deep thought. With that said, Matt, the people from, largely from Silicon Valley, many, many very well often errors, if I may, believe that climate change will be resolved just by technology. The humans are causing climate change. They're all down with that.

But they're not that concerned about it because they believe innovation will save us. We will save us from ourselves. But I got to tell you, there are a few people including Dr. Jim Hansen, James Hansen, the guy who testified in front of the US Congress back in 1988. He was there. I don't see it that way. The problem is huge. You can't just crowdsource your way out of it. But it was a cool thing. And I did a talk, Matt, about the Curiosity rover and its sundial, Bill's old Mars dial project. And so we're revving up again, everybody, the Earth dial project. And I made a Long Beach Earth dial.

This is visually reminiscent of the sundials on Mars, but customized for the exact latitude and longitude of the TED conference. I hope people participate. The Internet is so much more sophisticated than it was even 10 years ago that I think we can include many, many people around the world. And all that will be on the Planetary Society website by, I guess, Monday, the 16th of April. Speaking of climate change, that's a preventable natural disaster. We had a very cool talk.

Have you guys discussed this? A very cool talk at the Planetary Society office from Allison Gibbings, one of the people working on deflecting an asteroid with light. Oh, it's very cool. Not only have we discussed it, it comes up in Emily's new snapshots from space video, but she's just about to be heard as my guest on the show. And we're going to have her entire presentation that we recorded with all of her great PowerPoint slides for anybody who wants to check that out at planetary.org. So great talk, and we're going to be talking to her in a few seconds. We'll talk to you again next week.

Thanks, Matt. I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. Bill Nye is the Chief Executive Officer of the Planetary Society. He joins us every week right here for this commentary. Right back with mirror or now laser bees. It has been a while since we talked with researcher Max Vassili about mirror bees. Those mirrors have turned into lasers, according to Alison Giddings,

Max's Ph.D. candidate student and colleague at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Alison visited the Planetary Society a couple of weeks ago. She gave us a detailed update on this innovative and fascinating proposal for changing the trajectory of big asteroids that are on a collision course with our home planet. I sat down with her shortly after her presentation. I wonder if you could just give me an update on what's happening with the project, a little synopsis of what you presented to everyone today. Because it's been a couple of years since we talked with your boss, Max. Sure,

yes. Well, we're using the technique involves using laser ablation. So using high-powered lasers to deflect an asteroid. So no more mirror bees, they're laser bees with lasers now is what I like to call them. So small satellites, small spacecraft, each mounted with two mirrors to concentrate solar radiation, which will then be used to power

a series of lasers. By using lots of small spacecraft orbiting around the asteroid in formation, we can use many laser beams to superimpose and then sublimate the surface of the asteroid. And then this sublimation process transforms the surface rock from a solid to a gas, which is then used as a low-thrust method to gently nudge the asteroid away. Almost as if you were making a rocket engine out of the asteroid itself. Yes, it's actually modeled to be identical to that of the rocket exhaust in standard methods of rocket propulsion. And one of the aspects we're doing within the study that's supported by the Planetary Society is to verify the current modelling technique based on

experimental data. And you've done some of this stuff. I mean, you had a model and you've been able to test it. You've got to tell us about PEGI. PEGI, yes. PEGI is the name of our vacuum chamber that we built at the university. And within the vacuum chamber, we ablate. So we illuminate a number of asteroid analog target materials, typically sort of sandstone, olivine, and a highly porous composite structure with the laser beam. And then we measure how much, well, the effects of the ablation so how much ejector is ablated off the surface what the composition of the ejector what is the formation

of this rocket plume is it a formation of a rocket plume is it something different that we don't know about yet and most importantly how the ablated ejector might otherwise recondense and stick onto any exposed surface, such as the side of a satellite, you know, the satellite's solar rays, any radiating services. Or the mirrors that you're using, right? Yes. When this degradation is really considered to be a current showstopper, we're losing kind of laser ablation in space and the protection of the spacecraft.

You know, that term illuminate, that's much too benign. It ought to be ZAP or something like that. True, yeah, ZAP the space, ZAP the asteroid. I don't want people to get the idea, as I did until recently, that these are, it's that word bees, that these are really tiny spacecraft. They're really not as you envision them. No, when we've done our mass budget estimations,

each spacecraft is more or less between one and three tons but that's having a very conservative sort of mass propellant budget and everything so we are being very conservative and they could probably go a lot smaller if we used a more powerful laser and a more efficient solar array as well and solar concentrator to concentrate all the solar radiation that is used to power the satellite and to power the laser itself. How big are you projecting that these lasers might be on each of these little spacecraft? Well, at the moment in our simulations,

based on current and sort of future expectations, we're using 22 kilowatts per laser per spacecraft. Which is a, that's a, not bad. That's a pretty powerful little death ray that you have there. Does that technology actually exist? It does exist at the lower levels of efficiency. There would have to be work to update the semiconducting technology that's used within the laser and also the efficiency of the power conversions.

But it's nothing that's not achievable within the short term with a little bit of research and development. What is the advantage of this non-contact approach to, you know, nudging an asteroid off course? Well, there are several advantages. Well, it provides, as you said, a contactless method of interacting with the asteroid. So you don't get any fragmentation of the asteroid that's considered to be very problematic if you have a kinematic technique such as a nuclear detonator or a kinematic impactor whacking into the side of the asteroid. Because you fly in formation about the asteroid,

you don't need to physically land or attach the asteroid, so you don't have any complex landing operations. The initial power source that's used to power the laser and the spacecraft are freely available from the sun, so you don't have a cost associated with that, although you do need solar rays and solar collectors mirrors and also the ablated material itself is the fuel for the deflection process so unlike kind of more low thrust techniques which have to carry a propellant source to perform the deflection we just use the mass of the asteroid to ablate, similar to a rocket exhaust.

So you're saving significant mass then. So I think it's considered to be a far more adaptable and flexible technique because you're using a smaller spacecraft. All you would need, depending on how far the asteroid is away in its composition, you could just add more or take less spacecraft out of the existing configuration. And it also wouldn't need to develop or design new spacecraft. And despite the other techniques, which only rely on one spacecraft, so if the spacecraft fails or you don't manage to hit the asteroid,

then you've lost the mission. Where if you have a swarm of relatively smaller spacecraft, then you have this increased flexibility by design. You lose one or two and you probably still have... Exactly. And you can always have backups as well. Yeah. How far are we from possibly being able to move out of relatively small-scale experiments in the lab to perhaps having a spacecraft that rendezvouses and begins to blast away at something. Well, that's something that we would ideally love to develop

in the medium to long term in terms of interacting with spacecraft. There have been missions, like the ZB Impact Mission comes to hand and the ESA Rosetta Mission, which have intercepted and interacted with asteroids and comets. So the technology to rendezvous um to what to approach and rendezvous exists it's just the development of the pacific ablation technology and this is one of the reasons why we're doing the experiments within the laboratory is to really verify the approach um find out what environmental and physical constraints are on the

model and then to develop into sort of a more appropriate rep board modeling, and then ultimately onto sort of a mission case. Your enthusiasm for this project comes across here, but also during your presentation, and I hope that people will take a look. With any luck, by the time they can hear this, either the podcast or the radio program, We will have your complete presentation with your terrific slides up at planetary.org or planetary.org slash radio. You get a kick out of this. Of course, yes. You couldn't do it unless you got a kick out of it. It's something that sparks your imagination, and I think it has so many other future possibilities beyond laser ablation.

You can use lasers in such an array of different ways, not only for space, but to address your applications. So it's pretty cool. It certainly is. Thank you very much for joining us today and also for the presentation here at the Planetary Society. Thank you for having me. Alison Givings is a PhD researcher,

actually a PhD candidate researcher, hopefully not too far off. Is it within reach? Yes, yeah, it should be soon, hopefully. Probably sooner than we'll see one of these spacecraft being tested in space. At any rate, she will hopefully soon be a PhD, but at the moment she is at the University of Strathclyde working with her boss, Max Vasile, on this fascinating concept of no longer mirror bees but laser bees or bees with lasers. In a minute, we'll talk with someone who attended Alison Gibbings' presentation at the Planetary Society. JPL's Dawn Yeomans is next on Planetary Radio.

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.

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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. We've heard from Don Yeomans a couple of times.

This senior research scientist heads the Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Lab. So he spends much of his time thinking about killer asteroids and how we can avoid them. He has a few reservations about slow and steady techniques

like laser bees. Well, my thinking along these lines is if we find an object that's on an Earth-threatening trajectory, you want to address it in the simplest possible and most effective technique. And to my way of thinking, that is simply to run into it with a fairly massive spacecraft and slow it down just enough so that in 10 or 20 years when it was scheduled to hit the Earth, it wouldn't. That's something that we've done, you pointed out. Well, the Deep Impact mission actually ran into Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, so we've demonstrated the technology for actually running into an object that is moving along at 10 kilometers a second,

which is about 10 times faster than a high-speed bullet. I'm also thinking of all the other techniques that have been proposed, some of which I guess are being actually looked at and experimented with on a very small basis, as this one is so far. Do you see them offering other potential value in addition to or complementing an impactor? Well, there's some folks have suggested the so-called gravity tractor where a massive spacecraft actually tows an asteroid just using the gravitational attraction between

the spacecraft and the asteroid. That is a very slow, very slow, very weak technique, but it doesn't rely on landing and the asteroid. That is a very slow, very slow, very weak technique, but it doesn't rely on landing on the asteroid. It doesn't care what the asteroid's made of or how it's rotating. So it could be used after a kinetic impact to provide a trim maneuver, for example. If the kinetic impactor didn't do the complete job, a gravity tractor might be brought in to provide a trim maneuver and complete the deflection maneuver.

So that makes me wonder if maybe this technique, the laser ablation, might also be able to fine-tune that trajectory. That's true. If we have enough time, a few decades prior to the threatening Earth impact, then a technique of this type, the laser bees or perhaps a solar reflector, could be brought in to provide a slow, steady deflection of the asteroid in addition to a kinetic impactor, which would provide the majority of the deflection. But this technique might be used to provide the so-called trim maneuvers. Just thinking about this kind of work generally

and the other attention that is now finally being paid to not just finding these objects, which you've devoted so much time to, but what we're going to do about the one with our name on it, are you pleased to see this kind of activity in the research community? Oh, very much so. It wasn't so long ago that there was very little work being done on mitigation. I mean, the emphasis has always been on find them early, find them early, and then find them early, which makes sense because if we don't find them, we can't

do anything about them. But now we're seeing attention being turned to, well, what if we do find one that's on an Earth-threatening trajectory? What do we do about it? And so there are studies underway within NASA and at universities like this one that are being carried out to investigate the pros and cons of the various techniques that have been suggested. Don, I think that's it. Thanks very much.

Look forward to talking to you again another time on the radio show. My pleasure. We're here at Planetary Society headquarters to talk to Bruce Betts about what's up in the night sky and all the other fun stuff that we get to do each week in this segment on the radio show. We'll give away a t-shirt, too, in a few minutes. We were talking about going viral. I mean, what can we do to make what's up go viral?

Well, I personally think, as I told you, we should go bacterial. Oh, all right. I think macrophages. Macrophage. Phage? Phages? Phages. I don't know. Send in your ideas for how we can go bacterial or macrophageal.

Or even just viral. We'll settle for that. Night Sky. Night Sky's awesome. Have you been checking it out? It's gone viral. What is it with you and the viral? All right. Evening Sky over in the west.

Super bright Venus and above it super bright Jupiter. And they are getting closer and closer together. They reach their closest point in the sky on March 14th at about three degrees apart. And then they will switch places. It's craziness, craziness. But wait, don't order yet. If you catch this within a few days anyway, after it first goes up, you can still catch Mercury. Just saw it last night.

Low on the horizon, as it always is. But in the evening sky, if you follow a line down from Jupiter to Venus, then roughly on that line, you will see Mercury as a less bright object. And then wait just a little while. You don't even have to wait. It's a lot easier if you wait just a little while and then look over in the east. And Mars, just past opposition, closest point to the Earth for 26 months, is super bright over there. Nearly as bright as the brightest star in the sky, but reddish as characteristic with Mars.

And if you wait a little longer, until 9 or 10 in the evening over in the east, Saturn will come up yellowish and not nearly as bright as all these other things we were talking about. Check those things out. In the meantime, let's go on to this week in space history. In the meantime, let's go on to this week in space history. 30 years ago, 30 years ago this week, that Venera 14 successfully landed on Venus before getting cooked, as all landers on Venus do, but got some images and data,

one of the handful of successful Soviet probes to the surface of Venus. We also had just a mere three years ago, the Kepler spacecraft launched and began its, shortly thereafter, began its search for extrasolar planets. Yeah, how's that one doing? Find anything yet? Yeah. It's got gazillions of candidates. Well, maybe hundreds. Thousands. Thousands of candidates and many confirmed planets and more, more, more, more to come. Very cool.

We move on to... No, no, no. No. Celebrity. I cut him off right in mid-howl. No. All right. We have a celebrity random space fact.

Okay, here it goes. Hi, I'm Don Yeomans. I'm manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and here's your random space fact. So thank you, Don. That was very kind of you. You're right. That was cooler than my howling.

Hopefully it won't damage his career. As we've brought down so many people that's right so in my class which i'll shamelessly mention which has uh been going on teaching the introduction to astronomy and the solar system class at california state university dominguez hills uh we've been talking about venus and one of the big weird things about Venus is that all of the surface appears to be geologically young, like you, Matt. My face, yeah. Yeah, around 500 million, maybe 750 million years old. But like the whole thing, the impact craters are distributed randomly across the surface, which, like the same, pretty much everywhere.

There's some areas that are a little younger, but most of the surface seems to be pretty much the same age. So some nasty, nasty, probable catastrophic resurfacing event occurred back there in time. I don't look a day over 39, and neither does Venus, thanks to a major resurfacing event in both cases. I wonder who Venus' doctor is. It's really good. Although it did have a lot of eruptions following that. All right, let's move on to the trivia contest.

Please. I asked you, what roving vehicle has roved the farthest on a body other than earth and i believe you forced me to clarify a planetary body a not a human body yeah we had somebody wonder if we if uma thurman might be an exception but no i'm afraid she's not she isn't she's exceptional but she's not an exception no No, not for this trivia contest. How did we do, Matt? Oh, boy, did you throw people on this one. We got so many answers, most of them not correct this time.

A lot of people really fixated on those lunar moon buggies. Survey says. Yeah, Apollo 17, right? Very close to the longest, but not the longest. Yes, the Apollo 17 lunar rover, roving vehicle, on three outings, if you add the three together, went a total of 35.9 kilometers. No, but that wasn't it. If you just trucked a little ways around that big ball, you came up with what Jeff Thompson did.

Jeff Thompson in Kennesaw, Georgia, Lunokhod 2. Indeed. Soviets do it again. The Soviet basically joysticked rover. It hit about 37 kilometers. Yeah, 37 kilometers, or as Ilya Schwartz pointed out, about 370 million hair's breaths. That was actually the units I was looking for. I didn't even know hair was alive enough to breathe.

But it was actually, as I said, Jeff, who is our winner this time. Jeff, we're going to send you that large planetary radio T-shirt that you said you need. Please, people, do tell us what size you need. It saves unnecessary correspondence. But congratulations. For reference, those who are sitting out there being curious, the Opportunity rover is currently at 34.4 kilometers, so also very close. Keeps bopping around and has a really good chance to break both of those, pass through

Apollo 17 and then Lunokhod 2. Going for the record. Go, go, go, go. I'm just going to do that until it breaks the record. Would you? No. That'll go viral. We'll just put you on the web. Go, go, go, go, go. When you start to nod off, we'll give you a little shock. Wow, that does sound fun.

But instead, let's go to the next trivia contest. You know what I realized I had not done in a while? No. I had not done. Where in the solar system? No, it's about time. So we're going to do that. Where in the solar system?

It's about space, too. Is the crater Hubble? You all know about the telescope, but where's the crater named Hubble? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. Got until Monday, March 12 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about meatball sandwiches. Thank you, and good night. Did you see me coveting your sandwich over the table today?

Yes, yes, I did. My roast beef was good, but... Yeah. Yeah, I almost snatched that meatball that fell out. Yeah, I told you not to. It was a scary moment for both of us, trust me. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up.

You can still get in on Bruce's class at planetary.org. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.