Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Can Mirror Bees Save Our Planet?

Episode Date: February 22, 2010

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Look out! The mirror bees are coming, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It's only a matter of time. There's a rock out there with our name on it. So what do we do when we see it headed our way? Max Fazile has a new answer to that question, and he calls it mirror bees. We'll find out what he means in a few minutes. From mirror bees to WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. Never heard of them?

Well, Bill Nye is here to tell you that they might make up most of our universe. And it's not that Bruce Betts is a WIMP, he's just under the weather, but that won't stop him from joining me for this week's edition of What's Up. What's no longer up is Endeavor. The shuttle made a night landing at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday, February 21. It had spent two weeks in space, most of that docked with the International Space Station, where it delivered the Tranquility Module. Joined by middle school kids in an engineering competition,

President Barack Obama made a White House call to the commanders of Endeavour and the ISS. I just want to repeat, and I think I speak for all the young people here, everybody back home, how proud we are of you, how excited we are about the work that's being done on the space station, and how committed we are to continuing human space exploration in the future. President Obama talking with the crews of Space Shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station as the buzz surrounding the president's proposed NASA budget continues. Since we're going to be talking about deep impacts anyway, here's a story we missed last

week. Amateur astronomers get mentioned on our show pretty regularly, but amateur geologists? get mentioned on our show pretty regularly, but amateur geologists? Max Rocha of Buenos Aires is one. He loves searching images of Earth's surface for evidence of meteor impacts. The Planetary Society provided some encouragement a few years ago in the form of a grant. It has paid off. In December, a team of professional geologists announced it has confirmed Max's discovery of the largest crater ever found in South America. It's along the Vichada River in eastern Colombia. You can read the full story at planetary.org. Time to check in with Emily Lakdawalla. We call up the Planetary Society blogger and science and technology coordinator

to hear about her favorite online entries from the last few days. Emily, we're doing a lot out at Saturn this week because you've got lots to talk about, lots to find in recent entries on the blog, beginning with what is a pretty amazing page that you've set up that traces, you could say, the entire history and future of Cassini at Saturn. That's right. Cassini's course around the Saturn system is ordained many years in advance because they maneuver around the Saturn system largely by using gravity-assist flybys of the only large enough moon to do gravity-assist flybys, which is Titan.

NASA has announced that Cassini is going to have its mission extended a further seven years. And so recently I added to my page describing Cassini's tour seven more years' worth of Cassini flybys. And this page lists all the cogent information about the tour, including things like when Cassini is at its closest approach to Saturn, when it's farthest away, when it crosses the ring plane, when it has close flybys of any of the icy moons and Titan and other interesting places. And it's really quite an interesting read to see the rhythm of all of these orbits that it's seeking around Saturn. So check it out, you fans of the big ring planet. We'll put the link up, of course, at planetary.org slash radio. On now to talk about and new images of a couple of the moons of that ringed planet, beginning just back on the 19th of February with a composite you created of Iapetus. That's right. Cassini is, at the moment that we speak, near its farthest distance from Saturn.

And when it's at its farthest distance from Saturn is Cassini's best opportunity typically to view Iapetus, which is usually much farther away yet than Cassini. And so right now it seems like once a day it's capturing a whole lot of different color views of Iapetus, which is usually much farther away yet than Cassini. And so right now, it seems like once a day, it's capturing a whole lot of different color views of Iapetus, which is the funny two-faced moon. It's got one bright hemisphere and one dark hemisphere. So it's always a really lovely view from Cassini's cameras. With a snowman, but we'll tell people to read the entry to learn more about that. Then a moon that Cassini gets much, much closer to, this time less than 10,000 kilometers away. That's right. Cassini had its one and only relatively close flyby of Mimas last week. Mimas is a rather battered-looking moon.

It's got this absolutely enormous crater called Herschel. And in that, it's not particularly unusual. Lots of places in the solar system have single large craters. But Herschel is unusual because it's recent. It seems to overprint a lot of this other battered terrain, and up close it's got some funky features like a strange dark line splashed around the inner wall, so it's pretty cool to see up close. And these images that you gathered also came from another amateur, another sign of more and more people becoming interested in taking these raw images and turning them into things of beauty.

That's right. New people keep on showing up on unmannedspaceflight.com with new ability to process these raw images that are coming back from spacecraft every day. Thanks again, Emily. We'll talk to you next week, and I think you'll be in Texas getting ready for the LPSC, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Yeah, it's going to be an exciting year for the LPSC.

I can't wait to be there. Emily Laktawal is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, also the keeper of the Planetary Society blog, joins us every week here. And here's Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, Vice President of Planetary Society. And this week, it's the weekly interacting massive particles, the WIMPs, the WIMPs. Now, to find WIMPs, you have to go where it's cold and dark in a mine. And when I say cold, these people have set up these detectors made of microscopic aluminum fins and tungsten and germanium, and they're just tiny, and they keep them at about 10 millikelvin.

That's ten thousandths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. That, my friends, by human standards, is some kind of cold. And the bottom of a mine in Minnesota or France standards, is some kind of cold. And the bottom of a mine in Minnesota or France, that's some kind of dark. And what they do, they let these WIMPs, which we believe to be in the universe, coursing through the entire space of space. They get them to be detected by these crazy semiconducting crystals. And the idea is, when you look at the universe with telescopes and spacecraft,

somehow there's not enough stuff out there to be accounting for all the gravity that seems to be affecting all the distant stars and galaxies. So everybody thinks there's this stuff called dark matter. And one of the key features of dark matter are WIMPs, And one of the key features of dark matter are WIMPs, these unbelievably tiny yet astonishingly massive weakly interacting particles. And so they think they got a 75% chance of having found one, maybe, in a way. My friends, if we discover WIMPs, if we prove they exist, this will tell us all kinds of amazing things about our cosmology, our understanding of the universe. This is another thing where space exploration

meets particle physics, meets microscopic things, meets astonishing engineering achievements, all in the background while you and I are paying taxes and going to work. People are out there maybe changing the world. It's a fantastic thing to be a part of. Well, thanks for listening. I've got to fly. Bill and I are the Planetary Guy. It has been a long, long time since our pretty little planet has had to deal with the kind of meteor impact that threatens most of the species that live here.

But you never know what the future holds. Until it hits. It's a meteor shower. This new one you're tracking, how big? It's what we call a global killer. Nothing would survive, not even bacteria. The United States government just asked us to save the world. Anybody want to say no?

You think we'll get hazard pay out of this? Of course, Bruce Willis and his roustabout crew in Armageddon used a nuclear explosion to break up, not divert their asteroid. But that may not be much better than letting the rock hit us intact. Better to push it off course, if you have the time and the technology. Dr. Massilimiano Vasile and his project staff at Scotland's University of Glasgow think they may have found a good way to do just that. A flotilla of relatively small spacecraft would meet up with the

killer rock, unfold mirrors that would make them look like solar sails, and focus sunlight on the asteroid's surface. The resulting stream of vaporized material would act just like a rocket engine, pushing the object off its deadly course. You can read more about mirror bees at planetary.org. its deadly course. You can read more about mirror bees at planetary.org. Dr. Vazile, who goes by Max, joined me via Skype for a recent conversation about his research, which the Planetary Society hopes to support. Max, thank you very much, first of all, for joining us on Planetary Radio to talk about what I know the Planetary Society is calling mirror bees. Is that what you call the project? Yeah, exactly how we call the project. That's the name we gave to our idea for deflecting asteroids. And it's very catchy, but it's also pretty descriptive,

since you're talking about a lot of rather small spacecraft carrying mirrors. I mean, how big would these spacecraft be, carrying mirrors? I mean, how big would these spacecraft be? And how many would you be thinking of launching to try to deflect a near-Earth object that's headed our way? Well, we designed different options depending on the size of the asteroid and on the warning time, which is basically the time at which you know that there will be an impact, you can have 20 up to 100 spacecraft. In some cases, even just three, four spacecraft are enough. And even the size of the spacecraft can change depending on the size of the asteroid. So for a medium to small size asteroid, let's say 100 meter in diameter, 200 meter in diameter, we have two options. One with very small spacecraft with mirrors five meter in diameter, up to 10 meters in diameter.

5 meters in diameter, up to 10 meters in diameter. 5 are enough to deflect the asteroid. Another option instead uses larger mirrors up to 60 meters in diameter. And again, you need 3 to 4 spacecraft. And if you go for a bigger asteroid, well, then the number of bees increase significantly. You can go over 100 spacecraft if the asteroid is a kilometer-sized body. Talk about the principle at work here. How is it that this array of mirrors can actually change the trajectory of

a rock of this size? Well, first of all, let me say that the original idea about using mirrors to deflect asteroids comes from Professor Marosch, who in 1993 proposed at first this concept. He proposed basically the idea of using focused sunlight to sublimate the surface of asteroids. So if you sublimate the surface of the asteroid, basically you produce a jet of gas and debris, and that works like a rocket engine.

So it's pushing the asteroid. The initial concept required a very huge mirror, a single very huge mirror that was focused in the light of the sun. And some following studies show that there were some problems in designing such a huge structure and putting that structure in space. that structure in space. And so we came up with this idea of using smaller mirrors, more agile and easy to control, and implicitly redundant. Even problems like the contamination of the mirrors or possible failures were mitigated because we had many, many spacecraft instead of one.

And each of the spacecraft could be easily launched and deployed and, of course, controlled in the proximity of the asteroid. And we developed two different concepts. One is similar to the original idea. So it's actually projecting directly the light of the sun onto the surface of the asteroid. The other concept instead is using the light of the Sun to pump a laser. The laser is just a way to generate a very well collimated beam of light. And the second concept is very interesting because with a very well collimated beam, with a very well-collimated beam, the spacecraft can fly pretty far from the asteroid and avoid the plume of gas and debris coming from the asteroid.

My friend Bruce Betts is a skeptical fellow, as well he should be. What most impressed me about his reaction to this is that when he looked at the work that you have done so far, he said, you know, this could actually work. And I guess it's been determined that this may be next to nuclear bombs, perhaps the most effective way that we've come up with so far to push these rocks out of the way. And I guess nukes have their own challenges. Oh, yeah.

out of the way. And I guess nukes have their own challenges. Oh, yeah. There are, of course, a number of problems related to the use of nuclear bombs, starting from the fact that you need to launch nuclear devices into space. We didn't, of course, look into the political or other issues not related to the design of the spacecraft, but we look at what exploding a bomb could induce in the structure of the asteroid. And if the explosion fragments the asteroid, of course, you might have a damage on the surface of the Earth, which is not negligible,

even if you have an impact with small fragments of the Earth, which is not negligible, even if you have an impact with small fragments of the asteroid. And of course, it's difficult to control the fragmentation of the asteroid with a nuclear explosion. On top of that, we thought that basically a single nuclear device was one shot to deflect the asteroid, and then it was probably shot to deflect the asteroid and then was probably difficult to control exactly the deflection. The Miro-Bs are a more flexible way of deflecting the asteroid

and you can control basically the deflection. You can control what you're doing. It's a more gentle way of, if you want, move the asteroid out of the interception course. From what we have seen, it doesn't have any drawback in terms of fragmentation. Of course, we just built a mathematical model. So there are a number of things that we still have to assess. And there's a lot of experimental work that we are planning to start this year to verify that all the assumptions that we made were correct.

More from Max Vazile about his mirror bees in a minute. This is 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. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS.

Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Dr. Max Fazile of the University of Glasgow leads a team that is investigating an approach that might someday save our planet, or at least the living things on it, from the kind of cataclysmic meteor impact that caught the dinosaurs by surprise. Mirror bees are spacecraft that would

use sunlight to steer an asteroid to a safer course. You could do the same thing with nuclear explosions, but not without other risks and challenges. Max believes we can make mirror bees work. From a technological point of view, we saw that we can, in fact, build the spacecraft. And that was the first important proof that the concept could work, because nuclear explosions are something very simple to realize. So the technology readiness of a deflection system based on nuclear bombs is pretty high.

So it's something that you can put in space in a few years, possibly. But an innovative idea like the sublimation of an asteroid is something more complicated from a technological point of view. What we have done was trying to increase the technology readiness and propose an idea that could be realized in the next five to ten years. What are the questions that you hope to resolve beyond the mathematical model that you've built with actual laboratory experiments? that you've built with actual laboratory experiments? Well, the primary concern at the moment is how the plume of gases will develop around the asteroid and, of course, how this will impact the lifetime of the spacecraft because the laser or whatever the light projected on the surface of the asteroid will interact with the gas and the debris,

and the debris and the gas will impact the spacecraft. There exists a model, a mathematical model of this in the literature, but we hope to have an improvement of that model through some experiments and get a better idea of how we should design the space cat and how the sunlight will actually interact with the plume of gas. If we were to discover tomorrow that there was a rock headed our way and we had maybe 10 years before this sizable rock, let's say that it's, oh, 100 meters across. We had 10 years to do something to deflect this near-Earth object from hitting us. Could you conceive of this technique, mirror bees, being ready and able to basically save,

if not the planet, quite a few people on one piece of the planet. Well, I have to be completely honest, and I think that in terms of technology development, that there is still quite a lot to do. So it's not something that we can put in space tomorrow or in one year time. one year time is certainly a very interesting alternative to more technologically ready deflection methods like as i said the nuclear explosion but we need some time to develop it as i said if we actually can progress in the research on this concept, we can probably bring up the technology readiness to a decent level to propose an actual experiment probably in five years, an actual experiment in space or in a relevant environment.

But I don't think before that. You're saying in five years, the possibility of actually putting up a prototype mirror B and sending it to an asteroid to at least see if, in principle, it would be able to zap that rock and change its path somewhat? Well, the experiment I have in mind is not really to deflect an actual asteroid, but more to prove that you can sublimate the surface and generate a jet of gas.

We can actually measure and test this sublimation process and see if our models are ballistic. Five years seems like a very reasonable time frame to me. Obviously, this work in the lab comes first. It looks like the Planetary Society at least will be attempting to help you with that work. Is this support going to mean that you will be able to move forward? Oh, yeah, definitely. If we could have this support, that would be an important contribution to our research that would allow a number of progress in this direction. So we really hope to have that support.

Max, we're out of time. Thank you very much for telling us a little bit about this concept for the mirror bees that, who knows, may one day, may very well one day, save our planet, save our species. We are always thrilled to talk to people like you who are involved in that work. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Max Vassile is a senior lecturer in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Glasgow, across the pond from us in Scotland. He is the project leader for the project we've been talking about, Mirror Bees. He is also one of the leaders of what they call SpaceArt, the Space Advanced Research Team there at the University of Glasgow. We're just moments away from joining an acquaintance of Max's. That'll be Bruce Batts, who will drop in for this week's edition of What's Up. Got Bruce Batts on the Skype connection for this week's edition of What's Up. He's a bit under the weather.

Did you catch a bug on the way back from Vienna? I did. I did. I decided I wanted to bring something nice and memorable back from Austria. I hope you declared it at customs. Stop, stop. Make me laugh. Only hurts when he laughs. So listen, we'll make it quick. Tell us about the night sky. Alright. Mars still

quite bright in the east, fairly high up now after sunset. Looking reddish if you look above it at the two bright stars. Those are Castor and Pollux, the twins of Gemini. Look after 8 p.m. or so. Saturn is rising low in the east, looking kind of yellowish. And it will keep rising earlier and earlier, moving towards a late March opposition. And you can also check out Saturn in the pre-dawn over in the west. Moving on to this week in space history, 1978, the first NavSTAR GPS satellite.

1987, a lovely supernova that coincidentally was named supernova 1987 a great coincidence 2007 new horizons passes jupiter headed out on its way towards uh pluto still heading still going still working on it and we're going to get alan stern back sometime soon you still have a few years before it gets there, but it does do things periodically. Mostly it just snoozes. Did good stuff at Jupiter, though. Three years ago, it turns out. On to random space fact.

That's good. I'm glad you didn't strain yourself. Thank you, everyone. In honor of the Winter Olympics going on right now, if Earth had the mass of a curling stone, then Jupiter would have the approximate mass of the tractor part of a tractor-trailer truck. Of the tractor part of a tractor-trailer truck. Very good. I think they should do curling with tractor trailer trucks. And still have somebody with a little broom out in front of it.

Sweeping. Go, go, sweep. Let's talk about Mars, actually, in the trivia contest answer. All right. We asked you how many solar panels did Mariner 9 have. So Mariner 9, of course, the first orbiter around Mars. How did we do, Matt? You know how I said we'll see if anybody can play Funk the Bruce with this? And sure enough, smart aleck Torsten Zimmer, he said, well, when are you talking about?

Because, I mean, there was a weekend when everybody went home from JPL and it only had three panels. And eventually, after 2022, it will have no panels at all. Did you know that Mariner 4 is apparently still orbiting Mars, which, of course, is the point of that last comment? I'm guessing you meant Mariner 9. Oh, yes. I'm very sorry. My mistake. Yes, I did. I'm guessing you meant Mariner 9. Oh, I'm very sorry. My mistake. Yes, I did. It is, and I think that's pretty incredible.

And the reason I said four, Mariner 4, is that, of course, Mariner 9 had four panels, as we heard from Steve Lehman, who I think wrote in for the first time. I even wrote back to him because he's the secretary of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society. And I said, I hope you win just so that I can mention that Charlottesville, the home of my father's alma mater, the University of Virginia. And Steve indeed said it had four solar panels. And by the way, that's 14,742 solar cells that generated 500 watts at Mars. Stephen, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Nicely done. We move on to a rather different subject. What were the maximum height and weight restrictions for the Mercury astronaut selection? Maximum height and weight if you wanted to get up in a spam in a can.

Exactly. Because there's only so much room for spam in a can. That's right. Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter your spam in a can in our contest. And you've got until March 1 of 2010, a year that is flying by, March 1 at 2 p.m. to get us your answer. You can go back to bed now. Oh, thank you.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about letting sleeping dogs lie. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts. Get well soon, Guy. I'll see you next week. He joins us every week here on What's Up. Shh. Do we now know roughly how many Milky Way star systems look like our own? That's our topic next time on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up! NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology Thank you.