Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Discovery of a New and Neighborly Asteroid

Episode Date: March 12, 2012

With Planetary Society help, La Sagra Observatory discovered big near-Earth object 2012 DA14. Guest: Jaime Nomen.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A new space rock, and maybe a new anime character, 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. It's another one of those overflowing episodes. And why not when you've got a newly discovered asteroid that is going to get uncomfortably close in less than a year? We'll talk with one of its discoverers and with our own Bruce Betts. Bruce heads a grant program that helped make the find possible. Oh, and that anime character, Emily Lakdawalla, we'll get to him in a moment. Emily, I am so glad that you were able to

turn good news and bad news into good news and good news. Please explain. Well, that's right. I had, I posted a couple of brief mission updates last week. One of them was on GRAIL. That's the twin spacecraft that are studying the lunar gravity field. And they successfully got their science mission underway last week. It's going to last less than three months to do their primary gravity map of the moon. And then hopefully they'll get an extension. So that was good news. mission underway last week. It's going to last less than three months to do their primary gravity map of the moon, and then hopefully they'll get an extension. So that was good news. But then with this solar storm that has been spraying outward from the sun for the last week, several spacecraft have had some issues, none of them permanent. Venus Express looked to be the

one that was worst affected. Its star trackers,. Both of them went blind last week for more than two days, which is the longest that has ever happened on this mission. But fortunately, the news came back about a day after I posted it that, in fact, the use of the StarTrackers had been recovered. And actually, there was a comment on this blog entry from Mark Adler, who used to be the project manager for Mars Exploration Rover Mission, and he reminded me that both of those missions actually suffered momentary star tracker blindness from a solar storm that they were hit with back in 2004. So I guess it's actually a common occurrence. Thank goodness these things weren't just burned out, that they actually, they just had snow blindness, you might say. The other thing that we really have

to do, because it has such great audio potential, is this theme song for a Japanese mission that you found? Yeah, it's a Japanese mission that we don't know is hibernating right now. We don't know if they're going to be able to retain contact with it. It's Icarus, the solar sail mission, which throughout its lifetime has had such the adorable personality online. And now they've made it 10 times more adorable, or I guess I should say kawaii, which is the Japanese term for cute, with this cute theme song that they've made. It's just great. This completely took me by surprise. We're going to sneak in a few seconds of it here.

That is amazing. Fully orchestrated, much more than I expected. What fun. I would watch this anime if it was a cartoon. Well, keep your fingers crossed. It might end up that way. And just to prove the nerddom that is present here today, you wrote this terrific piece about your visit to the Leet Up on March 6th.

We don't have time to explain it, but it is a March 6th entry in the blog. This carnival of nerdly delights, as you described it. You happened to mention the proof of your own nerdiness out of this. Going back to high school, I had no idea that you used to design your own Transformer

characters. I thought the Transformers did not have a sufficient number of female characters, so I designed actually nearly 200 of my own. Emily, you're a nerd. Thanks for joining us once again. You're welcome, Matt. She is the nerd-in-chief and the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, though, is, well, really, he's the nerd in chief, Bill Nye. Bill, the budget battle for NASA continues. I think a friend of yours testified before Congress last week.

Yes, well, he's not just a friend. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is also on the board of directors of the Planetary Society and served as our president for a number of years. Now, I, Matt, just to talk briefly about me, I'm in the wonkish details right now because I am the CEO. We are working the political problems. We are thinking deep thoughts about who said what to whom and what committee meeting before the approves goes to the CR for the earmarks and all that stuff. But Dr. Tyson went to the Senate and he gave him an earful. He can do that from his position right now. He says, you want to innovate? You want the United States to be the world leader in anything? In the 1960s, before people went to the moon, the United States didn't outsource anything

because the United States felt it could do it better here in the United States. But now, everything is outsourced. Everything goes overseas and other countries. And so the argument is, if you want to have this in-house production again, you need to stimulate space exploration. in-house production again need to stimulate space exploration. And I am going to agree with him. Hear, hear. Cutting the NASA budget, I get it. Everybody's budget has to be reduced, you might think. But cutting the NASA budget or the space exploration budget, not just in the United States, but in any country, the space exploration budget stimulates every economy. It stimulates everybody and it percolates up and out. It is a really compelling argument.

I wish him and I wish you luck. Oh, thank you, Matt. And bear in mind, we're trying to discover life on another world. We're not just building rockets for the sake of rockets. We find that extraordinary discovery, it will change this world. Well, Matt, as near as I can tell, it's time for me to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. He is the Chief Executive Officer of the Planetary Society,

joins us every week here for this short conversation about what's happening up there and very often down here as well. I'll be right back to talk about some terrific work supported by the Planetary Society that has resulted in the discovery of yet another near-Earth object. 2012 DA14 is an asteroid, and more precisely, a near-Earth object. A very near-Earth object discovered late last month. We'll talk in a few minutes with Spanish astronomer Jaime Noman about this NEO, but first some background from Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects. Bruce, I'm glad that we can get a little bit of explanation from you

before we talk to Jaime of the La Saga Observatory Group, because you run the Shoemaker-Neo program. Tell us how that works and how it is that we were able to help Jaime and his colleagues get this camera that let them make this discovery. Well, since 1997, we've been running the Gene Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grant Program. Gene Shoemaker was a great planetary scientist who gave us a lot of the knowledge of what we know about impacts and cratering in the solar system. We're trying to fund amateur observers that are, and when we say amateur, they're really hardcore amateur, or professionals, particularly in developing countries, or just anyone. It's an open competition, and we've got a great volunteer committee that looks at the proposals and then pass recommendations along to me.

And Jaime Noman and his collaborators at La Saga Observatory submitted a successful proposal during the 2010 round. And theirs was a good example of what we do. We try to take good observers and take them to the next level. So they were already doing great work, but they wanted to do better work. So we funded a new camera that allowed them to not only have more sensitivity, but have faster readout times specifically so they could look for fast moving objects near earth, which is exactly what they found in 2012 DA14. And we've talked to a selection of these folks in the past, and some of them extremely successful,

some of them less so, I suppose. No, they're all successful. They're all successful, yes. Actually, they are all amazing. I mean, obviously, they focus on different things, too, I should point out. are all amazing. I mean, obviously, they focus on different things, too, I should point out. So you've got discovery has actually become a pretty rare part of the program because a lot of the discoveries are now made by professional surveys.

That's what's also interesting about what Hyman and his colleagues have done because they have found ways through this clever searching the sky for rapidly moving objects to find holes in the surveys and fill them in. But we also, a big focus, is doing follow-ups. So once you find an object, that doesn't help you unless you know whether it has Earth's name on it. So you need to do lots of follow-up observations to plot the orbit. So a lot of the observers do that. We've got observers who focus on binary asteroid systems. We have observers who focus on characterization of, you know, what are these things made of. So all sorts of variety in the program and lots of success.

This particular find, though, this one is especially significant. going to get a lot of publicity and it's also scientifically and asteroid defense significant because you've got this big object 50 meter object roughly uh so size of what caused the tunguska event that leveled 2 000 square kilometers of forest in siberia in 1908 as we heard only last week uh exactly you've got this object flying by closer than Earth's geostationary satellites, significantly closer than Earth's geostationary satellites. And we know when it's coming by and it's coming close, so it'll allow a lot of follow-up observation. That's going to be really important because particularly when they come by Earth, they get, not surprisingly, quite tweaked by Earth's gravity.

Having lots of observations, knowing it's coming, will allow us to then plot orbits off into the distant, very accurate orbits off into the distant future. Because I'm sure optical telescopes, radar telescopes, all sorts of things are going to be looking at that when it flies by next February. Be there. I think we ought to head out there. It's on the other side of the Earth.

Oh, I see. Okay. But it's not, probably not naked eye, but it's on the other side of the earth but oh i see okay yeah but it's it's not probably not naked eye but it's binocular visible yeah i read magnitude seven or so yeah now all that's kind of ballparked at the moment but it gives you an idea i was starting to say thank you and uh don't go too far away because we'll be talking to you again in just a few minutes when we get to uh this week's edition of what's up i I will sit here and wait, though perhaps not patiently. Bruce Betts, as if you don't know, is the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

And one of those projects happens to be the Gene Shoemaker NEO program, grant program, that operates out of the Planetary Society. Be right back with Jaime Noman. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show,

its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining 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. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We talked before the break with Bruce Betts about 2012 DA14, the asteroid discovered on the night of February 22nd

by astronomers at La Sagra Observatory in the south of Spain. Jaime Noman is part of that team. I connected with him via Skype a few days ago so that we could learn more about how the discovery was made, but also about this independent group of modestly funded astronomers that has found many NEOs, including this fast-moving space rock. Jaime, what a pleasure to be able to speak to you and congratulate you on the discovery of this near-Earth object. Oh, yes. So we were very, very lucky to find it. I think it was more than luck. I think that you and your colleagues at the La Sagra Observatory there in the south of

Spain have built a tremendous record for yourselves, which cannot be based purely on luck. Certainly, we at the Planetary Society hope that our camera that we were able to help you to buy helped quite a bit. Yes, of course. We were looking for a fast readout camera because we spent a lot of hours reading out the images. All the process is very, very slow. We know at this moment that it's very difficult to find new news, trying to go after what the big U.S US surveys are extremely well doing.

So the thing is to try to find something different, to try to get smaller objects, faster objects. Those objects are appearing in a few hours because small objects are a very, very faint magnitude and sometimes they strike directly to the Earth and maybe in one, two days they become visible and you can detect them. So with the old cameras, it was completely impossible to achieve this. Were you also, in a sense, looking where many of the other sky surveys

do not look for these objects? Of course. Every night we start observation. We try to monitor the sky coverage at the Mineral Plants Center, and we know exactly where the big surveys go. And then we try to find virgin sky areas in order to not go after them, because we know that if you are picking the same sky areas of the last night they made,

for sure we're not finding anything there. So this is the first step. But sometimes at the end of the dark run, so when the moon, all its dark period with no moon, at the end you see that the full sky is mostly covered. So then what to do? Then it's to try to go to the areas that are already covered, but changing the strategy to try to find only those smallest objects that may be visible only in the last two or three days.

Also because they move really, really fast. the last two or three days. Also because they move really, really fast. So they move from a not surveyed area to one that is already surveyed maybe in one day. How many asteroids have you and your team discovered? If you ask me about asteroids, and then we take into account main belters and all kinds of minor planets,

maybe more than 6,000 asteroids. Wow. If you take into account only the nearer objects, so the objects that have closest approaches, or they have perihelion under 1.3 astronomical units, with this last interesting object, 51, 51 NEOs in the last three years. 51 NEOs in the last three years. Which is quite a record for your team, putting you right up there with these three major U.S.-funded surveys and, of course, the wise spacecraft that has found so many of these. But let's talk a little bit more about 2012 DA14. Were you folks particularly excited when you found this and discovered that this was an object that was going to be returning in less than a year so close to our planet?

Okay. The nice thing about NEO is that for us it's really, really hard now to find a NEO object because all the sky is really well covered. When you go one night, for instance, to try to discover new asteroids, every night you can discover main belters. The problem is you spend a full night sometimes for nothing because you are not thinking anything. So it's somehow

comparing to try to hunting something kind of animal, leopard, whatever. And most of the night you are coming back home with nothing because there are not so many. Last month, the sky was really, really well covered. We were searching different areas and nothing, nothing.

Every night, finding nothing. So at the end, we were thinking we need to change the strategy. We need to go to different way to try to survey objects. And then after three nights, we found this object. At the first moment, you see that the object is quite close to the earth because it leaves in the images a worm, so it's not a dot, but you see that it's moving fast because in the exposures you see already that the object is trailing. And then you suspect that it would be more or less interesting. But it is only after other observers add some observations that can be computed that you know exactly where it is, if it is really close or not.

And, of course, this object has been determined to be exactly what we've described as a near-Earth object and will be returning quite close to our planet, as we said, in February of 2013. I hope with the moment or two that we have left that we can talk a little bit more about your observatory. I went to the website for the La Sagra Observatory. It's in quite a beautiful spot there. It must be someplace that you like to visit. Yes, of course, a very, very nice place. It's in the south of Spain, a very, very nice place. It's in the south of Spain, beside a very high mountain

that can be seen in the background of the images of 2,400 meters high altitude. And the place is the darkest place in Spain mainland, even in Europe. If you consider Europe and you take into account the Canary Islands and all that, then there are places that are better. But in the mainland of Europe, maybe are the darkest places, this one.

And this is the reason when we move from Mallorca, because we started humidity, because the light pollution, because the tourism, because Mallorca Island is a very touristic place, then we needed to move and to put this station, particularly for track and air options in this place. Well, clearly it has been a very successful location for you and your colleagues. Just one other thing that I wanted to mention that you brought up just before we started recording, and that is you're a 21st century astronomer. You spend a lot of time on the high-speed trains in Spain, and you actually get to do some of your observing while you're riding along the rails at 300 kilometers per hour. Yes, this is very—the thing is we moved the observatory in La Sagra,

and then we had there the best place to observe, but nobody was there, no observers. And then the problem is to try to develop first is the web system to control the telescopes remotely. Then we started to get a lot of images at the observatory, but that's completely impossible to try to download at home or the office or whatever because the weight of the images then we needed to develop a processing software that was showing us through web pages the

results so the objects found in the images but of course we need to be connected continuously to the observatory and as I need to spend a lot of time because I'm living in Barcelona half of the week and the other I'm living in Madrid. I'm getting the train every week. So I'm traveling a lot of times during the week in the train. And fortunately, the train has the possibility to be connected through the wireless connection to Internet. And then most of the observations, most of the reduction of the data, many of the scheduling for the telescopes are done from the train. So when I contribute with the team, most of my work

is done from the train. Yes, true. That's wonderful. Jaime, we are out of time, I'm afraid, but please congratulate all the members of your team there at La Sagra Observatory, and keep up the wonderful work, and we look forward to talking to you again as you continue these discoveries of asteroids and near-Earth objects and other small bodies that circulate through our solar system. I want to congratulate my colleagues, because this is not only my work. We have a nice team of friends more than colleagues

and we're working together in this facility there. And also I want to give a big thanks to Planetary Society because they helped with this extremely good performing CCD camera that helped us to discover not only this object but the last 10-year object, one comet last month. The only thing that I can say now that this is a CCD camera bought in here in the United States. We have some secret inside with the brand that they try to make some kind of tuning inside the CCD camera. It goes much, much

faster than the one that they are selling commercially to everybody. So this is the true. So we try to make some tricking thing inside the electronics to try to make them faster, able to do the work, to try to make them faster,

able to do the work that we want to get from it. Well, keep up the great work, and it looks like a heavenly place to study the heavens. Jaime, once again, thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you to all the team and to you who are listening. And we'll be right back for this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts. Big afternoon here at the Planetary Society. Pictures being taken of people, not of stuff in the sky.

Yes, it's been class picture day at the Planetary Society. It really has been. You'll be able to see pretty pictures sometime on our new exotic website in a few weeks. Pretty of some people, goofy of others. Pretty goofy. So anyway. What's up? Well, I'm repetitive, but it's those glorious planets looking really cool.

Venus and Jupiter in the evening sky in the west. Early evening, they are at conjunction, which just means the closest point they're going to get to each other in the sky. On March 14th, conjunction, conjunction, conjunction, junction. And on March 25th and 26th, the crescent moon will join them. So there's Venus and Jupiter partying for the next few weeks. Looking great. Still dominating. Just great.

The west. And over in the east, we've got Mars looking orangish bright and awesome. Still not that long after its opposition. Saturn coming up later in the evening in the east, looking dimmer than everyone else and yellowish, but really cool in a telescope. We move on to this week in space history. A lot of stuff happened this week in space history. We'll hit a couple of them. First of all, Messenger, one year ago, went into orbit around Mercury.

Great stuff has been coming back from Messenger, giving us a whole new understanding of the innermost planet. So that's been cool. new understanding of the innermost planet. So that's been cool. We also had in 1965, Alexei Leonov took the world's first spacewalk. That's right. Just beating out Ed White in the Gemini capsule.

Yes, but they weren't actually beating each other. They weren't in the same place. They weren't throwing gloves at each other. Is that why Ed White had that stick-like thing? That's right. Was that a just in case? You thought that was a propulsion thing, didn't you? I did, but I just realized. That was a silly string projector.

I don't know what to do with that. We move on to Random Space Fact. I didn't think that motor was going to start. We'll do that next time. On the second space shuttle mission in 1981, Joe Engel at the command controls, on that flight he became the first and only pilot ever to manually fly an aerospace vehicle from Mach 25 all the way to landing.

Wow. Because usually there's a lot of autopilot involved. Yeah, I didn't even think that was possible. Obviously it is. Thank goodness. NASA officials didn't think it was either, but Joe knew where the little switch was. No, totally, totally not true. We move on to the trivia question, and I asked you,

what spacecraft went closest to the sun and how far away was it how'd we do matt closest on purpose right anyway i don't know maybe i just occurred to me that maybe there might have been one or two that have been you know fell right in or something no it's really it's amazingly hard to go to the sun you have to change a huge amount of velocity it's like going to the outer solar system. That's right. It's like Messenger really had to struggle to get into orbit. Yeah, just get into Mercury.

So, yeah, they meant to do it. No, really, they meant to do it. It's the story. There were all those ships on Battlestar Galactica that went into the sun. That was true and that was realistic. I'm sorry. I forgot about that, Matt. All right. You want the answer?

Yes, please. You can't handle the answer. It's too hot for you. No. It was Ken Smith who won. Ken Smith out of Ontario, Canada. He said the answer is Helios 2, 1976. Long time ago. Orbited the sun at about 43 million kilometers. Actually got closer than that.

He did point out that if you wait 5 billion years, the Earth will be even closer to the sun because the sun will have moved out into us. Yeah, I don't think that counts, Matt. Oh, all right. That's the future. Spaceship Earth. That's different. Similarly, I don't think Battlestar Galactica is spacecraft.

You know how fast it was going, though? Helios 2, that is. Oh, Helios 2. No. How fast was it? Well, Robert McLarty says that it reached 241,350 kilometers per hour. Pretty darn fast. And really, to make it even more impressive,

Wesley Hayes said that that's 0.0234% of C, speed of light. Wow. Not bad. Not bad. That's zippy. That's the other technical term. It is zippy. All right.

We move on to the next trivia contest question. An Opportunity rover on Mars has snuggled in for a long winter's, well, it's not actually going to nap. It's going to be doing science, but it's going to be chilling hard, trying to keep itself powered up and warm during the Martian winter. Here's your question. Where is Opportunity now, and where will it spend the Martian winter? I'm looking for the probably still unofficial name, but the name for where they are named after a Mars scientist and an all-around good guy.

Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You have until Monday, March 19, at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. And if you are chosen by random.org and you have the correct answer, you will win exactly the same Planetary Radio t-shirt that we give to Ken Smith. We didn't mention he's getting a t-shirt. Okay, we'll give you another t-shirt. You won't have to wear Ken's.

All right, everybody, go out there. Look up at the night sky and think about if you took pictures of Matt and me, where would we be? Where would you put us? How would you shape us? Never mind. Thank you, and good night would you shape us? Never mind. Thank you and good night. It's a really painful thing.

I don't want to do anymore. Don't make me take any more pictures. We have to take more pictures. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects at the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Say green cheese. Green cheese? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California

and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.