Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Jonathan Goff Says Let’s Redirect an Asteroid

Episode Date: February 24, 2015

ARM is the Asteroid Redirect Mission, and sometimes it seems that it doesn’t have a friend in the world. But it does, and Jonathan Goff of Altius Space Machines is one.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why bringing an asteroid home is a good idea, 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. Does anybody outside the White House and NASA headquarters like the asteroid redirect mission? Yes, and Jonathan Goff is one of them. We'll hear his reasons today. Bill Nye will talk to us about a CubeSat explosion. Wait, that came out wrong, but you'll get the idea. And Bruce Betts will be here with more jewels in the current night sky, along with the space trivia contest.

Senior editor Emily Lakdawalla is ready to take us back to Mars. Emily, another nice, long review of what Curiosity has been up to up on the red planet. Give us a general Mars. Emily, another nice, long review of what Curiosity has been up to up on the Red Planet. Give us a general overview. What has been accomplished? Well, it took about a month of work, but Curiosity did a full drill campaign at a site called Mojave,

which is at the base of this light-colored outcrop of rock called Pahrump Hills. You know, drilling, it's a long procedure for Curiosity because you've got to pick the site, you've got to set up procedure for curiosity, because you got to pick the site, you got to set up at the site, you got to do some pre drilling documentation, you got to make sure it's okay for drilling, and then you drill and then you deliver to the instruments. And then

you analyze that a little bit, you decide how much more you want to deliver. And then you can drive on. And really, the fastest they can do this is in a little less than three weeks, it took them a bit more took them about four, in part part because they also had to update their software while they were there, which could have happened anywhere. It happens to the best of us. It was actually, to my mind, the most successful drilling campaign they've had since they were at Cumberland because it really wasn't marred by any equipment problems. It was just, you know, the usual long procedure. They got all the documentation needed and hopefully we'll get some good science out of it. And you said they have to make sure it's okay to drill.

I don't think they were waiting for a permit from the Martians. But there are other things that can go wrong. I mean, you talked about how One Rock, they tried it. They did a little test drill in. It broke. Why is that a problem? Well, in order to drill, you know, if you imagine yourself drilling something, imagine drilling a hole in a block of wood. You use one hand to hold down the block of wood and then you use the other hand with a drill to drill the hole in it.

Well, Curiosity does very much the same thing. There are these two fingers on either side of the drill that it braces against the Martian rock. And you can actually see the whole rover lift up a little bit when it braces the drill. And then it drills down into it. Well, if the rock breaks, then it's no longer got a good grip on the wood. It's like trying to drill into a block of wood without your other hand holding it down. And that's simply not going to work, and it could actually harm the rover. So when the rock breaks, they have to stop drilling, and they have to try to find a different place. They actually found that the rock was so soft

that they had to modify the way they used the drill. It's a percussion drill. They bang as much as they spin the drill. And so they banged less hard the second time around, and it worked better. And among the great illustrations in this new blog entry at planetary.org is a little movie about the drill doing its stuff. You can see exactly what Emily is talking about. All right, we're almost out of time, but very briefly, why does a robot get Sundays off? Because it's not really a robot doing all the science on Mars. It's a bunch of humans doing all the science on Mars using the robot. And we've got to give our humans some time off or else they'll quit the mission.

And so generally Curiosity operates. They do a three-solve plan every Friday. They plan for the next three days, and they come back in ready to work on Monday. They're actually in the extended mission doing a little bit of work on the occasional Saturday in order to make the most of Curiosity's time. Great report. Thank you, Emily. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Looking forward to it, Matt. It is a great report. Like I said, you'll find it at planetary.org. Just look for Emily's blog. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, welcome back. I call your attention to a piece by one of our terrific guest bloggers, Van Cain.

It's just a sampling, but it's a bunch of concepts for other small missions like LightSail, many of them CubeSat-based, we seem to be on to something here. Oh, yes. The great thing about the CubeSat, everybody, which is 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters, and there are standards that have evolved from that. Ours is 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters.

And for people in the last country on Earth to embrace the metric system, it's less than a foot long. A loaf of bread is what I hear it compared to all the time. It's generally smaller even than most loaves of bread. Considerably shorter than a baguette. That said, it is a standard that is, in a sense, easily launched. And so LightSail, the Planetary Society spacecraft, will be a three-unit, a three-U cubesat launched in May from a ring, a circle that's within the

rocket. And at the right moment, once it's in space, it will sproing off into orbit. And by sproing, I mean there's a launcher that is very much, reminds me very much of a jack in the box. But because these things are standardized now, their size and shape, their mass limits and so on, because they're standardized, people have proposed all these exciting and exotic missions. Lunar flashlight, where we take a spacecraft very similar to light sail and shine light into a crater on the moon to look for, for example, to look for ice. Then there's proposals to send CubeSats to Mars. And the Air Force, I can tell you, is very interested in a system of CubeSats that would act like an array or a grid flying in formation in orbit.

And these things greatly lower the cost of space missions. So yes, I am, as the CEO of the Planetary Society, honored to be working this problem at this moment in history. This small thing would be a big part of the exploration of space. It's fun to be a pioneer. It's fun to be a pioneer. It is fun to be a pioneer. Pioneering. That's right, Matt.

Thank you, Bill. Thank you. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Stay with us. The Asteroid Redirect Mission and Jonathan Goff are next. ARM. It started out as a study conducted by the Keck Institute for Space Studies. It was and is a bold proposal to robotically capture either a small asteroid or a sizable rock sitting on a much bigger asteroid, asteroid or a sizable rock sitting on a much bigger asteroid, drag it into an orbit that circles our moon, and then send a human crew in the new Orion spacecraft to visit it and bring samples, lots of samples, back to Earth. The

concept was embraced by the Obama administration and a few members of Congress, but not by many others. So it was eye-opening when Jonathan Goff laid out his arguments for the mission in his blog. From there, it went to the widely read and respected Space News. That's where I found it and invited Goff to the show. He is president and CEO of Altius Space Machines in Colorado and has a distinguished history as an aerospace engineer. John, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio.

You started your op-ed in the February 9th edition of Space News with the observation that almost everyone outside of NASA HQ dislikes, even hates, the asteroid redirect mission. I have to admit I get the same impression. Why do you think this is? For a wide range of reasons, depending on the person. I know that a lot of people in the commercial space side of things see it as another way of trying to make work for SLS and Orion. They see it as a wasteful

exercise. Admittedly, I even started out from that sort of perspective. I come from the commercial space side of things and hadn't really thought it through all the way, but it just seemed like looking for an excuse to use a big rocket that doesn't have a destination yet. I know that there's people who wish we were going to another destination first. So you have people who are like, oh, we should be going to the moon and this is just a distraction or, oh, we should be going straight to Mars and this is a distraction. Any destination you pick, you're going to get the other two thirds or three quarters of the destination partisans up in arms about how this is a distraction from what should be the true goal. Once again, I can empathize with that a little bit. To be honest, I've been a lot more interested

in the moon as a destination. But I see this as a good first step. Another group that I see opposing this, small body scientists, they probably have some of the more thought out concerns. They've seen human spaceflight programs kind of suck the air out of the room for science projects in the past. I can understand them being a little gun shy about it. And also from a pure science standpoint, to find out what an asteroid is made of, you don't need that much samples. I've noticed this conflict a lot of times in the past where there's a difference in opinion between people who are interested in science for science's sake and people who are interested in things like settlement, you know, bringing the resources of the solar system into humanity's economic sphere. And it's

true that they've got sometimes complementary, but sometimes different goals. There's also a huge partisan aspect of it, too. You know, there's a lot of people who aren't fans of President Obama and think that automatically, if he makes a suggestion, it's got to be stupid. I think you're probably right on all fronts. And so, as we said, there are a variety of reasons. Well, having stated these, you went on in your Space News piece, you provided 10 reasons that some of these people ought to consider changing their minds. I found a couple of these a little redundant but still impressive. We're not going to get through all of them, but let's consider a few,

beginning with your first and seemed sort of an overarching point, which is that once we move it, this new rock will be in our neighborhood for a very long time. What kinds of things, in your mind, does that open up? I'm interested in seeing the resources of the solar system become economically accessible. You know, right now, Elon Musk can reasonably make the joke that, oh yeah, even if there was like a crate of like crack cocaine sitting right there on the surface of Mars, you couldn't ship it back to the Earth and make a profit. It would be illegal for one thing, but go ahead. Yeah, that too, yeah.

And he's got a point, but my goal is to find ways to change that. Almost every resource that we use today started out at one point not being economic. today started out at one point not being economic. And one of the key drivers of making resources economical is A, figuring out how to extract them more efficiently, and B, the transportation infrastructure to actually make them accessible. I think that the Asteroid Redirect Mission helps a lot with the first part of that. There's a bit of a conceit among us aerospace engineers. You hear a lot of statements of all you have to do is just dot, dot, dot. And usually you hand away something that's really complex from somebody else's field, but how hard could it possibly be? They're not aerospace engineers. And I see that a lot in

things like, you know, asteroid resource extraction. Oh, all you have to do is put the thing in a bag and heat it up and the water will come out and it'll be just really easy. And it's like, maybe, or maybe that water is going to have chemical reaction, you know, side reactions with all sorts of other materials in there. And you're going to make a huge mess and not be able to extract it very efficiently. Maybe it'll work fine. We don't know. And the assumption that you see a lot with, I mean, moon, Mars and asteroid advocates is, oh, we'll just send robots and they'll be able to figure it out and they'll set up the base and we can send people and it'll be easy. We do a bit of robotics at our company. I just think that's really overly optimistic. Robots are great at repetitive tasks

and at acting as extended hands for humans when they're close enough for reasonable control. But when you're trying to do something as complex as debugging systems, troubleshooting things, trying to do that at the end of a, you know, 15 to 30 minute speed of light delay, it's just really hard. I mean, it's hard enough to just get samples, drilling things and doing repetitive tasks like that out in deep space, but trying to actually debug what's effectively complex chemical engineering projects. I mean, there's a reason why chemical engineers have a higher starting salary than most aerospace engineers. It's hard stuff. Yeah, I guess this is even more reason to admire JPL for what they accomplish with robots on Mars.

I was also thinking maybe instead of cocaine, maybe dilithium crystals on the surface of Mars. How's that? You also talked about how a nearby rock orbiting the moon might be useful for testing ways we might end up saving our planet. You know, planetary defense, asteroid deflection techniques. That's actually something that would come before coming back to Earth. Some of the techniques that people come up with vary in some of the gravity tractor methods. You know, they work by mutual gravitation and traction between the, you know, between the spacecraft and the asteroid. And the more mass you have on the spacecraft,

the greater the force you can transmit to the asteroid, which means the faster you can move it. One of the best ways of greatly increasing your mass is to not hold all the way from Earth, but to grab a rock off the surface of the asteroid or bag a small asteroid and fly over to another one. It seems like if you really want to test that effectively, if there were a killer asteroid that we found, and especially if it was one that had boulders on it, you'd probably go with a spacecraft and grab the biggest boulder you could to amplify your mass, amplify the gravitational connection between the two, so you could apply as much force as possible. Basically, you can apply the delta V faster that way than if you have a spacecraft that's not

augmented. How about habitat testing? That was another one you mentioned. You don't need a rock to test out a habitat. But I generally find that tests where you're actually using something for a real application as opposed to just play acting, you tend to get a lot more out of it. So having a habitat attached to the NEO, the asteroid sample you've brought back, you know, it's now a lab. You're now actually doing real world experimentation, real world work, where it allows you to really stress the habit in ways that you wouldn't necessarily think of if you're just trying to play act simulating, oh, we're going to pretend like we're on a trip to Mars. I figure if you're going to spend all the cost of having a HAB there, having it actually be able to do useful things, and I

think you'll learn a lot more if you're actually using it for a mission as opposed to just a simulation. That's Jonathan Goff of Altius Space Machines. He'll give us more reasons to support the Asteroid Red redirect mission after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio listeners. Bill Nye the Science Guy here. The Planetary Society's remarkable LightSail spacecraft is headed for space. We want you to come along.

LightSail is a small spacecraft propelled by photons from the sun. The excitement is building as we count down to our launch in May. Follow every aspect of the mission at sail.planetary.org. Let's change the world. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too.

And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now?

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Who supports ARM, the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Well, Lou Friedman does. The Executive Director Emeritus of the Planetary Society was a lead author of the study that laid out the concept. And Jonathan Goff likes it. John is president and CEO of Altia Space Machines. We'll hear more about the company in a few minutes, but there's one more argument I wanted to ask John about.

Why is it that you think a rock like this, an asteroid or a good-sized piece of one, might also make a good sort of way station for missions elsewhere? A lot of people talk about mining asteroids or the moon for water for propellants. There's a lot of things that we've got the general idea of how to do them, but we haven't really done them in like a zero-g environment very much. Electrolysis, chilling storage, and handling of propellants is all something that's going to be a useful learning experience. And making the storage tanks a bit bigger so that you can both take water that you're getting from the asteroid,

as well as propellant delivered from Earth initially, can allow you to basically stretch this thing into a way station. Or even if you don't do refueling, just having a habitat there where you can stop over and vehicles coming back from the moon stop there, drop people off, transfer them to Earth return vehicles. I think that the cost of going to the moon are going to go way down once we stop throwing everything away every single time. People are working on reusing the first stages of rockets on the Earth. A lot of the cost in the lunar mission is in the landers and the transfer vehicles to and from Earth. And the sooner we can develop technologies and infrastructures that enables us to reuse

those, I think the faster we'll get the prices down to the point where things start becoming more economically interesting, not just as an exploration thing, but eventually as mining or space tourism or settlement. John, you left out one reason that occurred to me, which brings out the little irrational kid in me. That reason for dragging an asteroid closer is because we can. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely a reason. I'm not super motivated by going someplace because we can.

I mean, I find that interesting to a certain level, but the novelty wears off quickly. Oh, yeah, and the bills get really big. Yeah, yeah. Because we're going to run out of time here, I do want to mention that, you know, you made full disclosure when you wrote this piece. You said that your company is doing some contract work that is related to ARM, the asteroid redirect mission, though this is just one of the many things Altius is working on. I hope you'll take a minute and just tell us very briefly about some of this stuff.

Some of them have really cool names, Sticky Boom, Gecko Gripper. What are those about? Most of what Altius has been working on have been robotic technologies related to what you call non-cooperative capture. So you're trying to reach out and stick to or control some object in space. It could be space debris. It could be a satellite you're trying to service. It could be a stage that's going to a propellant depot to be refueled. It could be an asteroid. So we've developed a suite of technologies in that area.

Sticky boom, the idea behind it is imagine a robot arm where you've got a two degree of freedom shoulder and then a telescoping boom. Most of the ones we've worked on have been using this technology called composite stems. Imagine a composite tube that slipped down one side and it's designed so you can basically unroll, flatten it, and then roll it up on a spool. So it gives you a really compactly stowable arm that can reach out three to five meters or longer. Kinematically, a whole lot cleaner than a traditional robot arm where all the links between the joints are a fixed length. I mean, imagine when you're working on a car, like how much easier it would be if you could like make your arm stretch or shrink or, you know,

different things to reach into hard to reach places. Yeah. You could join the fantastic four too. What about this? The gecko gripper? Does that have something to do with how geckos actually managed to climb walls? Yeah.

So, so that project was one we did, uh, the subcontractor to a really talented group at NASA JPL, a couple of different universities, There's one we did as a subcontractor to a really talented group at NASA JPL. A couple different universities, including Stanford, have been developing synthetic gecko adhesives. They use the same sort of microscopic hairs that geckos do to cling to smooth surfaces. And they'd come up with a way of making the material out of something that could survive the vacuum and temperatures of space. out of something that could survive the vacuum and temperatures of space. And we were working with them to build a mechanism to basically allow them to reach out and, say,

stick to solar panels or other flat surfaces on spacecraft for satellite servicing or other sort of applications like that. We've also done work with a technology called electrostatic adhesion with a group out of SRI International, basically controlled static cling to do a similar thing. And lately, under this Asteroid Redirect Mission BAA, we've been working with Empire Robotics on these jamming grippers that can soften and conform to complex shapes and then rigidize as hard as a rock and lock onto them. We've been working on a wide range of these sort of technologies that allow you to grab surfaces when you don't know in advance what they look like. And what strikes me about all of this,

once again, spinoffs, the kinds of things that are developed to solve a problem in space that end up being useful here, as these devices that you've just described sound like they might very well have applications. You know, we're out of time. People can go to the Altius website and check out other things they're doing, an intriguing device called HatchBasket, and a concept for small, little modular satellites that are assembled in space. It's a good read. Jonathan, for now, I appreciate your coming on Planetary Radio and making the case for this still very controversial mission. I guess we'll see what happens. I'm interested to see where this goes, too. Jonathan Goff is the president and CEO of

Altia Space Machines in Colorado. He co-founded Masten Space Systems, where he served as lead propulsion engineer and helped win the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. You can read more of his thoughts in the Selenium Boondock Space Technology and Policy blog. We've got a link to the blog and to Altea Space Machines on our show page at planetary.org slash radio. I'll be right back with this week's edition of What's Up and Bruce Betts. Bruce Betts is once again on the Skype line ready to tell us about what's up in the night sky. He's the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. Welcome back.

Hello and welcome to you. So you sound somber. Is that because I was chastised by so many listeners? I have to tell about this. I was chastised by so many listeners. I have to tell about this. I'm just embarrassed to even be associated with the heinousness of the crime. After working so hard to pronounce things throughout the universe correctly, I heard from many people how I mangled the name of the University of Leicester last week.

That, of course, is where Mark Sims of the Beagle 2 mission is based. He's part of the faculty there. So my apologies. I've now been trained better on British pronunciations. And man, people were really upset. You'd think they wanted me exiled to Uranus or something.

Uh, Matt? Yeah? Never mind. Okay, well, what's up in the night sky? Planets that are easy to see, unlike Uranus, include Mars and Venus that have just been so close together in the evening sky and are still close together but getting farther apart separating from night to night but you can see them low in the west after sunset venus is more than a hundred times brighter than mars mars obviously therefore trickier to see also in the evening you can turn your head around and like linda blair and look to the other horizon you will see see super bright Jupiter up in the evening sky.

And then later in the evening, we've got Saturn coming up. But it's a good planetary festivity time of the year. On to this week in space history. First, a space-related tragedy that isn't discussed as much, but we remember in 1966, the Gemini 9 primary crew of Charles Bassett and Elliot See were killed in a T-38 plane accident. Quite tragic. Guys who never even made it onto their rockets.

Yep. But in much happier news, in 2007, New Horizons flew past Jupiter on its way to Pluto, which it will finally get to this July. Yay! Yay, yeah. On to... If that's a cartoon character, it's not one I recognize. It's my own. Funny you'd mention cartoon characters, though.

The Apollo 10 call signs were named after Peanuts cartoon characters, with the permission of Peanuts creator Charles Schultz. The command service module was Charlie Brown and the lunar module was Snoopy. Oh, I thought that was so cute when I was a kid. Yeah, help make Snoopy indelibly associated with the space program. I guess I still do, actually. That's good.

All right, move on to the trivia contest. We asked you, what is the diameter of the largest NASA deep space network antennas? How'd we do? Terrific response to this. He says, don't use his first name. So it's just Mulder. Apparently, the truth is out there. Mulder is in Germany, and he gave us the truth, saying that the largest antennas on the deep

space network are the three 70-meter antennas that are spaced around the world in Spain, Australia, and Goldstone, California. He's correct, I think, isn't he? He is indeed. 70 meters. It's big. Huge. And we're going to send Mulder the year in space wall and desk calendars and a Planetary Radio t-shirt. As always, a little bit more material from our brilliant listeners. Craig Journet, friend of the show, he used to be with the Deep Space Network, so he's really up on this. He said that they're nearing the end of their lives. They're pretty old, even after they were expanded a little bit to receive data

from the Voyager spacecraft in 1988. a little bit to receive data from the Voyager spacecraft in 1988. They're going to be replaced by four 34-meter beam waveguide antennas at each of these three sites. These are pretty cool. Look them up. Beam waveguide antennas where they put the electronics. Instead of up there on the dish, they're down where they're much easier to get at. And then he says something called the beacon mode service that I couldn't really find much about may reduce reliance on these big dishes, but maybe that's something for the future.

Each one, almost 3,000 tons or 2.7 million kilograms. Here's another way to measure it. This came from Richard Cologe in Illinois, 5,652,174 antennas side by side to reach the moon, which I'm sure is something that, you know, there's a congressman who I'm sure is asking us to do that. You know, do you think once they're retired, we could just go get one and then put it up on blocks outside the planetary side of the eclipse? Wouldn't that be cool? That'd be so great. It'd be such a great, you know, bird bath, if nothing else. How many birds?

Well, we've got to specify size of birds. It would get complicated. All right. What do you got for next time? All right. For next time, about how close to the moon's surface did Snoopy get? Snoopy, the Apollo 10 lunar module. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry.

You have until 8 a.m. Pacific time on February 3rd, Tuesday, February 3rd, to get us this answer. We're going to have for you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. It's lovely. You'll wear it with pride. All right, everybody, go out there. Look up at night sky and think about Snoopy in space. I wonder if he's going to bring his doghouse. That's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology. I guess the doghouse would be the spaceship, wouldn't it? Too bad Charles Schultz

isn't around. Indeed, and he's thinking of naming it Apollo. Bruce is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary 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 the members of the Society. Josh Doyle wrote our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.