Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - OSIRIS-REx Readies for Asteroid Bennu

Episode Date: September 15, 2015

Dante Lauretta heads the most ambitious mission to an asteroid ever mounted. With one year left till launch, he returns to Planetary Radio with an update.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dante Loretta and Osiris-Rex, 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. Osiris-Rex, is that a cool name for a spacecraft or what? Its launch toward asteroid Bennu is one year away. Principal Investigator Dante Loretta is back with a status update. Bill Nye is on the road this week, but Emily is here with more exciting news from Pluto. And today's What's Up segment includes a chance to win Extranaut,

the game that lets you manage your own planetary science mission. It comes from Dante Loretta. Yeah, same guy. Before we go on, I want to thank everyone who let us know how much you enjoyed coverage of our SOFIA flight last week. More than 50,000 of you have also seen the great little video Merck Boyan produced about that trip.

You'll find it on the Planetary Society Facebook page and on our YouTube channel. Here's the Society's senior editor. Emily, the parade of images from New Horizons is underway. You've got them in the blog, in your Twitter account. That's at eLactawalla. Why are you so excited about these other than the fact that they're gorgeous? Well, I'm excited about the fact that everything that's coming down from Pluto is being shared on the web. It all comes out in the afternoon on Friday. So we get a little present in our inboxes to end our weeks. We wait

for people to process them over the weekend, and I get to post all the magic on Monday. And there's an awful lot of magic in these images. One of the things that New Horizons returned first is a global mosaic of Pluto. That's where they had to reposition the camera 15 times in order to take all the images necessary to cover the visible disk. It's just stunning. It's stunning when you back up from it, and it's stunning when you get close in and see the huge variety of different kinds of landscapes that there are on the surface of this world. This is really a geologist's paradise, isn't it? And a lot of mysteries to be solved? Absolutely. There's clearly a lot of different kinds of geology happening here. You have the obvious, the impact craters, which everything in the solar system has,

but those impact craters have been modified in a huge variety of different ways. Some of them have very flat floors, like they've been filled in or stuff has risen up from underneath to push the floor flat. Others of them are not flat at all, and their walls have been dissected by these striations or things running down their insides. And I'm trying to be incredibly careful with the language that I use, because if you say that the craters are dissected by gullies, then I would be implying that there's erosion happening on the surface of Pluto, which is a very big deal. If I said that they were dissected by fractures, then I'm saying that there's tectonics happening on Pluto. And I'm not ready to say any of those things yet, and neither is the science team. So you have to be really super careful when you make

your first impressions of these images, not to assume too much about how they were made, but just to marvel at all of the variety. The care that you're taking regarding these sorts of inferences, you make a reference to them that's pretty entertaining, not in this most recent blog entry, but the one from back on September 10th, about something you used to teach your nine-year-olds when you taught school. That's right. I was a fifth and sixth grade science teacher before I was a graduate student. first lesson I taught my fifth graders was the difference between observations, where you describe using very descriptive adjective terms, and inferences, where you draw conclusions from your observations. And training the students to recognize the difference between those two things is, I think, one of the fundamental lessons of being a scientist. And you're still doing that

today, except you're doing it, I think, for us adults. And I thank you for that, Emily. We'll, I'm sure, have more to say about New Horizons, and we'll talk to some of those team members. I'm sure we'll get Alan Stern back on the show before long. He is a very happy man, isn't he? I'm sure he is, as are all the geologists on the team. And you've got to get some of those geologists, too. Absolutely. Our senior editor, the Planetary Evangelist for the Planetary Society,

is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Dante Loretta, the head of the OSIRIS-REx mission, leaving in probably less than a year now for an asteroid. Oh, those space mission acronyms. Here's a doozy. Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer. Put it all together and you get OSIRIS-REx, which makes it worth the trouble, in my opinion. The spacecraft will probably launch in September of 2016 and reach an asteroid called Bennu two years later.

Bennu is one of those near-Earth objects that crosses Earth's orbit, but that's just one of the many reasons it was targeted by Principal Investigator Dante Loretta and his team. Dante is a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. He's also an expert in near-Earth asteroid formation and evolution. We talked a few days ago via Skype. Dante, great to have you back on Planetary Radio. Welcome.

Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here. So it's been nearly a year and a half since we last checked in with you, but the mission has been mentioned much more frequently than that. What's the current status of the spacecraft? Right now we have a nearly complete spacecraft. We just have a few components that are showing up in the very near future, and we're about one month away from beginning spacecraft-level environmental tests. Wow. But there have been tests going on of individual components, right?

I saw some great images of this in your blog. Yeah. I mean, the components go through their own set of environmental qualifications. You know, we do what we call the shake-and-bake test and do the electromagnetic interference test and acoustic tests. But that all has to get repeated when the spacecraft comes together as a single flight system. And that is what's happening now. It tested individually, and then you put it all together, and you run it through all these things again? That's right, and we have a complete spacecraft.

I've been down onto the high bay floor at Lockheed Martin and gotten up close and personal to inspect it. I was actually surprised to see in your blog that that opportunity you had in, what, late June, early July, was the first time you'd actually been on the floor in the bunny suit. Yeah, well, you know, we're very worried about contamination. Our goal is to bring back a pristine sample. There's a lot of people that are working in that clean room, so I really time my opportunities to coincide with when the activity's kind of at a lull, so I don't add to the contamination budget unnecessarily. but he's kind of at a lull, so I don't add to the contamination budget unnecessarily.

Staying out of the way. Exactly. What are the milestones that are left as we build toward the opening of that launch window on September 3rd of next year? Yeah, so we've got our big environmental tests. So we go through the thermal vacuum chamber. We'll do a spin balance test, an electromagnetic interference test, an acoustics test. We'll do all of our deployments, make sure the solar arrays deploy, make sure the TAGSAM arm deploys, and can transfer the head into the sample return capsule. All of that's going to happen over a period of about seven months. And so in May of 2016, we ship down to Cape Canaveral, and we start stacking with the

Atlas V launch vehicle. What are the chances that you're actually going to lift off on the first day of that launch window, September 3rd? It's a very generous window. We have 39 days when we can get off the Earth and still get on the rendezvous trajectory with Bennu. That's much longer than most planetary missions have. We're actually hoping to go later in that window window around September 17th. That's kind of the lowest energy point of the whole timeline. And if we get off on that date or right around that date,

we'll actually have enough fuel on the spacecraft to maybe come home a year early, bring those samples back in 2022. That'd be fantastic. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Cut a year off of that long wait would be terrific. But there are so many factors that go into a decision like this, right? That's right. I mean, there's a lot of other launches that are stacking up around that same time frame. The GOES-R spacecraft, which is our big weather satellite for the United States, is trying to launch in that same time period. And we understand that. And one of the reasons we planned for such a long launch window was to give the agency flexibility for all the other assets that need to get into space.

I want to talk about the other instruments on the spacecraft. But first, tell us about TAGSAM, the long arm of OSIRIS-REx with that sample collector on the end. This is a pretty cool device. There's also some photos on my blog at dsloretta.com. So if you want to check those out, you can see the real flight hardware. So, yeah, it's a three meter long robotic arm. It has three joints at the shoulder, at the elbow, and the wrist, so we can articulate it over a range of angles. At the bottom of it is basically a giant air filter. I always like to say it would look right at home on a carburetor of a 56 shift.

It does look that way, yeah. It's pretty much the same function. It's there to catch the dirt, but this case coming off the surface of Bennu. So we push that filter down into the surface. That's the only element that actually makes contact with Bennu. And then we open up a bottle of high purity nitrogen gas and we just blow it down into the regolith.

It creates a vacuum cleaner kind of action. And as the gas expands, we suck all that soil and gravel into that filter head. How much material, ideally, do you hope to make it back to Earth with? Well, if we fill that head full, we'll have about two kilograms, which is an enormous amount of sample. Yeah. The TAGSAM itself is designed to pick up a minimum of 150 grams and that gives us a lot of margin on our science requirement of only 60 grams.

Then you've got that long trip home, maybe not five years, maybe four years if you get that September 17th launch you were talking about. But then you've got that harrowing time when that sample return capsule has to make it back down to the surface. Tell us about that. Yeah, so we're coming in about 28,000 miles per hour. The sample return capsule hits the top of the atmosphere. Most of that velocity is lost just through friction with the Earth's atmosphere. So we've got a massive heat shield at the front of the capsule to absorb all of that energy and keep the sample nice and cool. We're coming into the Utah test and training range, which is where

both the Stardust mission and the Genesis mission landed. Our capsule looks a lot like the Stardust capsule. The avionics have been upgraded for modern electronics and so forth, but it's the same basic design. And that was a very successful landing to bring those samples back from Cometville too. Long, long before that sample makes it back down here, you're going to be returning data from Bennu. Tell us about the instruments and what those instruments are going to tell us about this asteroid. Yeah, we're going to have a phenomenal asteroid characterization mission, and we're going to learn more about Bennu than has ever been learned from another asteroid. The mission-critical instruments are called OCAMs. That's the OSIRIS-REx camera suite.

They were built right here at the University of Arizona. There are three different imagers. The Polycam is a telescope that finds Bennu during approach, turned microscope that does high-resolution imaging of the surface when we're close. That's why we call it the Polycam. The MapCam is our mapping camera. It's got four color filters, which map to the eight color asteroid survey filter set, which is what the astronomers use to measure the colors of

asteroids and do basic classification. And it's going to get global maps of the asteroid surface, what we call our base map. We'll be using that for the geologic interpretation and obviously for sample site selection. And then we got the SamCam, which is a wide field of view that's taking images the entire time during the approach to the asteroid surface. And TAGSAM is right in its field of view. So we'll actually see TAGSAM touch the surface of Bennu, see the gas fire, see what happens. And then afterwards, we can bring TAGSAM right up close to SAMCam and take a look. Can we see sample? Do we see dust?

It just helps us decide if we've got a successful sample or not. Wow. Live from Bennu. Yeah. We're creating three different kinds of spectrometers, which are instruments that break light up into its constituent wavelengths, and you'll see signatures of minerals and chemicals. The first one is the visible and infrared spectrometer we call OVIIRS. It is going to look for organic molecules,

so it's got a special filter that's right in the wavelength region where organics have their features, and it'll help guide sample site selection by characterizing the composition of the surface. We've got the thermal emission spectrometer called OTES, which is measuring the heat that's radiating off the surface of the surface. We've got the thermal emission spectrometer called OTES, which is measuring the heat that's radiating off the surface of the asteroid. And it also has mineral signatures inside of it. And it's important for this investigation into the

Arkovsky effect, which is how that emitted heat changes the orbit of the asteroid. And then finally, we've got a student experiment called REXIS. It's the Regolith X-ray Imaging Spectrometer. It's looking at X-rays that are being fluoresced on the surface of Bennu. So an X-ray from the sun hits a chemical element like iron. It excites the electrons, which then decay back to their ground state and emit an X-ray that REXIS will detect, and we'll be able to detect the individual chemical elements on the surface of the asteroid. More of Dante Loretta and the OSIRIS-REx mission in a minute. We'll also talk about Dante's new game, Extronaut. This is Planetary Radio.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos, which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Mark. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV is not on TV?

That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Mark? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Casey Dreyer here, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. The New Horizons Pluto encounter was NASA at its best, but

did you know that it was almost cancelled twice? It was saved by thousands of space advocates who wrote and called Congress nearly a decade ago. Today, more missions are threatened by budget cuts, including a journey to Europa and the Opportunity Rover on Mars. I need you to join me and stand up for space.

Sign our petition to Congress today at planetary.org slash stand up. Pluto was just the beginning. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. OSIRIS-REx is the most ambitious mission to an asteroid ever. As you heard from Principal Investigator Dante Loretta in the first half of today's show, the spacecraft will vacuum up some of asteroid Bennu's surface and return it to Earth. Dante has also been telling us about the suite of sophisticated cameras and instruments carried by the probe, including three spectrometers. And there's yet another device.

And then finally, we've got the laser altimeter we call OLA. This fires a laser at the asteroid and measures how long it takes to bounce back and get collected at the receiver, and that tells us how far away we are. We can also scan it. We've got a mirror that rasters back and forth and build up three-dimensional topographic maps of the region of the asteroid that we're looking at. Pretty impressive suite, but I'm going to bet that like the Mars people we talked to, you're going to say that nothing compares with sample return. That's right. You really can't replace sample return for understanding the key questions that we're going after,

which is, did these carbonaceous asteroids contribute to the origin of life on Earth? Did they contribute the water for our oceans? What role did they play to the origin of life on Earth? Did they contribute the water for our oceans? What role did they play in the early history of our planet? You need precise laboratory analysis, sometimes at the parts per billion level, to make measurements of the compounds inside that sample. And you simply can't afford to do that on a spaceflight instrument. The other big advantage is, you know, we're bringing back a lot more sample than we need. In fact, we're not allowed to consume more than 25% of the sample once it's back on Earth.

The other 75% is held for future researchers and future generations. New instruments will be invented, new people will come along with new ideas. They'll still have these samples available for analysis for decades into the future. Very much has happened with the Apollo lunar samples. That's right. We're still analyzing Apollo lunar samples. We get new

information about the moon all the time from that collection, and that's going to continue as well. Very briefly, what makes Bennu an interesting target, other than the fact that it poses at least a tiny threat to our home planet? Then it was chosen kind of a combination of engineering constraints and science requirements. From the engineering side, we made some key decisions about the spacecraft right away. We weren't going to have a nuclear power source. That was not an option. We know we were going to have to go to solar power. Operating a solar-powered vehicle out of the main asteroid belt is a real challenge.

We needed something that stayed relatively close to the sun. We also weren't going to come up with a really complex thermal control system like the MESSENGER mission had at Mercury, that giant heat shield and dealing with that proximity to the sun. So we didn't want an asteroid that got too close, kind of like Goldilocks zone or the asteroid for the spacecraft. And then we needed something that you could launch from the Earth, rendezvous, and come back to the Earth with a reentry velocity that was encompassed by that Stardust design. You know, the Stardust capsule can come in at that 12.4 kilometers per second or that 28,000 miles per hour that I mentioned. If you get to something that's too inclined, the angle of its orbit is too high relative to that of the Earth,

that velocity goes way up, and our design wouldn't be able to handle that. So that set of constraints got us down to about two dozen asteroids. And then we went for the one that looked like it had the highest probability of a lot of organic material and hydrated phases like clays that have water inside of them to go after our key science questions. We still have a little bit of time left to talk about something that you've been doing in parallel to your leadership of this mission. It's called Extronaut, the Game of Solar System Exploration, and you are listed as the creator, the author. That's right.

I saw sort of a preliminary version of the Kickstarter page, and it's pretty cool. And you even got an endorsement from none other than Chris Lewicki, the head of Planetary Resources. Chris says that his crew has fun playing the game when they're not figuring out how to mine asteroids. It does look pretty fun. Cool game pieces, cool graphics. What were you all about here? What did you want to accomplish? My goal was to bring the excitement of planetary exploration to a wide audience and to teach people about some common misconceptions. And the one that

I encountered most often was people's understanding of what the rocket does for us on OSIRIS-REx. You know, we're really excited to buy the Atlas V launch vehicle. Most people think that the rocket itself is what's going to the asteroid. Most people don't understand that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is just a tiny little component at the very top of that stack of rocket fuel and engines. And so the game is all about building the rocket to get to a destination in the solar system. It has real physics in terms of the amount of energy that different kinds of rockets can provide to your spacecraft. It also introduces the political and other challenges that we face as a way to overcome in order to make your mission succeed.

Things like government shutdowns, projects getting canceled, financial audits. And that allows for a lot of interactive gameplay among the different players of the game. So science, engineering, and politics. That's right. Pretty important elements. Kind of all the things I have to deal with in my job, they all ended up in that game. Folks, stay tuned because guess what one of the prizes will be when we get to the What's Up Space Trivia Contest with Bruce later today.

You're going to be able to make available a prototype version of the game, Dante? That's right. The winner will get a prototype version of the game for playtesting. And not only that, they'll set up an appointment for a phone call with me to talk about what they liked, what they didn't like, as we go through the final design phase of the product. I bet that Dante would even be willing to answer a question or two if you have some about Bennu and Osiris Rex. Absolutely. if you have some about Bennu and OSIRIS-REx. Absolutely.

Dante, thank you so much. It has been a pleasure, and we sure look forward to continuing our coverage of the mission right up through the launch and its mission out there to Bennu and return to Earth. Thanks, Matt. It's my pleasure. Dante Loretta is a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. As principal investigator, he leads NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission,

scheduled to launch, as you heard, less than a year from right now. It arrives at near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2018 and will return with precious samples of that threat to our planet in 2023 or just possibly 2022. We'll return much sooner, just seconds away now, from What's Up with Bruce Betts. Back on Terra Firma now, joined by the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. Welcome back. Thank you, Matt. How are you doing?

Very well. Our show about SOFIA and particularly the little video that our colleague Merck put together have proven to be extremely popular. Very fun video and audio from a very fun event. Yeah, it was a great, I was going to say evening, but it was really all night. Alright, so what may be up there this evening as perhaps Sophia flies about again?

Well, it probably won't be looking, but you should check out Saturn in the south in the evening, and then the pre-dawns becoming the planet party. We've got super bright Venus highest up and then much dimmer reddish Mars and very low to the horizon in the pre-dawn east is Jupiter. We have another total lunar eclipse coming up

for the Americas, Africa, Europe and that will be the night of the 27th, 28th. I'll give some more information next week but don't miss it. Excellent. On to this week in space history. This one's for you, Matt. It is the 50-year anniversary of the first airing of Lost in Space. That's wonderful, but you know what that means.

That means that next year is the Star Trek 50th anniversary. But shouldn't you celebrate right now? Yes, I will. Ready? Warning! Warning! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! Oh, God, I couldn't even get the line right. Just move on before people notice.

On to Random Space Fact. Yeah, he had a much more human voice than that, I guess. And we may come back to that. Dun-dun-dun. But first, I guess. And we may come back to that. But first, I like to check in with Voyager 1 periodically, our farthest emissary from Earth of humanity. It is now more than 18 light hours away. So one way travel time, which means the round trip light time, if you want to have a conversation with Voyager 1, which people do, is more than a day and a half right now. I just love the Voyagers, don't you?

I do. I do. And they're both still working since 1977. All right, we move on to our trivia contest. And we asked you, what moon in our solar system is closest to the size of the Earth's moon besides the Earth's moon. How did we do? Great response to this. Lots of entries and every single one got it right.

Our winning entry came from Ryan Valley, a first-time winner out of San Diego, California, where I spent the weekend, in fact, celebrating my daughter's birthday. He said, it's Io, Jupiter's innermost moon, with all of its tons of volcanoes. That's a technical term I think he applied. He's correct? He is indeed correct. Io at 1,818 kilometers radius versus the moon's 1,737. And for those playing the home game, Europa is next in closest size to the moon, but smaller than the moon at 1,561 kilometers radius. So congratulations, Ryan. You are going to receive one of those 200-point itelescope.net accounts for remote astronomy

across the globe. Also a Planetary Radio t-shirt. We ask people if they respond on the forum, how do you listen? He said, podcast! And then he added, big fan of the show, always look forward to the next one. Keep up the good work so I can stay edumacated on the awesome universe that we inhabit. Tom Van Scotter. This is an age- old question, a controversy.

He says, is the name for Earth's moon really Luna or is that just the Latin translation? If not, what is our moon's name? It really should have one. We've named so many other moons in the solar system. He says he's going to call it Mo until somebody comes up with something better. The moon is its name because when people named it, it was the only one they knew about. And then, so if anything, the question should be,

what do we call other moons? And obviously they also get called natural satellites, but we call them moons because the first one was the moon. But moon is its name, although I do enjoy Mo and encourage cute nicknames for the Earth's moon. Yeah, it's the Moon, capital M. That's the best reasoning I've ever heard, because I've always thought it was kind of like calling your dog, Dog. And I do. So what's wrong with that? Nothing at all, of course. I have one more. You have to hear this.

We got the same thing, suggestion, basically, from Hudson Ansley in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and Jeff Thompson in Milton, Georgia. I'm going to read Jeff's response. What if Io was our moon? Can you imagine, he says, looking up and seeing a full Io in the sky? Or even better, a half Io with volcanic plumes jetting off the dark half. Wouldn't that be spectacular? Can we arrange that?

Can we put a request into NASA? We can. That would be super spectacular. Of course, the downer scientist in me says, yeah, but if we put Io there, it will stop having volcanism. But we'll probably get a little while. Yeah, just maybe it would last another 1,000 or 10,000 years. That'd be worth it. Oh, okay. Then let's go ahead and put the request Yeah, just maybe it would last another 1,000 or 10,000 years. That'd be worth it. Oh, okay.

Then let's go ahead and put the request in, and maybe it'll happen soon. Just amortize the cost. It would be awfully pretty. Yeah. All right. We're ready to move on. Again, in honor of Matt, something a little different than usual. Who played the voice of the robot in Lost in Space?

Who was the person who said, Danger, Will Robinson. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Get us your entry. Sorry, planetary.org slash radio contest. That's more like it. And you have until Tuesday, September 22nd at

8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. I can't remember his name, but I think he just passed away. I may be wrong about that. Yeah, recently. Okay. In the last two or three years. All right. And our prize, very, very special this time.

You know, we just finished talking to Dante Loretta, and we mentioned that we're going to give away a prototypical version of his new game. It's a board game called Extronaut. He described it. game called Extranaut. He described it, and that will be the prize this time around, along with the chance to join a group chat with Dante about the game, about the mission, and it's really a

very cool prize, I think. The Kickstarter, by the way, is doing pretty well. If you want to find it, you just go to kickstarter.com and search for Extranaut. Not bad, huh? Not bad at all. It's a proto-game, but it's really a nice, high-quality proto-game. All right, I think we're done.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about whether there really is danger, Will Robinson. Thank you, and good night. That's not Dr. Smith. That's Dr. Betts, Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology, who joins us every week here for What's Up. I hated that guy. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by its tens of thousands of international members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan, tweeting from at PlanRad. Clear skies.