Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - OSIRIS-REx: The Voyage to Bennu Begins, With Dante Lauretta

Episode Date: September 13, 2016

In two years a Near Earth Asteroid now known as Bennu will have a visitor from Earth. OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta reports on his mission’s successful launch.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're off to asteroid Bennu this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. On September 8th, OSIRIS-REx departed Earth on its seven-year mission to seek out the origin of our solar system. A very happy Dante Loretta, the mission's leader, will celebrate that launch with us. Bill Nye was at Cape Canaveral for the liftoff. He'll share his impressions. Later, Bruce Betts will reveal surprising facts about a Soviet space shuttle that never went to space.

We start with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, I just read your blog about what to look forward to for end of mission EOM for Rosetta. And I can tell you, it's giving me goosebumps for more than one reason. Yes, well, it is going to be very exciting to set the spacecraft down on the comet. And Rosetta is not going to survive the landing. It's going to crash into the comet at a very sedate pace, about 90 centimeters per second, a walking pace. But it's a spacecraft that was never designed to do that. Moreover, as soon as its high gain antenna tilts more than one degree off of Earth pointing, that'll be it for

communication. So it's going to be an exciting mission end all the way down. It's going to be checking out this pit on the comet that they've seen in the sides of it, these goosebump features. Earlier in the mission, they called them dinosaur eggs. And they think that possibly it's a relic of how the comet initially formed in the first place, which would be a very cool thing to check out. Extremely exciting. And these are called active pits. What do they mean by that? Well, they seem to be places where the comet has cometary activity, where you see comet jets coming out periodically. They're actually going to put the spacecraft down in a relatively flat area between two pits, one of them which is no longer active and one of them active. So they're going to be able to compare and contrast the two things.

they're going to be able to compare and contrast the two things. How close to the comet do they think they're going to be able to get and still return some pictures, some data? Well, they should be returning data all the way down. It's going to be a little difficult because the comet is actually very near solar conjunction, meaning that it's close to the sun and the sky, and it's at its maximum distance from Earth. So the data rate is not very high. They're working out right now how to just collaborate among all the instruments

to get the most they possibly can out of this last final science opportunity for Rosetta. There are lots of great images in your blog entry from September 9th that show the details of these pits and even where to find them on the comet. And you've helped us along by turning it in to this rather cute little creature. It can be really hard to navigate around the comet, but from one certain perspective, it looks like this kind of bulldoggy, gopherish animal. Some people have suggested a capybara. And the pits are right on the animal's muzzle, so you can go find them that way. Yeah, they are clearly visible and it's worth finding in that blog entry.

One last thing, you mentioned how they're figuring out how to get the data back. It's not like they're going to be able to record some of it and send it later, is it? Nope, it all has to happen in real time until the bitter end. And then it's over, right? The spacecraft turns off.

That's right, the spacecraft turns off its transmitter. It passivates itself so that it won't be polluting the airwaves with errant transmissions anymore. Passivate. I love that. All right. It's all here in the blog. As you heard, it's a September 9th entry from Emily. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. And where will you be when the end of mission takes place, Emily? I'm going to be where I was for the Philae landing, right there at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. Thank you so much.

Look forward to checking in with you while you're there for this big finish to a great mission. And we'll move on now to the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Ho-hum, Bill. Just another launch last week. No big deal, right? Yeah, it was nothing. It was fine. No, it was amazing.

The OSIRIS-REx launch on its way to asteroid Bennu, formerly 1999 RQ36, which is a great name. Yeah, just great. We went with Bennu, and the guy who named it is a Planetary Society member. At the time he named it, Mike Puzio was eight years old. Now he's somewhat older. He's 12, but he'll soon be 13. And he, really everybody, this guy did the research about the Egyptian myths associated with Osiris, and he came up with really the best name. Bennu is when this heron spirit comes back to Earth after Osiris's brother kills him, the way you do.

And so it was really, it was cool. I got to introduce him to Charlie Bolden, the administrator of NASA, right before this picture-perfect launch. And, you know, when you've been to as many launches as I have, Matt, you start comparing them. So, everybody, this rocket is an Atlas V, which has a conventional Russian-built, very good engine.

And then strapped to the side of it was a solid rocket booster. So you got two different colors of smoke as the thing went up. And when it's strapped to the side, it's kind of crooked. It flies a little bit tilted. It's crazy. And you just ask yourself, I wonder if they thought of that. And they did, apparently. It was beautiful. And so to Planetary Society members, thank you all so much for your support. You were just one of my colleagues who attended the launch. We were there in force.

That's right. We were there in force. Some donors came, and we got some nice special tours for them. We got some good vantage points, and it was really great. And I did a little talk about the passion, beauty, and joy, the PB&J of space exploration, bringing out the best in us, answering the two deep questions, are we alone in the universe? And this one especially, where did we come from? That's what this mission to asteroid Bennu is all about.

So everybody just think about this. It's the summer of 2016. This thing will return in 2023, August of 2023. And that's just inherently optimistic. It's this vision that we can accomplish these great things. We can do rocket science to within seconds over millions of kilometers in deep space. It's fantastic. Did you get to say hello to the gentleman that we're going to welcome back to the show in just a few seconds here, Dante Loretta? Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Yeah, we all said hello, but he was working. He was busy. But we all greeted him. It was great. It was really good. Thank you, Bill. As mentioned, Dante Loretta coming up in just moments here on Planetary Radio. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society.

That's Bill Nye, the science guy. Three, two, one. And liftoff of OSIRIS-REx, its seven-year mission to boldly go to the asteroid vendor and back. to the asteroid Bennu and back. Sitting in the United Launch Alliance Atlas Spaceflight Operations Center, watching his spacecraft leave for Bennu, was the principal investigator for the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer, otherwise known as OSIRIS-REx.

Dante Loretta is a professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab. He joined me from there via Skype just hours before this week's show was produced. Dante, welcome back to Planetary Radio and congratulations. Thank you, Matt. It is very, very good to be here. I'm so excited from the events of last week. It is very, very good to be here. I'm so excited from the events of last week.

We already heard some of the enthusiasm that people had down there at the Cape from my boss, Bill Nye, who we talked to just a few moments ago about his participation in the launch. He said he got to say hello to you, but you were kind of busy. It was an amazing experience last week for the launch of OSIRIS-REx. So many thousands of people came out to wish us well on our journey. Bill Nye was a huge hit. I know my family members were super excited to have met with him as well. He was able to greet Michael Puzio, who was the winner of the Joint Planetary Society OSIRIS-REx Name That Asteroid contest. the amount of people who came to me afterwards and said what an amazing emotional experience this was. You know, I felt it. There was the whole world went with us on Thursday to Bennu. Absolutely. And, you know, anybody who witnesses a launch, and unfortunately, I only got to see it on YouTube this time. I wish I'd been able to join you. But anybody who witnesses a launch picks up that thrill. But for you, the PI, after years of work on this, I got to ask the typical cliche reporter question.

You've kind of told us, but how did it feel to see that going up into space? Yeah, the day we launched OSIRIS-REx was really almost a transcendental experience for me. I mean, we had worked so hard, so many of us, for so long to get to this point. We'd lost some people, and they were in our thoughts quite a bit, Michael Drake especially. Launch was dedicated to him. He was my mentor, former director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory here at the University of Arizona, and the original principal investigator. So, you know, I thought about him quite a bit, especially on the drive in to the ASOC, the operations center.

And then actually being on console, I had my own station in the mission director's center to the ASOC, the operations center. And then actually being on console, I had my own station in the mission director center at the ASOC. I was able to pull up all the telemetry pages I wanted. Super geeky for a rocket geek like myself. I just loved it. I went through every telemetry page and I watched all the data coming in. And then at the actual countdown and launch, I just went stone still and just locked on to all the key parameters and wished Osiris-Rex Godspeed. You know, I'm going to put up a link to the video that goes with the audio we just played of that exciting launch. And there is a wonderful shot. It's in very telephoto, very much a long shot. You're watching the rocket rise up off of the

pad and there is a woman with her arm around someone, and she just points her other hand straight up. And it just really captures the moment and the excitement. It was a great thing to see. I also liked what the communicator was saying as he narrated the launch. Even though we just played it, I'm not going to remember precisely, but he said to boldly go to an asteroid and return, which is the key, of course, isn't it? Yeah, September 8th was a faded day for us, in my opinion. First of all, the weather in Florida cooperated beautifully, and we've been having terrible weather just the week before. And our original launch date was September 3rd. We changed it due to manifest issues,

and we would not have gone, I don't think, if September 3rd had stayed. So we were just meant to go on September 8th, and of course it coincided with the fantastic 50th anniversary of the first episode of Star Trek. Huge influence on me personally and many of my colleagues and friends around the world. Yep, me too, of course, as our audience knows very well. Okay, you're in space. We heard the spacecraft separate from the booster. What's the current status? I know you just came from a staff briefing. OSIRIS-REx is in fantastic shape. All of our deployments went as planned. We got our solar arrays out. We were able to slew the arrays into the cruise phase orientation. They are on full-on sun. We're fully powered. Our batteries are charged. Communication system worked almost instantly. We had two-way uplink, downlink with the Deep Space Network station in

Canberra very quickly after separation. And we've transitioned into what we call our outbound cruise phase, which is where the spacecraft background sequence takes care of a lot of the minute-to-minute stuff. And we check in on it just once a day. And we also implemented our first maneuver on the propulsion system to do some momentum desaturation. So the prop is working. Everything about the spacecraft seems really perfectly healthy. And OSIRIS-REx is excited to get to Bennu. Fantastic. What's happening over the next couple of years as you make this long trip to asteroid Bennu? Will the spacecraft hibernate as Rosetta did on its way to the comet?

Now, we have a pretty busy calendar of activities, actually, over the next two years. In just a few days, on September 19th, we'll be turning on the science instruments for the first time, making sure that they're okay and they survive launch. So we still have that checkout to go through. We will be doing some, hopefully, observing science. I won't spill the beans on what that is, but we got some plans just for the outbound cruise phase to make some observations that could lead to some fun, interesting science discoveries. We come back to the Earth one year from now in September of 2017 for our gravity assist maneuver. That changes the inclination of OSIRIS-REx to six degrees to match that of Bennu's orbit.

And then we're only eight months away from the approach phase. We'll be going through a lot of readiness tests, making sure all our software on the ground is working, making sure the science team is integrated and can produce the products that we need to select that sample site. So it'll be active and fun and a very busy time for the team. That's Osiris Rex, Principal Investigator Dante Loretta. He'll be back with us in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system.

You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here with big news from the Planetary Society. We're rolling out a new membership plan with great benefits and expanded levels of participation. At the Planetary Society, passionate space fans like you join forces to create missions, nurture new science and technology, advocate for space, and educate the world.

Details are at planetary.org forward slash membership. I'll see you around the solar system. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Dante Loretta leads the OSIRIS-REx mission that just lifted off for near-Earth asteroid Bennu. He told us just before the break that the spacecraft has a fairly busy two years ahead before it reaches Bennu on August 17, 2018. And he hinted at even more. You addressed my next question, but you said you can't spill the beans,

and it was going to be, will there be any science on your way to the asteroid? I suppose the answer is yes. Nothing is approved yet, and we have an approval process that we need to go through, but you can bet that we've got some ideas and some things that we could observe on the way out to Bennu that would be really substantial if they turned out to be positive detection. All right, you've whetted our appetite. I'm going to leave that as a secret for you

guys to play along with us. Will you promise to come back on the show when you're ready to conduct some of that science, assuming it goes forward? I'll always promise to come back, Matt, and talk to Planetary Radio. You guys have been good friends of ours. Thank you very much. That's kind, Dante.

Okay, two years from now, roughly, you arrive at the asteroid. What's it going to take for OSIRIS-REx to get, well, into orbit, basically, but to sidle up next to that, I was going to call it a big rock, but it's so much more than that. Yeah, OSIRIS-REx has a really amazing mission profile for the asteroid encounter. NASA used to have a saying for their planetary exploration, which was flyby, orbit, land, rove, and return samples. And that was meant to be a programmatic description of how you approach Mars or other interesting

body. OSIRIS-REx does all of that. You know, we'll start out by doing flybys of the asteroid. We'll get some good images. We'll measure the mass of the body. We'll build a shape model. That'll be enough information for the flight dynamics team to plan an orbit insertion. When they go into orbit, it's really their phase. We're not doing dedicated science observations. It's all about them learning how to fly the spacecraft and particularly how to transition to what we call landmark tracking

optical navigation, using images of features on the surface to determine where the spacecraft is relative to the asteroid. It's going to take a while for that to get in line. Then we begin the global mapping phase. We'll do it from also flybys and standoff distances, and again from orbit in a science orbit, ultimately leading down to sample site selection, rehearsal, and then tag sample collection. What a day that's going to be. You know, you talked about them needing to sort of learn how to fly the spacecraft when it's in close proximity to Bennu. Do they have to take into account the gravity of the asteroid? I mean, really, it can't be much, right? Escape velocity is not much more than zero. Well, we will be putting the spacecraft into orbit around Bennu. So absolutely,

the mass and the gravity field of the asteroid are critical for that maneuver. It's not all of the force on the spacecraft. There's a lot of other forces like solar radiation pressure and outgassing from the spacecraft and thermal emission from the asteroid that are substantial, especially compared to the small gravity field of Bennu. They have to take into account all of those to figure out where the spacecraft's going to be as they do their orbit determination into the future. So when the time comes to sidle right up to Bennu and kiss it, that's going to happen more than once. You talked about roving, but you're kind of going to pop a little bit. We're kind of hovering. We only want to make contact with the surface once, but we'll do a lot of really close approaches, get high-resolution imaging, make sure that the site that we're targeting for the TAGSAM device to collect the samples looks appropriate for the capabilities of that mechanism. But the plan is one successful sampling event. So we go down, we make contact once, we collect the sample, and we're done.

If we need to, we have reserves and contingency plans for two additional sampling attempts, but those would only be used in the event that the first one did not get a sample. We've talked a lot on this show with you, but also separately, about the amount of sample material that you might be able to pick up, and it's pretty substantial. OSIRIS-REx, if it succeeds like we hope, it will be the largest sample return since the Apollo era. And we're looking at a minimum of 60 grams to meet the science requirements. That's about two ounces. We're looking at about one and a half times that, I'm sorry, two and a half times that for what the TAGSAM was designed to. And if we really get the full capability of TAGSAM,

we'll get over four pounds of material back on Earth. You got good instruments on board. Other instruments have examined asteroids in situ, essentially. And of course, we get those nice meteorites that land here. Remind us why it's so important to get these samples back to labs here on Earth. I heard a really great quote that kind of explains this from one of the other scientists on the program. Trying to understand the history of the solar system by looking at meteorites is similar to trying to understand the formation of the Rocky Mountains by digging in the ground in Kansas. You'll certainly get some tantalizing clues that what happened out there, but you really got to go up and you got to see the mountains and you got to see the context and you got to see the larger structures which are generating those samples. So you're really starting to connect it to real objects in the

solar system and through our dynamical models to events that happened in the main asteroid belt. So it's just going to give us a much better ability to analyze even the meteorites we have. We're hopeful that we're going to maybe get material that doesn't exist in our meteorite collections because it's so friable and fragile, concentrated in small grains on the surface of the asteroid. So it'll probably represent a different material no matter what, just because of the nature of the environment from which it was collected. And you've got a pretty well-proven system for getting that stuff back down through re-entry here to the surface. Absolutely. OSIRIS-REx is using a heritage design from the very successful Stardust Comet sample return mission.

And so we have updated the electronics in that device to bring it up to modern components and things like that. But the basic air design, the parachute, the whole reentry profile, the recovery procedure, and even the delivery and opening of the capsule in Johnson Space Center, all of that follows the path that Stardust laid out for us. Osiris-Rex Investigator Dante Loretta. He's a professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, an expert in near-Earth asteroid formation and evolution, and what these can tell us about the origin and chemical evolution of the solar system.

He's also the creator of Extronaut, the game of solar system exploration, available from Amazon. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. We're going to talk about the night sky and some really fun stuff about space shuttles, some of which never flew. We'll get to that. Yes, yes. Let's start with the sky.

Venus is getting higher and higher up in the early evening after sunset in the west. Super bright. It'll get easier to see over the coming weeks. And we've got Saturn and Mars in the south in the early evening, hanging out together, Saturn yellowish, Mars reddish. We move on to this week in space history. Two weeks in a row for you, Matt. 1965, lost in space permit. Yeah, I Matt. 1965 Lost in Space Permission. Yeah, I know.

It's incongruous. I'm a huge Trek fan, but I also liked Lost in Space. Danger. Danger, Matt Kaplan. Danger. What a stupid show. We move on to... to round-of-space.

Fact. And I'm sorry, that's all the time we have for today. That was it. Sorry. X-rays and gamma rays, as well as some other wavelengths of light from space, do not make it through Earth's atmosphere to the surface, getting absorbed by the atmosphere. That is why space-based telescopes or at least high-altitude balloon observations are required to see the universe in those high-energy wavelengths. We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you about space shuttle orbiters. I asked,

shuttle orbiters. I asked, what is the only space shuttle orbiter to travel by land, sea, and air? And I knew it was shady, but it was apparently even shadier than I realized. So tell us, Matt, tell us about this. Indeed. You had in mind Enterprise, right? Yes. The test flight model of the space shuttle, the U.S. space shuttle, that was used in drop tests from an aircraft. So flew that way and was driven around on land and then took a water barge to its home at the museum now, the Intrepid, at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum in New York. We have a winner. Kim McIntyre. Kim McIntyre in Longwood, Florida, said, indeed, Orbiter Enterprise made that last little trip to its home at the Intrepid Museum. It was taken there on a barge. Norman Kassoon, listener, was the only one who sent us an actual photo of Enterprise on the barge being dragged

across New York Harbor. We did also get an entry from George Brocklehurst, who claims that he wrote the entry, wrote or sent us this message, standing under Enterprise at the Intrepid Museum. Did he take a selfie? No. But he was there. I believe him. All right. I'll buy it too. But really, come on. Okay. Now here's where it gets interesting. Well, let me first mention, I thought it was a little shady that I was asking about a space shuttle orbiter that didn't actually fly in space, but still it is a space shuttle orbiter, but it turns out there's more. It gets so great. We had three entries, Pietro Carboni, Marcel Jan Kragsman, and Neil Ashelman, who came up with an alternative to Enterprise. They said Space Shuttle Buran, the Soviet Space Shuttle, also used those three other modes of transportation and flew in space. You discovered they weren't quite correct.

No, it turns out the actual one Buran flew a flight in space. It was destroyed in a collapse of the warehouse that it was in in Kazakhstan several years ago in a tragedy that killed some people. Turns out there was kind of the Enterprise equivalent of the Buran that was used for flight tests in Earth's atmosphere, just like Enterprise was for the space shuttle. And it turns out it also traveled by land, sea, and air because it took a barge to its home at a museum in Germany. But it also went to so many other places, Bahrain, Australia. It's a great story.

And this model was known as, you go ahead. Well, no, you were so excited. I just read it as letters, but Matt got something more out of its letter designation. OK Glee, OK GLI. read it as letters, but Matt got something more out of its letter designation. OKGLEE. OKGLEE. It's got to be OKGLEE, right? Yeah. It's the official OKGLEE, Baran Shuttle Test Orbiter Vehicle, which also would have been a valid answer probably. So remember our show talking to the band OKGO and they did their weightless or

microgravity music video. Wouldn't it have been great? OK Go on OK Glee. It would have been. It would have been. OK. That entertained Matt so very much. We are going to send Kim McIntyre

a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society, say it with me now, rubber asteroid. And a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, that worldwide non-profit network of telescopes that you can

point anywhere in the universe if you like, if you win, and even if you don't, you can get your own account. We're going to stick with that prize package for the person chosen by random.org who gets this next question correct. For spacecraft not headed to or near the moon, so not Apollo program spacecraft is basically what I'm saying, what human mission had the highest apogee or the highest point in its orbit from the Earth? So what human mission got the farthest from Earth the highest point in its orbit from the Earth? So what mission, human mission, got the farthest from Earth that wasn't headed to the moon? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. Very cool. You have until the 20th, that's Tuesday,

September 20th, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what you think the Planetary Society studio might look like on the inside, where we sit right now inside a former bank vault. It's impossibly cool. That's all I can tell you, folks. You know what else is impossibly cool? Me? Yes, of course. But I went to see, I went to JPL, as you know, to visit with Linda Spilker today, one of her regular visits. So of course I had to buy you a gift. Yay! Yay! Yay! You ready?

This one's really good. That is really good. It's a Hot Wheels Curiosity Rover. That's awesome. Thank you, man. You're welcome. You're the best. Do you think it runs on the Hot Wheels track? Will they maybe put Hot Wheels track across a Martian landscape?

Wouldn't that be cool? They actually did. They just remove it. They Photoshop it out. Wait, I wasn't supposed to say that out loud. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology and Farce at the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up? Zoom Zoom.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its Bennu Beneficent members. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies. guys.