Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live Defends Planet Earth!

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

Leaders of the global effort to avoid a catastrophic Near Earth Object impact gathered at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference. On the evening of May 1st, The Planetary Society partnered in an exciting PDC public event at the University of Maryland College Park. Presentations by Society CEO Bill Nye and NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green were followed by Planetary Radio Live. Join Mat Kaplan and his outstanding guests who are trying to save the world. The evening rolled on through a live version of What’s Up with Bruce Betts.You can learn more about this week’s guests and topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0508-2019-2019-pdc-planetary-radio-live.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Defending Our World at the Planetary Defense Conference, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Ed Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. The International Academy of Astronautics has just completed the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference. The Planetary Society was there as a participant and sponsor, and we helped create a live public event on the evening of May 1st. I was there to host Planetary Radio Live right after the outstanding presentations by NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green and Society CEO Bill Nye. Here is the wonderful Planetary Radio Live conversation we recorded that evening, followed on stage by a live What's Up with Bruce Betts.

This is Planetary Radio Live. We are at the University of Maryland College Park. Make some noise, Terps! I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. I am thrilled to be here for the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference. Scientists, planners, government officials, media types like me, gather every couple of years to share what we've learned about near-Earth objects, or NEOs. These fascinating asteroids and comets would be worthy of study, even if they didn't

pose a threat to civilization, but they do. That underlying theme is always present at these gatherings. In a moment, we're going to meet five of the experts who are here with hundreds of their colleagues. It's a really distinguished group, and I know you're going to enjoy hearing from them. Later, we'll welcome Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts to the stage for this week's What's Up with a live space trivia contest and some rubber asteroids to toss out. So let's get to it. First up, and we're just doing them in order here, Nancy Chabot is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. She was my guest not long ago when I was at APL,

and she's back tonight primarily to talk about the amazing DART mission. That's a Near Earth Asteroid Impactor mission that we will be talking to her about a little bit later in the conversation. She is the DART coordination lead. Johns Hopkins, by the way, Johns Hopkins University, is one of the primary sponsors of the Planetary Defense Conference. So please welcome Nancy. Businesses Gerhard Drolshagen chairs the UN-mandated Space Missions Planning Advisory Group. That's S-M-P-A-G. It is really one of those great

space acronyms. You know what they say? Same page. I think it's because we may regret it if we don't all get on the same page regarding the asteroid threat. He has headed the group since its creation in 2014 and has been with ESA, the European Space Agency, for over 30 years. ESA is another of the PDC's primary sponsors. Please welcome Gerhard. Kelly Fast is here from NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is part of the Planetary Science Division of the space agency. She is the Near Earth Object Observations Program Manager. You ready? Guess where she got her PhD in astronomy? That's right, she's a Terrapin! Kelly conducted a lot of research at the Goddard Space Flight Center before moving to NASA HQ. She is the program scientist for the Infrared Telescope Facility on a mountain in Hawaii and the deputy program scientist for the MAVEN mission,

which is currently orbiting Mars and tasting the atmosphere of that planet. It's a really terrific mission. the atmosphere of that planet. It's a really terrific mission. You will not be surprised to hear that NASA is also a primary sponsor of the Planetary Defense Conference. Mathematician Rudiger Jena, and I hope I got it halfway right, thank you Rudiger, and his European Space Agency colleague Detlef Koshny co-manage ESA's Planetary Defense Office within the Space Safety Office. Now, as such, he's the European counterpart of NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, Lindley Johnson. Lindley, who is sitting out in the audience right now, and actually who nominated all these panelists for us to talk to. Wave, Lindley. Say hi, Lindley. There he is.

There he is. So you saw some of the telescopes that NASA supports and or operates, which are looking for these objects up there. The European Space Agency is doing the same thing, and all of this work has to be carefully coordinated. And that's some of what we will talk about in a moment. Last up on our panel is Carrie Nugent. She is a professor of computational physics and planetary science at Olin College.

Her research focuses on asteroid detection. She's an ace science communicator. She likes to remind audiences, this is a line we hear a lot, that an asteroid impact is the only natural disaster that we have the technology to prevent. She is also a TED senior fellow. I highly recommend you check out her 2016 TED Talk, which is about all of this stuff. She is the author of Asteroid Hunters, and she hosts her own podcast competition for us, the SpacePod podcast. Please welcome Carrie Nugent. So Carrie, you're last up, but I'll give you the first question. Having the technology, as you've pointed out, that we essentially have, it's still being

refined. We're still a long ways from being prepared to deal with those big rocks that are headed our way, right? Absolutely. I just want to take a second to thank you for having us here. I know everyone here loves talking about asteroids, and it's just a real pleasure to tell you guys about this. So, yes, as you said, an asteroid impact is the only natural disaster we have the technology to prevent. And that's like a very surprising thing to most people to learn. we have the technology to prevent. And that's like a very surprising thing to most people to learn because, you know, in movies and TV shows, an asteroid impact is always like a metaphor for an act of God.

It's like standing in, it's like a symbolism for things humans can't control at all. But it turns out that if you study the physics of asteroids, you can learn that you can actually prevent an impact. And we're going to talk more about this, I'm sure. But the key to this is that asteroid orbits are very predictable so if we can measure an asteroids orbit we can generally predict for most of them are going to be several dozen years in advance if we really like buckle down and study something really closely we can learn where they're gonna be hundreds of years in advance which is

crazy so now you can start to understand that if you have hundreds of years or maybe decades to prepare you can really build something and design something really cool that will get this asteroid out of the way. The key is getting that time, right? You want to observe the sky now, you want to map the asteroid population, and you really want to know what's out there, so that you can figure out if something's coming and do something about it. And that's what this conference is all about. There's people from all over the world gathered here to talk about finding asteroids, and there's a lot of really great work done in this field. Looking around this audience, you can see they're all brilliant and well-informed, but for the few who may not be aware of it, please define a near-Earth object, a NEO. Absolutely. So there's lots of planets in the solar system, and then there's lots of smaller things, and we can fight about what they're

called, but don't necessarily have to right here. And the much smaller things are distributed all throughout the solar system. So there's things that hang out by Pluto, and there's a whole bunch of things in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. And then there's the various near-Earth asteroids that hang out close to Earth's orbit, and I like to think of them as neighbors. It's always good to get to know your neighbors. You know, sometimes they're friendly, and that's great, and sometimes they're not friendly, and you want to know them anyways, so you can be aware of it. Near-Earth asteroids get close to Earth's orbit. There's also near-Earth comets,

which get close to Earth's orbit, and if you just want to call asteroids and comets the same thing, we call those near-Earth objects or NEOs. So you hear us toss around NEOs quite a bit. Kelly, how many of them are out there? For the near-Earth objects, the ones that we know about,

we actually just went past 20,000, the 20,000 mark, so. Which is a good thing. Yeah, that was a big milestone for us. A lot more to find? That's the thing, a lot more to find, yes. It depends on what size you're talking about. From the large ones, we think we have a pretty good handle on things that are one kilometer and larger in size. Thankfully, they're larger, they're easier to find, and they would do more damage, and probably found like 98% of those. Don't find too many every year, but it's the ones that are smaller that are still you could cause regional damage on Earth. We use a metric of 140 meters and larger in size. Estimated about 25,000 of them out there, and we're only about a third of the way there, working our way through.

All right, but we're making progress. Making progress. Nancy, you've got a slide. This is impressive. It gives us some really dramatic comparison. Talk a little bit about this. Well, this is going back to the DART mission that we were talking about a little earlier, which is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission, the one that we're going to run into that binary asteroid in order to see how asteroid deflection might work. The one that you are coordinating all the science for. The one that I'm the coordination lead for,

but I guess I'll take this opportunity since we're doing audience interaction. There's a lot of other people on the DART team here, from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and also University of Maryland and scientists. So if you're on the team, can you like stand up? Go ahead. That's all right as Bill says they're just trying to save the world. And it takes a team, obviously. So, yeah, we've got a whole team of people. And the graphic that was up a second ago was just showing the relative sizes because it's a good idea to sort of see what are we really talking about here.

And so this is a double asteroid system, hence the name of the mission. The two asteroids there, Didymos A is the bigger one. Didymos B is the smaller moon one. That's the one we're going to impact with the little spacecraft. It's got really long solar panels. And if the solar panels are all the way spun out, it's like 19 meters. But actually, the body of the spacecraft is only about two meters or so. So sort of person-sized.

Perhaps I could add at this time, I mean, also, ESA is planning a mission which hopefully goes through this HERA mission to look what happened after that had impacted. How big is the crater? How effective was the deflection? So this is all contributing to learn and also support the same page in a real case, what can we do? Rudiger, was I more or less correct when I said that your work is roughly equivalent

to NASA's Planetary Defense Office, the work that you and Detlef do? Yes, absolutely. We in Europe, we always try to copy NASA. They are our big idols, so we follow your approach, and I try to do the same in Europe with a little bit less money, but more or less, yes. But you make it, you stretch it pretty far, I would say. We try our best, yeah. NASA's doing a lot of work from the ground to find these near-Earth objects. ESA's also very involved.

We have got some nice telescopes. I have to admit that the discoveries are 99% done by the U.S. surveys, Pan-STARRS, Catalina. So we are building the flyer telescope, which you see in the lower left corner So we try to catch up there as well, but it's not yet there Currently we use our telescope mainly for follow-ups when Catalina or pan's last discover a new object The very first moment we just see a little motion in the sky It moves a few pixels and we don't know is it an impactor? Is it a main

builder, is it just one of the friendly neighbors or the bad neighbors. And that's when we come in and we point our telescope to follow up to find them again. If we find them six hours later, 12 hours later, one day later, then we have enough observations to make a nice orbit and know whether they are dangerous or just friendly neighbors. Because you can't just find them, we've got to know where they're going. Yes. I'm going to come back to you in just a second, but Kelly, because Rudiger mentioned

Pan-STARRS and the Catalina Sky Survey, could you tell us what those are? Yes, those are telescopes that are supplied by Pan-STARRS by the University of Hawaii and the Catalina Sky Survey by the University of Arizona. And NASA funds them to scan the skies every night to looking for asteroids that haven't yet been discovered. And they're special telescopes that can look at wide swaths of the sky to try to see asteroids in the star field there, something moving against the stars. When they find those discoveries, possible discoveries, they report them immediately to the Minor Planet Center,

which is the clearinghouse for information on positions of small bodies, any kind of small body in the solar system. And then they're put on a website. As Rüdiger was saying, other observatories will then go after those and get more observations so that you have enough observations to get a long enough arc that you can get an orbit and figure out where it is, where it's been, and where it's going. Rudiger, what's this next slide? Why does it start with a wanted poster?

Exactly. There is this object, 2017 RH16. This was for more than a year on our top wanted list. These are the asteroids which might hit the Earth. We don't know whether they hit the Earth. We have a few data. We have seen them in the sky and they pose a risk. We have currently 850 of these candidates in our catalog. These are objects which risk larger than zero that they will hit the Earth in the next 100 years. And we have to search for them. Are they really a danger or not?

And in this case, after a really careful search, we found where it was and we could confirm that it is actually not on a collision course. We removed it from our risk list and we could tick it off. Here you see the 10 most risky objects. Just yesterday we took our 10 meter telescope pointing at one object and usually after we see it, they drop or they completely, the risk is eliminated. In this case now we have a new number four

because we discovered it at a point where it's still dangerous, but I can assure you it's the year 2080 when the impact risk is so we still have some time to react so this really is like the FBI most wanted list except these are cosmic threats cosmic criminals yeah at least potentially criminals Gerhard let's get to your work for ESA the European Space Agency and the SMP SMPAG, same page. What does it do? Well, I mean, I liked very much the presentation by Bill Nye because he more or less already explained it. I mean, he showed impacts have happened all the time. Impacts have happened everywhere in the world. And he also showed there are potentially very different methods

in deflecting them, preventing an impact. But it was realized some time ago that you need a coordination, and best some type of worldwide coordination. It's not possible that one, in case of a real impacting threat, decides, oh, we move it this way and we use a nice mirror piece, or the other one prefers a big bang and they want to move it the other way so you need some coordination and after years of discussion the united nations decided two groups should be established to coordinate worldwide the activities iawn that's called i1

we decided to pronounce it and on the right you have this group same page that you already mentioned It's a network to find objects to calculate the orbit and put if required to give warnings and the same page they deal with potential methods to deflect an object to Coordinate ways to coordinate research and potentially also also to reach consensus what should be done. I must say, and here in this connection it shows how they interact with each other, with the parent governments, and then on top also to inform the United Nations. There you see again some acronyms. Actually, I must say, I think we have much cooler acronyms than what we have heard before. These are much more difficult to remember. So on top is the United Nations Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space

and then the Office of Outer Space Affairs. So they could deal worldwide distributing the information. And the aim of this group is to coordinate activities to be ready in case a real one is heading towards us. So there is a protocol. We have this process that begins with these groups, and if they perceive a real threat and it's time to alert the world, that happens in this way? More or less, yes. I mean, the I-1 is the one who should issue a warning, and some procedures are still being

worked out. We have the process of doing it. And same page who look at the potential space mission to deflect an object will only get into action if the object is big enough and the risk is high enough. Actually, we will only consider a space mission if the object is bigger than about 50 meters and has a higher than 1% impact chance.

And some procedures are still being worked out on this, but it's an ongoing work and we are really looking at options what could be done. I mean, all these nice methods presented, they can be applied depending on the size of the object and how much time you have to deflect it. And we've got a slide that you've provided as well that goes through at least four of these techniques. Others have been suggested, but I guess these are the main candidates. These are some of the main candidates. On the top left, you have a standoff nuclear explosion.

On the top right, a kinetic impactor. And actually, the DART mission is exactly trying to do this. At the bottom left, there is this gravity tractor having a heavy spacecraft that's just trying to slowly pull the asteroid away. And on the right, I mean, there are two options. You can fire at this. We have seen the mirror bees, but you can do it with a single laser. Also with an ion beam, you can try to push the object away. And there are at least a dozen methods that have been proposed. I think these are some of the more realistic ones that are being considered. But laser bees sound so much better than ion bees.

That is a great lead-in to DART, which we've already heard a little bit about. Nancy, you gave us a little bit of an introduction, and we know roughly how big it is now. But tell us what you're up to here, you and the DART team. Me and the DART team are building a spacecraft to run into an asteroid, so that's pretty much what we're up to. Yeah, kinetic impactor technology. Right now this mission is going to be NASA's first dedicated planetary defense mission to do these technologies, to demonstrate this technology of a kinetic impactor

where you would nudge the position of an asteroid slightly just to change its path going forward. DART is scheduled to launch in July of 2021, so that's not very far off. So when I say people are starting to build, we really are. Some of the prototype parts are getting together, things are actually coming together,

people are writing the computer codes to make this possible. Impact is going to be in late September of 2022. So we've had other spacecraft, even all the way back to Deep Impact, which impacted something, a comet, right? Much more recently, much more gentle impacts, if you will, like Hayabusa 2, the very successful JAXA, Japanese Space Agency mission, OSIRIS-REx, studying its rubble pile now.

Is this really the first time that we're going to see if we can change the trajectory of an object? Well, so what we're doing with this in particular, too, is this asteroid that we're targeting, this Didymos b, the moonlet that's going around the main asteroid, the one that we showed on that other graphic was about the size of the Great Pyramid, if you would. This is the sort of size that we were just talking about, which is the one that you really wanna kind of

do the test on, because it's the one that poses potentially the largest threat, potentially, if you would find it. There's a lot of those out there. We're still looking to find them, one of those there. So we're just doing this test now on one that we can, that's very applicable to the situation as compared to the cometary or the small impact that Hayabusa did, which we're still learning a lot from. Also, what really makes this mission special is that we can make this measurement. We're going to this double asteroid. That's

really key to enabling this mission. How does that work? Well, it's very clever, actually. So DART is a very focused mission. It's going to run into this smaller asteroid. You want to see how much you've moved it, though, right? You're not going to be able to do that with the spacecraft, the same spacecraft, because trust me, it's going to be going at 15,000 miles per hour and it will be destroyed. But we can see how this moon orbits around the larger asteroid from Earth-based telescopes. So using the assets that we already have here on Earth, we'll be able to measure how effective this deflection is. And right now it takes about 12 hours for the moon to go around the main asteroid.

We think we're going to change that by maybe about 10 minutes or so. So it's just a little nudge. We don't really know if it'll be 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 20 minutes. That's why we're doing the test. And this is a good start. I want to talk about some of the other science that we were hearing this morning in the Planetary Defense Conference. But before we leave this slide, there's a little companion there. If you look on the sort of halfway down on the left, just to the left of DART itself, that looks familiar to me because I'm from the Planetary Society.

That's a CubeSat. It is. It's a CubeSat. It is. It's a CubeSat. So DART is a NASA mission, and the Italian Space Agency is contributing a CubeSat. And we're going to kick this CubeSat off somewhere between two and five days ahead of time. It has a camera on it, and so it's going to be able to take some images of the impact. It's also going to fly by very fast, and so we still need the Earth-based telescopes to see how much you deflect that, because that has to build up over time. But this little CubeSat companion should capture some images of the final demise of our DART

spacecraft. So this is going to take some pretty amazing coordination, right? I mean, basically, you've got a speeding bullet hitting another speeding bullet, and another one along for the ride to watch what happens. See, I told you this was fun. So we have a lot of fun on this mission. It's challenging. And one of the things that's challenging is that you can't actually make out that smaller asteroid

until less than an hour, really, before you're about to impact it. So all of this targeting has to be done on board. And so we're going to have the camera. It's the same. It's adapted from the camera that took pictures of Pluto, these amazing images of Pluto. We're adapting that camera. We're putting it on this spacecraft.

On board, it's going to be able to distinguish that smaller moon from the larger asteroid, and then that's what's going to enable this impact to happen. And that's the technology that will go on to future missions potentially too. Kelly? I just wanted to add a comment that you mentioned, Matt, the deep impact mission and how that might have been a pathfinder for DART. And that was indeed, that was a science mission. It was a comet where an impactor was sent into it to bring up material to study the

interior of a comet. And it wasn't to to deflect it but the process of doing that helped develop technologies that could feed into something like DART and you may or may not know that Deep Impact was a University of Maryland mission led by Dr. Micah Hearn. So just want to mention here that University of Maryland is part of feeding into planetary defense mission. And we have University of Maryland team members proudly on the DART team. So yes. Yay.

Go Terrapins. There's one other factor involved with DART, something it has to accomplish. New Horizons made that wonderful flyby on New Year's Eve of that far distant object has plenty of time to return its data. I think it's what, Jim? They're taking over a year to get the data back, partly because it's so far away and the data rate is so low. You don't have that luxury, right? You've got to get what you're going to learn from DART before it gets smashed to atoms. But we have the advantage of being much closer to Earth than Pluto. So, yeah, I mean, Deutemos is not a threat to the Earth,

not on a collision path with the Earth, but we are doing this at a time when we're minimizing the distance between Earth and this asteroid to use the telescope. So it's going to be about 7 million miles away or so, and the data rate will be much, much faster than Pluto was able to stream back to us. And so we're going to actually send back an image roughly once every second. And it's just going to keep streaming back from the camera until it doesn't anymore. If you're old like me, and I was

very, very young, you can remember the Ranger missions, which smacked into the moon back in the 1960s. Oh, God, I've really dated myself. Rudiger, there are other missions that you might want to bring up that are coming. You talked about one, which I think you said you're hoping might get you an asteroid named after you. And I will point out that everybody up here except Rudiger and me has an asteroid named after them. Can we get this fixed? except Rüdiger and me has an asteroid named after them. Can we get this fixed? In Europe, we want to build a fly-eye telescope,

and fly is the little zzzz, has fancy eyes with facets, and we want to copy nature a bit. We want to collect the light, reflect it on a mirror, send it back on a beam splitter, and then we split it on 16 cameras. So exactly like the eye of the fly, we have facets, we copy it in our telescope. And the trick with this, we get a huge field of view, so we can scan the whole sky within 48 hours. Pan-STARRS and Catalina, they have fantastic telescopes, but they have a much smaller field of view, so it takes longer and then they see it.

And let's assume something is coming from this direction, but you scan the sky over there, you might see it too late. And with this new concept of telescope, we hope that we can cover the whole sky in 48 hours, return it every night, repeat it, and not missing any object which could approach us. I just got to add, and it's not an asteroid impact mission, in fact, it's over, but the Rosetta mission, which is one of the greatest successes in the history of space exploration, in my humble opinion, which went to...

To Yuma Gerasimenko. I'm glad you said it, thank you. We learn every time we go to one of these objects, don't we? Yes, all these objects are different. We can always learn

new things about. And Rosetta, our people, our operators were not prepared for such a strange shape. This was like a rubber duck with two binaries connected.

And we had to build a gravity model. We want to approach, we want to really fly around and make close-up photos and it was a big challenge basically on the fly to adapt the models and to calculate the tiny gravity forces and to learn how this special comet looks like. This morning at the Planetary Defense Conference there was just presentation after presentation by scientists who are doing work to prepare for the DART mission. Many of them developing mathematical models for how this might work so that we know what to look for. It's amazing to me that so much science is coming out of a mission that hasn't even launched yet. Yeah, well this relates back even to some of the questions that had come up earlier that we were talking about,

is that you need to know what this asteroid is like. Is it a bunch of sand? Is it a solid rock? These were the questions that naturally you want to ask, and these are the different types of models that people are doing. Different sized particles on the surface, what's your impact going to be like? If you class into a boulder, what's it going to be like? If you come at a crazy angle, what's it going to be like? If you have a shape that, you know, looks like a, you know, trim off Garasimenko, then, you know, what's that going to be like? This is exactly the work that we're doing. And we're doing this ahead of time because we want to, you know, have our predictions and then we're doing a test. This is how you do science, right? You make your predictions, you think you know what's going to happen,

you get the data, and you see how it went. Kelly, I said to you and Lindley after we saw some of those presentations this morning that really what it said to me was, one, Nancy and her team need to aim DART very carefully so they hit big boulders, but not too big. Kidding. Second, that we really need to get Congress to fund, oh, I don't know, 19 or 20 more DART missions because it's going to something different is going to happen every time. Well, and that is the point, actually. Something different is going to happen every time. It's customized to the asteroid

and there's so many different asteroids out there of different sizes, different orbits, different composition. And so it might not necessarily be a bunch of darts. It might be one of the other techniques that's been discussed here. And so for those who think that, oh, we just have to have the mission sitting on the pad ready to go when we find something that's a problem, that's really not going to be the case. And that's why if we find them first, then there's the time to actually plan it out well, to maybe send a mission out to characterize it first to understand what is it made of,

does it look like a rubber duck, is it rubbly or what. And then you go and you design your deflection mission if you have the time to do that and so if you find them first you can do that and then you can investigate the possibilities. We'll shift gears a little bit and talk about what is happening just about a mile from where we are tonight, the Planetary Defense Conference, which as we speak continues for another couple of days. One of the things that I have loved, I've been to two or three of the previous conferences, and it started with the first one I went to, and they're doing it this time, is the so-called scenario. Gerhard, I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about this and what it involves, because it is one of the most dramatic and involving things I have ever been to with a group of hundreds of scientists, because there's a little bit of play acting going on.

That is correct. I mean, in the last PDC conferences, we have come up with some artificial object that we put on the trajectory so that it would hit Earth with a certain probability and the same thing is happening now again. And then every day more information becomes available and it is being discussed what could be done, what should be done, and we will learn from it. And can we deflect it so it's perfectly something that same page should address because they deal with these methods it's an exercise it's an artificial object I must say so it's now the third day and just before we came here is that the latest information show that it's heading towards Denver so if

you have any remember this is an exercise it's an exercise I want to let them know no it's all pretend affairs person will get upset with us. Everybody's very careful. It's all made up. It's all make-believe. And I could perhaps add that, of course, we also want to learn from these exercises. It's important for this UN group, but also we have to see what information we can gain when we fly to the object and observe how it reacts.

But right now, this is an exercise, and it will go until Friday when we finally know, will it be successful to deflect it or not? It will be an exciting situation. The scenario considers more than science. I mean, when I was there, people were pretending to be public safety oriented, people who would have to handle mass evacuations, who would have to get the word out to the public. The media would be heavily involved in this. Does it still have this sort of comprehensive approach? Yes, they're all involved. Everyone is still involved. We have the

FEMA, so the emergency response agencies. We have the communication people from the media, and they are discussing how to pass this information on to the public and then of course the spacecraft designers So everything everyone is still involved and we want to see what would be a realistic reaction at this time How would people react it's also analyzed the object has a given size What would be really the damage on the ground for this object? And what do we know? What information is missing? An attempt is made to make it as realistic as possible, but again, it's an exercise. It's not really on its way. Kerry?

I just want to give a shout-out to Dr. Paul Chodas, who designs these scenarios. Great guy. Yeah, he's great. And he spends a lot of time making it as challenging and as hard for us as possible, and he's very diabolical about it. And so it's pretty fun to have him crafting this plan, and we're always trying to adapt to that as well.

They just trickle out the details. And at one that I was at, one of the deflection missions failed, and it was headed toward Bangladesh. Really, it gets very emotional. People get really into it, and voices go up. I was actually kicked out of a discussion group by Rushdie Schweikert, Apollo astronaut, Apollo 8 astronaut, because I made a bad joke. He said, get out of here, media.

Rüdiger? We also have a third group. We have the Europeans, we out of here, media. Rüdiger? We also have a third group. We have the Europeans, we have the Americans, and we have the rest of the world in this game. The rest of the world, they were not quite happy when they realized that when the U.S. make a deflection mission, when they move it away from Denver, it moves more and more towards Africa.

So they are very worried and watching what the U.S. are doing. Yeah, think about it. The political decisions that have to be made. If you're going to put nuclear weapons on the tip of a rocket and you say it's going to deflect an asteroid, there might be some nations around the world, Kerry, I'll let you address this, that might not take kindly to that.

They might be suspicious. Well, it's interesting because, you know, we're all scientists Terry, I'll let you address this, that might not take kindly to that. They might be suspicious. Well, it's interesting because, you know, we're all scientists, and we want to look at the data and make the best, most logical choice possible. But when it comes down to it, the science is very easy, and dealing with the politics is very hard. And I think that's why it's so important to have these simulations where we can run through the different things, we can talk to different stakeholders. And when you have great representatives from all over the world here,

you can really get more voices in on this conversation. I think that the whole asteroid community would love it if even more of the world was involved as well. We really want this to be a worldwide affair because it matters to everybody. One of the few times you will hear a scientist say, and other scientists agree with her, the science is easy. Other scientists agree with her. The science is easy. We have so much more to do to show that we are going to be ready for that rock that wants to do to us what its ancestor did to the dinosaurs. One of the things that is coming up, and Carrie, you may be able to address this as well, or Kelly,

is a project called NeoCam, which I believe is a follow-on to carry a project you're working on called NeoWISE. Yes, there was a, as part of a science solicitation, a mission proposed called NeoCam, which would look for near-Earth asteroids. NeoWISE does that, except it was designed to be an astrophysics mission. But asteroids, they photobomb anything. They're going to go across your field of view no matter what. But what if you could build something that was really optimized to do this, that was looking in the right place and looking in the right way,

looking in the infrared to see the sizes, as Carrie has talked about. And so right now at NASA there is development on the instrument part of what came out of that mission concept, NEOCAM, and we're waiting to see where that goes. So much progress is being made. We have so far to go still. I want to ask each of you where you hope we will be 10 years down the line. That would be five planetary defense conferences from now.

And I want to go farther than that because, you know, it's really hard to make predictions, especially about the future, right? Old line. Carrie? So I'm an optimist, so I'm going to be real optimistic here. Maybe the other scientists are going to laugh at me a little bit. But ten years from now, let's say everybody in this room contacts their congressional representative, and they say, this is really important to me.

I mean, contacting your congressional representative is always good. You should always be calling them up on whatever you're concerned about. But if you're concerned about this, give them a call. Maybe that'll happen. Maybe we'll get a ton of new funding and it's possible for us to discover over 90% of the near-Earth asteroids that are 140 meters across or bigger that pose a hazard to Earth. We could just rule out the possibility of a collision altogether. That'd be really, really cool.

And then we'd all have to do something else, but that'd be fine with me. Lots still to learn out there. Hey, let's go right down the line. Rüdiger, would you tell us? Yeah, my personal hope would be that in 10 years, all the nations work together and that we don't have to send a US mission, a Russian mission, a Chinese, a European mission, that we join up our forces, that the same page is finally working perfectly. We know what to do, and we have a common approach,

because if an asteroid is approaching the Earth, we all have to work together. It's a global threat. It's not for one nation. So in 10 years, I think this is doable if we want to. Kelly? Well, that's all well said, because really the ultimate goal is for us to work ourselves out of a job. And so we're working hard on that, and we can do that if we keep at it. Gerhard?

Yeah, my wish is similar to what Rüdiger said. So as chair of SanePage, I hope that in 10 years time, we have thought of a look-up table, that if there is a real threatening object, we know what could be done, technically, to deflect this object. Same page, as the name says, is an advisory group. They will not take a decision. But that we could, in each case, give a recommendation,

technically this and this is feasible to the decision makers. That would not waste any time. It's just a decision to be taken as quickly as possible. So interesting that several of you really have focused more on the political and policy side of this than the science or technology side. Nancy, you'll get the last word on this one. Well, I'm with Kerry. I mean, we should just figure out what's out there. This is something that's imminently doable, identifying where these objects are and keeping track of them

so we understand how big a threat this is or isn't. I mean, that's something that we could do very easily without very much resources if we were interested in doing it. I told you this would be a great panel. Please thank our terrific panelists all at the Planetary Defense Conference. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, so I am joined by the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. So we'll do all the stuff that we usually do during this segment, ending with that contest for the folks at home and the people who are here with us at the University of Maryland. Tell us what's up in the night sky. All right, in the evening sky, Mars is working hard to stay visible,

but you still have to look fairly low in the west. In the early evening, it'll be looking reddish, like a kind of bright, not that bright star. And in the pre-dawn in the east, Venus super bright, but also very low down in the east. But coming up around midnight now, actually even earlier, 10 or 11, we will have Jupiter looking very, very bright in the east, and then a couple hours later, Saturn coming up looking yellowish. Excellent. We've got this week in space history. It was this week in 1973 that Skylab launched and started its space station stays. That amazing space station, which is just not remembered by as many people as it ought to be. You liked Skylab?

A lot. I wanted to run. There was a track. If you were up there, you could run around a track on the inside skin of Skylab, and it just looked like more fun than a barrel of monkeys. We will get you a barrel of monkeys and a spinning track. I'd like to see a barrel of monkeys in space. Wouldn't that be fun? That would be fun. So anyway, we move on, and I would like your help. On three, I'm going to ask you to say, random space fact. One, two, three. Random space fact.

That was not bad. In April 2029, Friday the 13th, Apophis, a roughly 350-meter asteroid, will come closer to Earth than our geostationary satellites. Oh, my. It will be visible with the naked eye from about half the world, including Europe, and moving across sky, get up to approximately third magnitude in brightness, looking like a kind of bright star.

So that'll be exciting, but it's not going to hit. You're not? You wouldn't kid us. I would kid you about nearly everything other than massive, massive destruction and death. All right, so last time around, I asked you what is the second largest near-Earth asteroid, with Ganymede being the largest. This occasionally happens.

I hadn't thought through the entire details of this. What answers do we get? And I'm willing to give two of them, consider two of them as right answers. I would guess about three-quarters of the respondents came up with the one that I think you had in mind, 433 Eros? Yes, and 433 Eros has a long axis. It's oblong. It's what the near Shoemaker spacecraft observed and has a long axis of over 34 kilometers,

but a mean average diameter of about 16, which leaves open what I guess some other people said, which was Don Quixote, which has a somewhat higher average diameter at over 18 kilometers. So we take either answer. How do we do? Who won? We let Random.org, yes, it's a real thing, choose among the people who have a correct

answer or, in this case, one of the two correct answers. And Random.org this time chose Justin Taylor in Exeter, California. He said, indeed, it's the second largest near-Earth asteroid. It's banana-shaped, 433 Eros. This is interesting. I've heard from Justin before. He has been known to binge on eight hours of past planetary radio episodes. He says he loves listening, being present for the future of space exploration, and he thanks us, you and me, for unearthing his passion for space science, which drove him to start his BA in environmental science.

Wow, cool. So Justin, you are gonna get a Planetary Society kick asteroid, say it with me, rubber asteroid, as will some people here tonight. And along with that, a 200-point itelescope.net account. iTelescope is the worldwide network of remotely operated telescopes, which anybody can use to look for near-Earth asteroids. Why not? We always get great stuff from other listeners as well. Norman Kassoon in the UK, he said AEROS is one of the first asteroids visited by a spacecraft. The first one orbited, the first one soft-landed on, all done, of course, by Shoemaker-Near. That is correct. Shoemaker-Near. That is correct. David Sprott, also in the UK, he says it's also an NMA, a near Mars asteroid. So it threatens the Martians as well. We should get together and work with the Martians. Well we are trying to collaborate

broadly. Richard Entz in McGrath, Canada, he says, next week's question should be, what is the largest near-Earth rubber asteroid? And finally, do we have any fans of The Expanse out there, either the books or the TV show? Just a handful. Okay, you're the only ones who get this, who will get this. Jordan Tickton, San Luis Obispo, said, be sure to visit Eros before the protomolecule arrives. Okay. Finally, do you know

that we have a poet laureate? Indeed, we do. Dave Fairchild in Shawnee, Kansas. Here is his submission for this week. 433 Eros is stony and shaped like a shoe or a peanut or such. It currently crosses the orbits of Mars and Shoemaker showed us as much. And since it is larger, a factor of five, on the Chicxulub impactor scale, I'm hoping the conference for planet defense is kicking that asteroid's tail. He doesn't usually get applause, but that's great. Why don't we do the contest for the people here? We will do the contest. I will throw rubber asteroids. I cannot guarantee I will hit the right person.

Please pass them along to the winner. Raise your hands. Matt will call on you. And we have volunteers running. Excellent. We have the microphone, people? Yes, yes. We need you back. Thank you very much. Okay, here's the first question. All right, name both missions currently active at asteroids. Both missions currently active.

I'm not sure Rick Binzel, MIT professor, is allowed to enter. Hi, what's your name is? I'm Katie, and the two missions would be Hayabusa 2 and Osiris-Rex. That is correct. And here goes the asteroid. Nice. Well done. All right, in what year was the Tunguska impact?

Tunguska impact in Siberia. Let's go all the way to the back there, gentleman with his hand up. Hi, what's your name, sir? My name's Charlie. The Tunguska impact was in 1908. That is correct. Got a long throw. Here's the wind-up. The wind-up and the pitch. Oh, God. It is so hard to predict the trajectories of asteroids. You know, I had it, and then the Yarkovsky effect. Non-graph humor.

Name one of the top two telescopic discovering surveys as measured by discoveries in 2018. And here we were just talking about it. Let's go to the other side. There's a woman with her hand only about halfway up. Now it's up higher. Catalina Sky Survey. That is higher. Catalina Skysurvey. That is correct. Catalina and Pan Stars.

Here it comes. Oh, gosh. That was terrible. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Wilson, I'm sorry. Oh, the humanity. Couple more?

All right, couple more. Let's see. What is Lindley Johnson's title at NASA? And, Lindley, you don't put up your hand. He's right here. How about the young person right here with the NASA T-shirt? What's your name? William.

And? Chief Planetary Defense Officer. That is correct. NASA t-shirt. What's your name? William. And? Chief Planetary Defense Officer. That is correct. Well, it's enough, right, Lindley? Yes. Planetary Defense Officer, very cool title, and here's an asteroid. We'll try a different throwing technique.

I hit his hands. So you're not like Lindley's son or nephew, are you? Okay. What asteroid did Neil Shoemaker explore? If you're paying attention. Oh, come on, folks. We just went here. Guy in the orange shirt right there on the aisle. Your name, sir?

My name is Yavuz Asteroid Eros. That is correct. Asteroid Eros. Fantastic. Fantastic. That was better. One more. Shall we do one more extra bonus time, rubber asteroid? Who wants one more?

They'll raise their hands instead of applaud. I don't blame them. Here we go. What is the largest asteroid or smallest dwarf planet? Largest asteroid, smallest dwarf planet. In our solar system

that we know of. Way in the back I see, right next to someone else who has his hand up. Sorry, buddy, with your hand up. No? No, that is incorrect. How about right over here? I think that's Ceres.

That is indeed Ceres. Ceres! Oh, he ran for it. Oh, good going for it. Excellent motivation there. All right, thank you, everybody, for participating. We're going to now, we're going to put the next trivia contest out there for the folks at home, the listeners to Planetary Radio. Please don't shout out the answer.

Although I'd be really impressed if you knew the answer. Just because I find it challenging. What is the name of the 930-meter, approximately, asteroid that will fly by Earth at only 0.65 lunar distances to the moon? Sorry, lunar distances in June 2028. You can hear a pin drop, but they were so good at not yelling out the answer. I don't even know if all the scientists in the room know. I did see a paper by, I should say, by Lance Benner and Marina Brozovic at the conference that I did not know. This is

the year before Apophis. There's another very large asteroid flyby. Give us the question one more time. All right, I'll try not to stutter this time. What is the name of the 930-meter asteroid that will fly by Earth at 0.65 lunar distances in June of 2028? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You've got till May 15. That would be Wednesday, May 15 at 8 a.m. Pacific time.

And if you get it right and are chosen by Random.org, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid will be yours along with a 200-point itelescope.net account. By the way, Bruce, if a 930-meter asteroid hit the Earth, we'd probably know about it, wouldn't we? Yeah, I mean, you'd notice. Except for a whole segment of people who would not know what hit them. Say goodnight, Bruce. Alright, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about whether a terrapin could be used to stop an asteroid. Thank you, and good night.

He is Dr. Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. This has been Planetary Radio Live, coming to you from the University of Maryland at College Park, the proud home of the terrapins, many of whom are in our audience. Tomorrow, a lot of the other people in this room will go back to saving the Earth at the Planetary Defense Conference. It has been a great pleasure to join all of you this evening. Once again, thank you for joining us. And Ad Astra, everybody. Good night.

Our thanks go to the International Academy of Astronautics, the University of Maryland College Park, NASA 360, and all the sponsors and others who made this year's Planetary Defense Conference possible. I'm off to the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C. that begins on May 14th. Registrations are still open as this episode comes out. You can learn more at h2m.exploremars.org. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our members who believe Earth is worth defending. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer.

Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Ad Astra.