Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live: Near Earth Objects—The Killer Asteroid Threat

Episode Date: February 22, 2017

Leaders of the quest to find, understand and protect ourselves from the asteroids and comets called Near Earth Objects gathered with host Mat Kaplan for a live conversation about this existential threat from space.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Killer Asteroids, on stage, this week on Planetary Radio Live. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. A special treat today, and a long one as we present nearly every second of last week's live show. present nearly every second of last week's live show. Get ready for more than 90 minutes with leaders of humanity's quest to find and understand near-Earth objects. As we also learn how to deflect the killers among them, we'll go back to our regular format next week. It began on Thursday evening, February 16th,

in the heart of Pasadena, California. evening, February 16th, in the heart of Pasadena, California. Well, that's a good start. Welcome, everybody. This is Planetary Radio Live. I am thrilled to be back here in Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum. We're just like a mile or two from galactic headquarters of the Planetary Society. We are joined, and I'm talking now to those of you who are watching us live streaming, and I'm told also on Facebook Live tonight at the SCPR Facebook channel. So welcome. But we have with us a whole bunch of great space fans. Are you guys ready to meet any asteroid or comet head-on? Absolutely, yeah. Give yourselves a hand. You know, we do this show on a weekly basis, but when we

get the chance, we kind of crawl out of the studio, and we love to come out and do it in front of happy space fans, enthusiasts like yourselves. We also have some terrific experts who are going to be spending some time with us this evening. And as you're going to hear, they're not just scientists and leaders, they are truly defenders of our world. And I think that's something that we'll be demonstrating very, very amply, amply tonight. Before I introduce them, though, there is one other human who has a message for you. So we're going to look at the big screen, and here is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Greetings. Bill Nye here. I'm here, and you're there. And thank you very much for coming.

Tonight we're talking about near-Earth objects. These are things in space that could potentially create a catastrophe here on Earth. There's no evidence that the ancient dinosaurs had a space program. But we do. And we could identify an incoming object and actually deflect it. It's an extraordinary idea that's very much in the international interest. And it's something that the Planetary Society has been interested in for over 35 years. So I'm really glad you're here to discuss it.

It's an exciting thing. Even if we don't find an object that we think we need to deflect, the study of asteroids and comets tells us more about our place in the cosmos, our place in space. We get closer to answering those two deep questions. Where did we all come from? And are we alone in the universe? It's an extraordinary time to be alive. Thank you so much for coming.

Back to you, Matt. Thank you, Bill. Matt is the boss. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. And by the way, somewhere out there in the dark in the back of the room is our Chief Operating Officer, Jennifer Vaughn, so you might have a chance to say hello to her tonight as well. Joining me on stage now is the Planetary Society's Director of Science and Technology, the only other person who has joined me for every episode of Planetary

Radio over the last 14 years. Please welcome Bruce Betts. How are you? I am good. It is always good to be here with you, Matt. Yeah, he's here not just because he's a funny guy and good to have at events like this, but because within his purview at the Planetary Society is a lot of stuff that has to do with what we're going to be talking about tonight, right? Near-Earth objects. It does indeed. Everything from our Shoemaker-Neo grants that go out to amateurs and professionals across the world to help improve their ability to keep their eyes on the sky,

to working on funding deflection techniques. And we are one of the primary sponsors of the upcoming Planetary Defense Conference in Tokyo, which I think all of our guests will probably be at. They do those every two years. We'll talk about them a little bit later tonight. You'll hear more about the Shoemaker-Neo grants as well. At the last Planetary Defense Conference, you were there in your video alter ego shooting for your series, Random Space Fact. We have one of those to show to people now, and it has a guest star of one of our other panelists this evening. We can roll that.

Random Space Fact! NEOWISE is a space telescope that's focused on finding and characterizing near-Earth asteroids. It looks in the infrared part of the spectrum. That allows it to see the heat from the asteroids, making it very good at finding darker asteroids, ones that are dark in the visible. This has allowed it to find almost five asteroids. Hello, Bruce.

Hi, Amy. This is Amy Meinzer, principal investigator for Neowise. How'd I do? Uh, we found a few more than almost five. So like, uh, five? Mmm, keep going. Ten? Uh, a little more. A hundred?

Try over 34,000. Over 34,000? Over 34,000?! Yep. And you didn't see the one coming down that hit me? Actually, we did. Alright, ready? Yeah. Nice.

Want to learn more about planets and astronomy? Check out my free online course at California State University, Dominguez Hills, Introduction to Planetary Science and Astronomy. Go to planetary.org slash Betts Class. And by sheerest coincidence, that class is underway again. It is. It is underway right now. Not right now. No, this is part of my lecture.

Oh, good. All right, so there will be a quiz. Every Tuesday afternoon at 3 Pacific time, you can find it online. Learn more at planetary.org slash Betts class, B-E-T-T-S class. Could you tell that we were in, I was standing off camera, but we were in Italy, and that will come up again as well. You could tell, right? The light was so Italian. There might have been an olive tree in the background. A word about what you just saw was an installment of Bruce's series,

Random Space Fact, this very entertaining series. They're all brief and very entertaining like that, and they all are very educational. You can collect the whole set at planetary.org, the home of Planetary TV. Let's bring up the other person that you just saw in that video a moment ago. Amy Meinzer is a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab. You may also have caught her in the History Channel series, The Universe. Actually, Amy, the last time I saw you on a screen, you were talking about Mr. Spock and science

in Adam Nimoy's documentary about his pointy-eared father. Most significantly this evening, Amy, as you heard, is principal investigator, that's the boss, of the NEOWISE mission that will come up again later this evening as well. Now, please help me welcome once again Amy Meinzer. Well, I guess I've been... What was that? I guess I've been outed as a big Star Trek fan. Oh, yeah.

Well, who hasn't seen you in the uniform? It's there. You'll find it on the Internet. It's required at JPL, actually. I'm going to bring up our next person right away, and that is Paul Chodas, another one of these marvelous JPL folks. Welcome, Paul. Paul manages the NASA Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.

And I love this line from the center's website. CNEOS, or CNEOS, right? CNEOS. CNEOS. CNEOS? Is NASA's center, this is all right off the web, is NASA's center for computing asteroid anderoid and Comet Orbits, and get this, their odds of Earth impact.

Pretty important work. We can welcome somebody who's been working to defend our planet for many, many years. That's Paul Chodas. Thank you. Bruce, we have to juggle 16,000 NEOs in our software. That's going to be too tough for you to juggle. I can't do that many. I'm glad you have the job.

That's a lot of rocks. And do you have one of those Star Trek costumes that she just said was required at JPL? I'm going to buy one. Yes, I need that. I don't have a Star Trek uniform, but I did wear my solar system socks. Those are very specific. All right. Our last participant.

He's going to be coming to us via Skype from Washington, D.C., inside the Beltway there, where nothing of any interest ever happens. He has one of the greatest titles, job titles of all time. Lindley Johnson, who you now see on the screen, is NASA's planetary defense officer. He runs the planetary defense coordination office at the agency's headquarters. Like Paul and Amy, Lindley has been in the game for many years. He arrived at NASA after a distinguished 23-year career in the Air Force, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. Here is Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson.

Lindley, you can hear me okay, I hope. Yeah, I hear you fine, Matt. Hi. Hi, Bruce. Hi, Amy. Hey, Paul. Just seems like I just talked to you today. Yes, we did.

They talk all the time, right, you guys? They do, yes. All the time. We've got to get the most important thing out of the way, Lindley. Show us your entire t-shirt. All I can see is asteroids are nature's way of asking... Well, these are my pajama tops. I wear these every night to bed.

How's that space program coming? Yeah, you know, like the boss, Bill, said, the dinosaurs didn't have one. You know what happened to them? We have a lot to talk about in what's going to seem like a very short amount of time. Everybody up here has been a guest on Planetary Radio in the past.

They were also with us for Planetary Radio Live at the headquarters of the Italian Space Agency two years ago when we had that Planetary Defense Conference, that conference that happens every couple of years. I just wanted to say, Matt, you've done an amazing job of getting, if you pick three people to talk about NEOs in America, these are the three people. And how? Well played.

You're in there, too. Oh, no, I was talking about you and me. Let's get to the content. We've got one very impressive slide that I bet a lot of you have seen. We're going to pop it up there now just to give you an idea of the kind of threat we're talking about. You guys can see it on the screen here. That's not an asteroid. That's a comet that we visited.

That's 67P. Gerasimov. Churyumov. Churyumov. Thank you very much, Paul. Take a look at that. Four kilometers across. That's it sitting on top of Los Angeles.

Oh, and the little guy next to it, that's Siding Spring. The question is, what would a rock or a dirty snowball or whatever we're thinking of comets as nowadays, what would that do to us? And that takes us to the next slide, which Paul and Lindley, I'm hoping you'll be able to talk about a little bit. Paul, you want to get us started? Sure. I want to emphasize that asteroid impacts are rare events if you're talking about big ones. And this slide kind of indicates what the frequency of asteroid impacts is as it varies with size. Now, the one that killed off the dinosaurs is at the bottom line. Okay, that was 10 kilometers in size, 100 million years, if you see in the corner on the right,

is about the average time that asteroids of that size hit the Earth. Not very often and not something to lose sleep about. In fact, 10-kilometer objects, we know all of them, all of the near-Earth asteroids, we've already found all of them. So we don't have to worry about that stuff. If you go to the other extreme, at the very top, the five-meter object, if it hits the Earth, creates a bolide, that if it hits the earth, creates a bolide, which is just like a bright meteor. It's not going to even hit the ground. It's going to

burn up in the atmosphere. And something like that, we figure happens about once per year that we get that kind of impact. And then there's a whole spectrum of cases in between. So the ones we talk about, let's see, four kilometers was that comet. Let's see, where would that be on this diagram? I mean, that's going to be the second bottom line, let's say five kilometers. Objects of that size do not hit the Earth very often. We don't have to worry about five kilometer objects. We found all of those, in fact. And we'll hear more about NEOWISE and how it is so well suited to find these objects, really large ones, even if they're dark. So they're extremely rare, right, Lindley, but they can still ruin your day if one shows up.

Absolutely. Absolutely true. They're extremely rare, happen on the order of impacts on the order of millions of years, but it could happen tomorrow, too. millions of years, but it could happen tomorrow too. Our job is to try to find these things before they are a threat to impact in the Earth and hopefully be able to find them far enough advance in time that we're able to launch a space mission to deflect them or at least minimize the damage that they could do at the Earth's surface. Paul? I just want to comment the color coding here. The green ones at the bottom have been NASA's goal in the past to find 90% of objects that are one kilometer and larger.

So those are the green lines there. And we have succeeded. We found 90% of the near-Earth asteroids that are one kilometer and larger. We're somewhere around 93% or so. And we can talk later about how we know how many are there that we haven't found. Good. Now, the middle band, the brown ones on this screen anyway, are down to 140 meters. And that's NASA's next objective.

We'd like to find 90% of the asteroids down to 140 meters in size. And we have some work to do in that area. And we'll hear more from Amy about how we might achieve the objective because there's a lot of them out there at that size. And we've got some other great slides that'll actually show us how that pace of discovery has been accelerating. That's coming up. But before we do that, let's show off one that I'll bet most of this crowd has seen,

the result of, I think, the biggest impact of the 20th century, right? If we can go to that next shot. There it is, yes, the famous Tunguska impact of 1908. And it happened in the forests of Siberia, and there were no known casualties, as far as I know. Some reindeer died, I think, And there were a few people who observed it. But what I wanted to point out on this slide is an asteroid around 40 meters in size, we think it was, flattened large area, 2,000 square kilometers of land. So half a football field, half a football field, roughly. Inside of the asteroid. But it flattened. The shockwave of the asteroid, but it flattened. The shockwave of the air blast flattened a huge area.

But this was the largest asteroid to hit the Earth in the 20th century, and we had one that was not too much smaller recently. Yeah, and that's the next shot. Let's take a look at that. So, yes, Chelyabinsk. Now, Russia. It seems that Russia gets hit frequently, isn't it? Chelyabinsk is in Russia. And fortunately, there are many webcams in cars in Russia. That's a whole genre of YouTube videos, isn't it?

But this was, I think, taken from a webcam in a car. And early in the morning on February the 15th, what's that, four years ago, just over, there was this massive streak through the atmosphere that lit up at many times, I think 20 times brighter than the sun, really bright, left massive shadows. And I've written on this just kind of the altitude of the asteroid entering the atmosphere, 90 kilometers when it first starts burning up, 30 kilometers when you have the massive release of energy and it slows down, and at 25, it's petering out and breaking up into pieces. So that was half a megaton of an explosion of a 20-meter asteroid.

So half a megaton of TNT. So a half-megaton blast. I figured that was maybe 40 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. Okay, yes. About that. All right. We think that's a fairly rare event. I won't go backwards in the slides,

but something like that happens once every 50 years, maybe 80 years, somewhere like that. And a 20-meter asteroid, I'm sorry to say, that's below our threshold that we're looking for right now. So we consider that a pretty small asteroid. There were no fatalities from this that I know of. There was a lot of injuries from it, though, and so it's a significant event.

But on the scale of things we're talking about, this was pretty small. A lot of people, I think, who ran to the window, because there was this bright light, and then the shock wave hit, right? There's a lesson there. Bruce? There is. I was just going to help recreate some of the videos I've seen on YouTube.

Oh, would you? Because I looked for a good one, and I just decided against it. So you come out, you're right by the window, you're looking up at the sky, and suddenly... That was good. That's the sound of breaking glass. All right, maybe that wasn't as good as I'd hoped. Never mind. Go ahead, Matt. Lindley, I think this next shot, I think you provided this, and it gives us an idea just since 1988.

Is this one of your slides, Lindley? I think so. Yes, it is. This graph depicts all of the explosions that have been detected in Earth's atmosphere from small asteroids, a few meters in size, entering the Earth's atmosphere and detonating above the surface. Shag events, the event that we just talked about, is of course the largest event here, as you can see on the scale on the right side, but there are still a number of other events that were larger than the energy release of the Hiroshima bomb at the end of World War II. So these events happen on a regular basis, and these are the very smallest events. These are the objects at the very small end of anything that we'd be concerned about, certainly.

The Earth makes a great sample plate moving through space to pick up the flux, as we call it, of these small objects. impacts occur helps us extrapolate what the population of larger objects is, because it anchors the small end of the population curve. Paul? And I just wanted to add some advertising. At the bottom line there is our website, cneos.jpl.nasa.gov slash fireballs. This is an interactive map, and you can look at it yourself. And when a new fireball occurs, we add it to our table, we update the map. You can zoom in on the map. So our website is a new thing. Actually, we just announced it today, frankly. I mean, it's a brand new website. It is a beautiful website. Really nice. The Cineos website is now live and this is straight from that website. We'll put that link up on the weekly show page as well at planetary.org.

This is data that the U.S. government has provided to the scientific community, the worldwide scientific community, to use in understanding more about the population of near-Earth objects. Just a couple more of these to sort of set things up. The next slide we've got, Paul, I think is one that you gave us, and it looks like plots of these objects that we've got to watch out for. It's artwork here. What do you think? I plotted the real orbits of 1,400 PHAs, potentially hazardous asteroids that we throw around with acronyms all the time. So these are PHAs. And Bruce, you cannot juggle all of these.

These are... Well, I don't know. I mean, they're what? 1,000 or so? 1,400. And I checked the stats today. We are now at 1,785. These are asteroids that come very close to the Earth's orbit. And they have to be also larger than 140 meters. So they're in that gray, that middle band of the first slide. You see they congregate near the Earth's orbit, which is the brightest of the circles

there around the sun, the third planet from the sun, by definition. Because a PHA, by definition, is hazardous because its orbit comes close to the Earth's orbit. And that's how we select these. But there are 1,785 of them right now. We can't just discover them, figure out their orbit, and then walk away, right? Because things change. Amy, you're nodding.

Yeah, that's right. So when we first see an object, we don't really know all that much about it in the initial discovery. It takes a little bit of time to watch it. I kind of think of it as, you know, if you're golfing, let's say. You hit a golf ball, and the way you know whether or not you're going to make it all the way to the green is you're watching the golf ball as it flies. But in our case, when we look for these objects, we can't just follow it on its trajectory the whole way. We only have a few snapshots, especially in the beginning when we first see it.

So we have to extrapolate where it's going to go with some fairly limited information. And then we wait, and we get a few more images of it and then a few more and a few more. Right. Sometimes you have to wait for it to come back around and you see another part of its orbit. That's because the Earth's going around the sun and the asteroid's going around the sun and so we have to kind of wait sometimes when we get close again. And you're right. When we do catch it up the second time, then we can really get its orbit nailed down more accurately.

Right. And other follow-up can help a lot. This is where having observers in different parts of the Earth, being able to use radar telescopes, telescopes that aren't even using visible light at all, but are actually able to bounce a radio wave off of the object, that can really improve the orbit. Well, the radar is wonderful. I hope we get to talk about it more. We definitely will. In fact, we've got a surprise guest who's going to help us talk about radar observations. And even once you've determined that orbit, sometimes it doesn't stay in that orbit, right? Things change.

These are ellipses, basically. Kepler's law. Go back into your education. Kepler's law says they're all ellipses, but not really, because the planets move them around, and if it comes near the Earth, it's going to change a little bit. And Jupiter, some of these get near Jupiter's orbit, which is on the outer circle there. If it comes near Jupiter, that can really change its orbit a little bit. We keep track of all of those possible changes when we project them into the future to see if they can hit the Earth.

So we've got that covered. Let's start to talk about how we know these things, how we found them, how we've characterized them. Lindley, I think you gave me a slide that shows us images of some of these survey instruments that are being used around the world to find these objects. Yeah, that's right, Matt. We have about three major survey programs, ground-based survey programs, ongoing that NASA supports. We work with universities and space institutes around the country. The Catalina Sky Survey has been working with us for, well, almost a decade and a half now with telescopes down in Arizona. The University of Hawaii operates the Pan-STARRS systems, Pan-STARRS-1 pictured here, but there's also a second Pan-STARRS telescope that's now coming online,

which will increase our capabilities and discovery rates. We also work with the Department of Defense and the Air Force, Air Force Space Command, and their space surveillance assets. DARPA developed a space surveillance telescope, which is operated by Air Force Space Command. It's another one of the survey assets that we use while it's doing its prime mission of observing spacecraft and pieces of spacecraft debris orbiting the Earth. We are also using that data and looking for the asteroids in the background. The Space Surveillance Telescope will shortly be moving to Australia, where it will be set up and go into operation in a couple more years, which will provide us a tremendous southern hemisphere asset,

which we're a little sparse in right now. And then of course there is the NEOWISE project that has reactivated the Wide Area Infrared Survey Explorer that is our one space-based asset that is providing us both detection and a lot of size characterization data on these objects so we have a better understanding of how large they are and of course Amy can tell you all about that. And I wanted to do that because obviously the three that we see on the top there, big, powerful telescopes. What's the advantage of having one of these in space, Amy? Right. So the ground-based telescopes operate using visible light. So the same wavelengths of light that our eyes are sensitive to,

and what you're seeing when you see anything in visible light, you, me, the microphone, eyes are sensitive to. And what you're seeing when you see anything in visible light, you, me, the microphone, we're seeing some sort of a light source bouncing off of that object and reflecting back to our eyes. But you can also look with other wavelengths. And in the case of NEOWISE, we're using infrared light. This is essentially heat that the objects are giving off. And because we're looking for the object's heat rather than the sunlight that's just bouncing off the surface, we're actually looking at the sunlight that warms them up, and then the asteroids sort of re-emit, they glow at infrared wavelengths. So we can spot them with this infrared telescope.

And that's particularly helpful for seeing things that have very dark-colored surfaces. If something's a dark-colored object, if it's dark gray or even a really deep black color, it's hard to spot with visible light sometimes. And yet with heat, we can see it glowing no matter what. So it's pretty helpful to have this alternate detection method. It's complementary to the ground-based telescopes. Which you can't really do very effectively from ground because the infrared doesn't reach us, right? Yeah. One of the big complications with trying to do infrared astronomy from the ground is that

the telescope is warm. So we're looking for faint heat signatures. But you can imagine that if the telescope's warm, that would be sort of like trying to do visible light astronomy using a telescope made out of light bulbs. It's kind of hard to do, right? I mean, it's not that you couldn't do it. It's just hard. It'd be tough to get a grant to build that one. Yeah, it's harder. So our little infrared telescope in space is equivalent in power to thousands

of ground-based telescopes operating at these infrared wavelengths. And I have a beautiful image of your spacecraft, NEOWISE. I should have put it right after this slide. It's going to come up later, but maybe that'll let us bring up another spacecraft that you have proposed, at least. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Paul? Just before you move on, we shouldn't be shy, Lindley. NASA's asteroid search programs find the vast majority

of near-Earth objects. So if it weren't for NASA, we wouldn't know about the danger we're in. We wouldn't for NASA, we wouldn't know about the danger we're in. We wouldn't know about, we'd only know a small fraction of what we know now. So it's something like 90%, Lindley, that NASA-funded asteroid search programs are finding. Lindley, this is not just NASA wanting to do the right thing. There were directions from Congress, weren't there? the right thing, there were directions from Congress, weren't there? That's correct, Matt. Although it was NASA-funded studies that prompted Congress back in 1998 to direct that NASA create a program to search for the near-Earth asteroids to determine what the threat is and find anything that could be an impact threat. Those directions were enhanced for us in 2005 based on a study that NASA had done in 2003 that said, well, finding the large ones is great, but objects all the way down to 100

meters in size, if it were to hit near a population center, would be devastating. So it is by direction of Congress, and Congress has also amended NASA's charter from back in 1957 to make the detection and warning of a potential impact one of the seven explicitly stated reasons for NASA's existence. The next slide we've got, Lindley. Actually, I got from both you and Paul, proof that great minds think alike. So we're going to go to that. This is so interesting to look at this curve and how it has accelerated the discovery of these objects. Lindley, tell us about it.

Okay, well, over on the left, you see, before we started our program in 1998, there were about 500 total near-Earth asteroids known. And then we began our program at NASA to survey and find what the population was. And so that's where you start to see that curve swing up. First of all, in the larger size objects, 100 meters in size and larger in the orange, one kilometer and larger there in the red. And then those that are smaller than this 140 gold that we have are in the blue. So now we are finding about, well, in 2016, we found 1,884 near-Earth asteroids total with all of our projects, and of the overall population, which is about 15,500 of known near-earth objects, about half of that catalog are 140 meters and larger. One kilometer and larger, the number is

876 currently in the catalog. So the rate of the smaller size objects, the rate at which we're finding those is increasing with our additional capabilities. Amy, we already heard this in the random space fact video, but your spacecraft had a big part in what we're looking at here. So we've actually been very lucky to get to use this spacecraft. It was never really originally designed for looking for asteroids. Its primary mission was actually to look for very luminous galaxies, but it turned out to be a pretty effective little asteroid hunter. We are basically looking for asteroids and comets with it. In fact, it's taking pictures every 11 seconds right now as we speak. You actually can see it over Southern California. In fact,

there were a couple of passes last week. It was pretty neat. But anyway, yeah, so we've been finding asteroids and comets with it. We tend to find things that are on the larger side, just by virtue of the wavelengths we're using and where we're looking in the sky. So a lot of our discoveries tend to be kind of in that larger bin there at the bottom. The natural question that flows out of this, Lindley, is how many are left out there for us to find? And how do we know how many of them are left? There is a pie chart, the next slide that we're going to put up here, which we will kind of build through. And Lindley is somewhat at a disadvantage because he can't actually see the slides that we're seeing, but I think he's pretty familiar with them. And Paul, you should jump in on this as well, but take us through this, Lindley.

Well, I have a bit of advantage because I sent the slides to you originally. Yes. I know what you're talking about. That's not cheating. This slide, this pie chart, it shows that our estimated population of these objects, 140 meters or larger in size, is a modeling that we do. Between 25,000 and 26,000 objects out there in the population. Now, about 4% of that population is the one kilometer and larger objects.

And as you see in this filled-in part of the pie chart, we have found the majority of those one kilometer and larger, just a few tenths of a percent of the overall population left to be found at the large size. 300 meters to a kilometer in size is about 30% of this population, and we have found a little over half those numbers in that size bin. Of course, the smaller you go, the more there are. A small side of this population, 140 meters to 300 meters in size, is about two-thirds of the population, and we've only found about 8% of those smaller size objects. So between the 58% or so of the population on the small end and the numbers to be found yet between 300 and a kilometer and so of size, we still have about 73% of this population to be found. 73% of this population to be found. And that's after a little over two decades, almost two decades, I should say, of our program so far. Of course, our capabilities are increasing. We're

finding more and more each year, but we have a ways to go. We're currently finding this population at about five to six hundred objects a year, but with 18,000 yet to go, that will take us a while yet. Paul, how can we possibly know how many more there are out there for us to find? By doing some math here, you... I was afraid you'd say that. Yeah, I'm not going to give any equations. Matt, it's magic. The observatories who are scanning the skies record the regions that they're searching, and we look to see basically how many asteroids they are of a given size,

how many asteroids they are redetecting that we already know, versus how many are brand new that we didn't know about. And for the large asteroids, one kilometer in size, it's about nine to one. Basically, 90% of them have already been found. So that's why we say we know about 90% of that population. But at the smaller sizes, down to 140 meters, most of the ones we're finding are brand new. We didn't see them before, simply because they probably didn't come near the Earth or they weren't bright enough before or whatever reason. So that's how we can infer that we know only about like a third of that population or less. I guess it's less than

a third of the really small ones. So that's kind of how we mathematically figure out what the real population is. But it's clear there's a lot of work to be done. And even though we have amazing observatories, and on that earlier slide you saw, you know, the facilities we have, with just those, it would take a long time to get to 100%. Our program has been going for 20 years or so. It's been improving, but there's a lot more work to be done. The way I think about these surveys is it's a poll. We're taking a poll, essentially. And so you want to make sure you have a representative sample of your population.

You want to pick things that you think are like all the rest of them. So that's one of the techniques that we use with our spacecraft. We basically are able to sample the brighter objects as well as the darker objects with relatively equal sensitivity. So we know that we're not likely to be missing any big chunks of the population. And then from the sample that we observe, we can look at the previously known asteroids that cross through our field of view, and we can figure out just how sensitive the instrument really is. And then we can kind of back that out of our observed sample to figure out how many they're really out there. So you might ask, someone might ask, how can we do better? You know,

why can't we find more? What can we do better? And there's two answers to that I would give. One of them is to use infrared telescopes in space. Great way to find more asteroids than we're finding right now. And another way is to have bigger telescopes that can observe fainter asteroids, or observe fainter objects, so that when the smaller ones don't pass too close to the Earth, but they're within range of a big telescope, we could find them. But our telescopes aren't quite big enough right now to find many of them. They just don't get close enough to the Earth. We've really only talked about the United States so far. It is an international effort, isn't it?

That's correct. We work with our counterparts both in Europe with the European Space Agency, with counterparts in Japan, the Japanese space agency JAXA, contributions to the observation of near-Earth objects by Russian observatories, Chinese observatories, Korean observatories. So it is a worldwide effort. We have, through the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, set up both an international asteroid warning network that encourages nations that

have the assets to contribute to the overall effort, and a forum for the World Space Agencies to gather to collaborate on technologies and techniques that could be used to deflect an asteroid in space if we were able to find it far enough ahead of time. And we've got a long ways to go in figuring out the most effective way to do that deflection, which we've got some stuff about later this evening. But, Paul? I just wanted to point out that this includes radar. If you see on the bottom right is Puerto Rico, and that's where CEBO is. It's right there.

And radar is a key instrument to characterize asteroids and get orbit information and size information on asteroids. And we've got the first of a couple of examples of what the radar can do in this next slide, which you're going to see here. And, Lindley, if you know the one we're talking about, tell us what we're seeing here, multiple images of this object. Okay. Well, I think you've got the image up of a newly discovered object, 2017 BQ6. Did I guess right? Yes, you did. This was an object that was recently discovered by the Space Surveillance Telescope that we operate in collaboration with the Air Force.

Discovered this object on the 26th of January. Our estimates on its size are about 190 meters to 200 meters in size. Its closest approach to the Earth was a few days ago at about six times the distance to the moon, 1.5 million miles. And while it was making this close pass, the interplanetary radars that we have, in this case Goldstone, was able to obtain radar images. This is an unusually shaped object. As you see, it's very angular. It's not the potato shape that we so often see in these objects. And so this is kind of curious as to how this object could have these flat surfaces and angular shapes. It's a stealth asteroid.

They have surfaces like that. Paul, were you going to say something? If this was a fragment of some other asteroid, maybe there was a collision and the asteroid kind of broke apart along some kind of planes. I don't know. This is a very unusual shaped asteroid. Maybe there was a collision and the asteroid kind of broke apart along some kind of planes. I don't know. This is a very unusual shaped asteroid. Most of them are either potatoes or baked goods in shape. I was going to say, why does the universe have such an affinity for potatoes and muffins? Well, muffins are tasty and french fries. That's all I can figure. We actually are beginning with that response to go in the direction I was hoping to go next. So far, we've really only talked about these guys as a threat.

There's a lot we can learn from them, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we like to think of these as time capsules, really. They are some of the oldest things that we will ever see. When we find meteorites. It's always really kind of amazing to me that a small little tiny piece of rock that I'm holding in my hand is as old as the solar system. It's kind of weird if you think about it. I mean, most of the things that we see on the surface of the Earth are much, much younger because the

Earth has weather and geology that's constantly turning the rocks over. So it's actually pretty hard to find rocks that are anywhere near that old. So these things are very precious to us because they're one of the few ways that we have to really understand what it was like at the beginning for our solar system. Our own origins. That's JPL senior scientist Amy Meinzer. Amy and my other guests will be back in a minute

with the second half of Planetary Radio Live. Stay with us. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space. We have to explore.

This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us. Encouraging people from all walks of life to work together, to achieve a common goal, to know the cosmos and our place within it. This is why the Planetary within it. This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're going back to Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum for the second half of our special on-stage conversation about the wonder and danger of near-Earth objects. Still ahead is this week's

edition of What's Up and the new space trivia contest with Bruce Vets. Sitting with Bruce and me were Amy Meinzer and Paul Chodas of JPL. NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson joined us via Skype from Washington, D.C. It's wonderful to do the observations like this, whether from space or from ground-based telescopes, but there's a lot to be said for visiting, for going out there. We've done this a few times now, right, Bruce, and more to come. Yeah, there are a number of asteroids, a dozen or so that have been visited. Two near-Earth asteroids so far, Shoemaker-Near spacecraft at the asteroid Eros and the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft at Itokawa. But we've got a couple spacecraft headed to near-Earth asteroids now,

one of them the follow-on Hayabusa, Hayabusa 2, and then the NASA mission OSIRIS-REx that will actually not only visit but actually sample, in both cases, sample the asteroids and bring material back. Now, I didn't have the forethought to include an image of OSIRIS-REx with its spindly-looking little sample collection thing. Oh, good, he'll simulate it for us. Look more like the great bird of the galaxy, actually. But why is it important to bring stuff back?

Because when you actually get stuff, you can stick it into your laboratory devices. So even if you sent spacecraft that, I mean, usually we're doing flybys, or in the case of the very large asteroids that Don has visited, Ceres and Vesta, we're doing orbiters, and you're getting remote sensing data from a distance, and that's great, and you can come up with some composition. But there's no substitute for being able to grab material, bring it back to Earth, where you can put it into laboratory after laboratory. You can use instruments the size of a room instead of the size of your fist. And multiple scientists can

study it. And so you're able to extract a lot more information. It's a lot harder, but you can get a lot more information out of your samples. I want to give at least honorable mention to a mission to a comet. Our colleagues at the European Space Agency, with help from around the world, including here in the United States, the Rosetta mission. What a tremendous success. Yeah, Rosetta was amazing. It took 10 years to get to its target comet. It flew by some asteroids along the way.

It flew in formation with it basically for about a year and gave us just spectacular images of the comet, detailed information, and put a lander down on the comet and put itself down on the comet. Amy, as a scientist, I mean, you've talked about how important these are for learning about the origin of our solar system, which basically is the origin of ourselves. Is there more to this science of studying these objects? Sure.

Well, one of the things, I'm a huge OSIRIS-REx fan. I'm really looking forward to the sample coming back because we have lots of meteorites that we find on the ground. But the thing is, they all come crashing through the Earth's atmosphere and they get pretty burned up. A lot of times we find them on the ground after they've been sitting in the middle of a forest. So learning about the original composition of the objects, particularly the ones that are thought to be these dark objects that are rich with organics and volatiles, the precursor chemicals to life, that's hard to do sometimes on the ground. It depends on the conditions the object was found.

So OSIRIS-REx is going to have a chance to bring back fresh material that hasn't been fried by the atmosphere or weathered by the Earth. So we'll really get a look at some very pristine material from early on in our solar system's history. I'm really looking forward to it. Paul? And it's sampling an interesting type of asteroid, as Amy was saying. There aren't many of those meteorites on the ground. It's a strange thing, because when we look in space, and you know the various types of asteroids, C-types, S-types of asteroids, you know the ratios up there, and then you look at the meteorites, and they don't match. The ratios of the meteorites that we have on the ground

don't seem to be consistent with what's up there. So there's many mysteries, especially matching the various types of meteorites, chondrites, and all of these things, to what the types of asteroids are. There's a lot of work and a lot of science, a lot to learn. We've got a shot now of your spacecraft, Amy, NEOWISE, which we'll use as a way to get into... Isn't that a pretty image? I happen to like it, but I'm biased. But it's not so much this spacecraft,

because we've talked a lot about this, but a follow-on that you're also working on, which is, as you said, this one was not originally designed to find these nearby rocks. Tell us about this other mission that you're hoping to get up there. Right. So I'll do a little bit of history on this one. So the principal investigator of this spacecraft, the Whitefield Infrared Survey Explorer, is a fellow named Ned Wright at UCLA. And Ned is really smart. He knew that this would do great things for characterizing

a set of asteroids. But it really wasn't the primary objective of the mission. So quite some time ago, Ned and I were talking, well, what else could we do for asteroids? And so we cooked up an idea that would basically be the sort of the asteroids first version of this mission. The thing with this particular spacecraft is it has some limitations. It's done a lot of great stuff, but its time is going to be coming to an end. The type of orbit that it's in, it's orbiting the Earth, and the orbit doesn't last forever. This type of orbit, it's well exceeded its design life like a lot of our missions.

A lot of our missions are just, what is the old Timex watch commercial? They take a licking and they keep on ticking, right? Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, 13 years on Mars, still trucking. It's amazing. So this spacecraft was really only supposed to last about six months in its prime mission, and now here we are. It launched in late 2009, so I'm starting to lose track of how long it's been. It's been a while. A lot of years, but it's approaching its end. Is that correct?

Yeah, it's not going to last for a whole lot longer. It'll last for a while longer, maybe a couple years. But, you know, eventually the orbit is going to decay to the point that we won't be able to use it anymore. to the point that we won't be able to use it anymore. So we've been planning an idea to basically go out and build the sort of the bigger, better, badder version of this that's really optimized for finding asteroids and comets and finding them well in advance of when they make any close approaches to the Earth. So there are a few design changes. The chief, I would say the main change is get a little bit away from the Earth, but not too far.

And if I may add, this is your mission, but instead of NEOWISE just scanning one little strip of sky each time, NEOCam can look all over. So you have a lot more capability. Right, yeah. So the name of the mission that we're proposing is called the Near Earth Object Camera, or NEOCam. We seem to like that NEO acronym a lot. We keep using it. So anyway, NEOCAM is basically designed to go out and really search for these objects in a much more concerted way than we were able to do with this particular spacecraft, with NEO-WISE. It's a fabulous mission.

It's going to find a lot more asteroids than this little guy could, even though it's been great. NEOCAM is going to be a wonderful follow-on. We're looking forward to it. If it happens. And, Lindley, we turn to you because you spend your days at NASA headquarters where you guys get lots of mission proposals, and NEOCAM is just one of them. There are only a handful of missions that can be approved at any one time. How does this process work, and is this seen as a priority? There's certainly no lack of good ideas. We

wish we had the funding to be able to fly even half of them, let alone all of them. But NEOCAM is still on our list of missions that we would like to see fly. The recent selection by Discovery of the NEOCAM proposal did quite well, just not quite good enough. A couple of other missions came forward with what was felt to be more compelling science for that science program. Discovery is a science, a planetary science-based program, so it's more focused on the science side of things, whereas a mission like

NEOCAM does both a lot of science, but it is really to find the population of the asteroids that would closely approach the Earth. We are working with both GPL and the agency to find a way to bring this mission forward in the future budget. And the two missions that you mentioned that were funded also happen to be asteroid missions, science missions, right? Yeah, that's correct. to be asteroid missions, science missions, right? Yeah, that's correct. Lucy is a mission to go to do a tour of the Trojan asteroids. Those are asteroids that lead and trail Jupiter in its orbit about the sun.

Psyche is a mission to the asteroid, the main belt asteroid Psyche, which appears to be a heavily metallic asteroid, could be the remnants of the core of a protoplanet in the main asteroid belt. Small Bodies missions kind of ran the table on the discovery selections this past round. Yeah, we should say Venus totally left out the cold in this round, but maybe it'll get its day as well. And with two munitions selections and we were also able to extend Phase A for NEOCAM to keep that proposal alive so we can find a way to bring it in as part

of our program for planetary defense. I will, speaking only for myself, say you folks think this is good stuff, it ought to get more support. Well, you know who controls the purse in Washington. I'll just leave it there. Bruce, very expensive spacecraft, expensive giant telescopes on the ground, but at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are these people in their, literally in their backyards, doing some pretty important work.

And I'll start this part of the discussion with a picture of a guy that we're going to pop up here in a moment. Tell us about this gentleman. This is Gene Shoemaker, who is a planetary scientist, pioneered a lot of the study of cratering and confirming that Meteor Crater in Arizona was actually an impact, that those crater-shaped things on the moon were actually from impact, not volcanism, at least most of them, that this was a real issue. He was a real pioneer in the field. So after his passing in 1997, the Planetary Society named a grant program after him, the Gene Shoemaker Near-Earth Object, NEO grant program. And we've continued it on ever since. So we're in our 20th year of the program. And we support largely amateur astronomers,

although sometimes professional astronomers, including other places in the world. But these are not just your run-of-the-mill backyard. When they have a backyard, they've got a backyard in the middle of a Kansas or Illinois field or in the middle of the mountains of Spain or Italy. And so they're really advanced amateurs, and our grant program is designed to take them to the next level. Now, you may ask, why would these people be useful with all this professional gadgetry? Took the words out of my mouth. Oh, okay. Well, I tried. I read them off your script. And when the program started, amateurs were still doing a fair amount of percentage-wise of the discovery. But as we've seen in that diagram,

professional observatories largely sponsored by NASA are doing much of the discovery nowadays. So what our winners tend to be focusing on are the next couple phases. So you find them, but as Amy talked about, if you don't keep tracking them and get more observations, you don't know their orbit. You don't know if it's coming back to hit Earth. So that follow-up tracking and doing it quickly and rapidly and ideally having observatories around the world, they're heavily involved with that.

And then particularly with the third step which is characterization of asteroids. So really having telescopes where they can devote their time to stare at the same asteroid night after night after night, as opposed to the professional ones whose jobs are to find those asteroids and start the process. And so they look for brightness versus time. They figure out rotation rates. They figure out if one asteroid is actually two, which is going to be kind of important.

If you have to deflect it, you can go out and find two and get surprised. be kind of important if you have to deflect it and you can go out and find two and get surprised. About 15 percent-ish of the population of asteroids are binaries, or actually two, not one. So they're working in all these kind of fields. We got a shot that shows how broadly spread across the globe the recipients of these grants are. Really, it is global. It is, and we've had 39 awardees from 16 countries on five continents. Each round, we get a different distribution, but they're advanced to both individuals and then also groups of amateur astronomers who pool together, and they're just amazing. In fact, perhaps if we can take a look at the next slide. Yeah, go to the next shot here.

You'll actually see some of these folks and some of their telescopes. These are some of the telescopes that are all of them from the last round in 2015. We're about to announce a new round tied to the Planetary Defense Conference in May. We'll call for proposals again. But the 2015 winners, you can see these are not just your Kmart special telescope. They're serious about what they're doing. They're spread from California to Illinois, Australia, Italy, and this is just one round of winners.

Amy, calling these people amateurs, it's not really doing them justice. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So we rely on their follow-up with NEOWISE. These folks contribute follow-up in some cases from cornfields in Illinois to northern England, places you would not expect to be doing excellent, excellent astronomy. I mean, these people are doing world-class work, and they are what allow us to extend the arcs, to keep from losing objects, you know, discovering it and then losing it.

They really help us nail these things down. And I think Lindley likes to say planetary defense is a team sport, right? Yeah, planetary defense is a team sport, and these folks are the semi-pros. I was going to say, they're amateurs like college athletes are amateurs. I think that's a good analogy. There is one other kind of tool that is used to find these. It's already come up a little bit in our discussion. And it's why we've got one other participant who we didn't have room for on stage,

but he's going to join us for a couple of moments here. He's actually been sitting among you up until now, patiently waiting for this moment. Adam Greenberg is a PhD candidate at UCLA. He works under astronomer and planetary scientist Jean-Luc Margot. And like everybody else that we've met tonight, he's a past guest on Planetary Radio. When you were on, Adam, we talked about the unique work that you and Jean-Luc and others are doing here. It's going to pop up. There it is. That was, for decades, the largest single-dish radio telescope and therefore the largest single, if you will, lens or reflector telescope in the world until the completion of the FAST instrument in China just last year.

Radio telescopes, we think of them as just sort of passively listening or nowadays imaging, sort of seeing things out there. But really, they can kind of be, you know, our planet's most powerful flashlight. Am I pretty close to accurate there, Adam? That's correct. Thanks for having me again. Sure. Glad to have you. As you mentioned, I work with Jean-Luc Margot at UCLA, and we use telescopes like Arecibo to send radio waves out into space, and after a few seconds, or sometimes even a few minutes, those waves come back, and they have encoded in them the information about the objects that they bounced off of.

And that information includes their distance, and the way that they're spinning, and even what their surface looks like. You've actually been there. You've done this work at Arecibo. Yes, I've been to Arecibo a few times. Now let's put up, I wish this was my selfie. Let's take a look at him there. Yes, I got very lucky.

The few times that I've gone, I got permission to actually go up into the dome, the receiving dome that hangs above the main dish. The pictures don't really do it justice because you don't have a good sense for just how big it is, but it's many times larger than my apartment, which then again isn't really saying much. And the view is spectacular. And the view is incredible. This kind of instrument is actually really only possible to build in a few places in the world because it relies on local topography. Puerto Rico has very unique topography that allows it to be built basically into the landscape. And so that's the reason why up until recently,

it was the largest telescope in the world. Yeah. Before we take a look at some of the work that it and others have done, just a couple of shots, you talked about going out to the center, the focus of that big dish. Tell people how you get there. Yeah. So there's a catwalk, which you can see just behind me over there. And it doesn't look, maybe it looks scary, but it didn't look that scary until I got there and I realized that it's actually all mesh and you can see straight down And so the first time I went up I was I was a little bit scared

But eventually you kind of get used to it and there's actually also a cart that sort of like an elevator that goes sideways that will take you from where the Catwalk begins up to the top and I haven't written in that yet, but maybe someday Just really sounds like Indiana Jones. Oh, yeah. That's me. And speaking of Indiana Jones, James Bond, right? Is it true or not true, right, that this was actually hidden under a lake and lifted up

so that they could use it in a James Bond movie? That's what they did in the 50s. They certainly didn't spend a lot of money building it. it in a James Bond movie. That's what they did in the 50s. They certainly didn't spend a lot of money building it. I just want to add, there is a larger telescope in China, but it cannot bounce radar. It does not have a transmitter or receiver, so it cannot do what Arecibo is doing at all. I didn't realize that. I thought that this next image we're going to show was based on radar images. It is good.

This false color, phew. Yes. So actually this image was created by Shantanu Naidoo, who is also at JPL, and he's a former grad student of my advisor, Jean-Luc. These are a series of simulated images taken of a three-dimensional model of an asteroid, and that three-dimensional model was reconstructed using radar images.

And radar images are one of the few ways that we have of reconstructing the full 3D shape of an object without actually flying out to it, which is slightly more expensive. And what the color here indicates, it isn't quite the topography, but it is the surface gravity. In other words, how strong would the gravity be at the surface if you were standing at that point? This has got to be extremely useful data to people like you, Paul. Absolutely. Radar is so precise in its ability to measure the distance to an asteroid to within, you know, tens of meters or less. It is useful not just to get the shape and the physical properties, but the orbit.

If we can get radar data on an asteroid orbit, then we know its orbit really accurately, and we can predict centuries into the future and see whether it could hit the Earth. The probability is nailed if we have radar. There's one more shot I couldn't resist, including it's actually

an animation, and look at the data on there. Just happened. more shot I couldn't resist including. It's actually an animation. And look at the date on there. Just happened. Yep. Tell us what's going on here. So these are a series of radar images taken of apparently a comet. And what's going on is the images are taken and updated once every few minutes or seconds, depending on the distance. And then these images can be stitched together and actually show you the rotation of the object over time. Now, because these are radar images, you're not just seeing the rotation of the object, you're also seeing some other effects that have to do with the way that it's spinning. But you can actually see the leading front of the object, which is where the brightest pixels are.

The way you can think of this is the observer or Earth is located down. And the light has been shown up, bounced off the object, and it came back to us. And that's what these images are showing. And this is comet HMP, which is the short form for Hondas Mercos Pajacova, I think it is. Did I pronounce that right? Got that right?

Did I get that right? Well done. Well done. Closer than I ever got it. Anyway, it does have an orbit that comes close to the Earth. And how rare it is to actually see the nucleus of a comet, because usually we just see it embedded in a coma, and we have no idea what it looks like or the size.

We think this is about one and a half kilometers in size, something like that. So the work that we're seeing here, and we've heard how important this component of NEO research is, and yet there's some question, is there still, I think, about whether this great instrument at Arecibo is going to keep functioning, whether it's going to be turned off? Yes. Arecibo is having some funding difficulties right now. If we lost Arecibo as an instrument, it would be a pretty big blow to science and planetary defense as a whole. Arecibo as an instrument, it would be a pretty big blow to science and planetary defense as a whole.

Arecibo is the largest telescope in the United States, and it's the largest telescope that's capable of transmitting and receiving radar in the world. And because the range that we can probe to with radar is proportional to the area of the telescope that we use, if we were to lose Arecibo, that would more than halve humankind's total radar range, which would have a huge effect on the rate at which we could nail down these orbits, as has been mentioned, and also the number of objects that we can get really accurate surfaces for. Lindley, I don't really know how much NASA is involved with this. Is this something you can comment on?

We're very involved. NASA funded the radar capability on Arecibo, working with NASA back, first of all, in the 70s when the first radar capability was added to that radio telescope, which was actually built in the 60s. We also funded a substantial upgrade to that radar capability in the 90s. So it's been a collaboration with NASA, with the National Science Foundation, I should say, by NASA for this capability.

NSF, though, National Science Foundation, has wanted to move on to bigger and better capabilities in the radio astronomy arena and has built other facilities that it needs to fund. Arecibo has kind of fallen down in their priority list, looking at it from an astrophysics science standpoint. But it's still quite important to us in the planetary science business, and we are certainly working to try to find a way with NSF to keep Arecibo operating, at least for the near-term future until we find a more capable solution for planetary radar capabilities. Adam, how close are you to getting those extra letters behind your name?

Within six months. Wow. Okay. Thank you. Best of luck with that. Thank you for joining us here this evening. That was a terrific contribution. We have just about reached that portion of the show where we're going to turn to the

audience here in Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum to get your questions. So start to think about those and be ready to raise your hand. Before we do that, or as we get ready to do that, I want to get us back to the topic we started with tonight, and that is, of course, Armageddon and how we're going to avoid it. We got a shot here from that conference two years ago, the Planetary Defense Conference, which all of us, I think, were at. It's going to come up here in a second. There we are. If you look carefully, you'll find most of us in that shot. If you got your laser pointer, you can point us out. This is a group that came from around the world to talk about all the stuff we've been talking about tonight and really focus in on how the world, and it will be the world, it's going to be a global challenge,

is going to respond, not just if, but when we have this challenge of a rock that has our name on it. Bruce, you've been a big participant at this. You've presented at the last, at least, what, two of these, maybe more? Oh, several. And it's really, even though it's a very serious topic, it's kind of fun. Well, sure, it's fun. It's a good crowd. But we're excited about it. And the Planetary Society takes an involvement to the point of being a primary sponsor because it really does bring together the experts of the world in all aspects of the problem that's what's really interesting about this conference so you've got

finding tracking characterizing deflecting educating international collaboration missions and and so on and more and more in recent years getting involved with disaster management agencies like FEMA and involving them. And it's just a great exchange of ideas with a lot of talented people. Amy, this is, I would think, outside of what you do on a daily basis, which is, you know, finding, characterizing these. How does it fit into your work and what you want to be involved with? Well, one of the things that I think really personally appeals to me about this whole issue of asteroids is that it is a fairly tractable problem in a certain way. I mean, we can basically go out and look for these objects.

We can find them. It is a soluble problem. It's something we can really do something about. As a scientist, that really speaks to me personally. It feels like something I can actually make a contribution to, and I like also a sponsor of the PDC, the Planetary Defense Conference. Yeah, raise your hand if you've been to every Planetary Defense Conference. Bruce is half up. I can't remember. I can't remember when they started, but pretty close. 2004.

And every other year. Why is this important to NASA? That's a silly question. Well, the most important part of it is that we are bringing experts from around the world together for a week to talk about all the aspects that are involved in planetary defense, from how are we going to find them, track them, understand to high precision what their orbits are so we can determine if they are an impact threat in the future. And then if we find one that's a threat, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to work together as an international community and our space agencies to go out there and protect the Earth from a catastrophic event.

Paul, are we figuring out what we're going to do when that one is detected that's coming our way? Well, that's why we have these planetary defense conferences, is to try to explore the options we would have. And we have a space program, and we can do something about this if we have enough time, if the warning time is sufficient. Then there are several options on the table for planetary defense, including the basic one of actually hitting an asteroid with a spacecraft. We would launch as heavy a spacecraft as we could and run into it with some velocity. And that would change its course just slightly by maybe a centimeter per second

on velocity. And if we do that several years ahead of its potential pass by the Earth, close pass, then that might be enough to move it off of the Earth. So that's probably the simplest technique. Kinetic impactor is the name of that technique. And there are other ones, though. Yeah, some of those, at least one of them I know of, that the Planetary Society has been somewhat involved with the research for. Yeah, it's one of the more experimental techniques, and we supported laboratory work into laser ablation, where you have spacecraft with high-powered lasers that vaporize the rock on the side opposite you want to move. It creates a jet of gas gas and it moves it.

But it's one of these many techniques, including what Paul talked about, including the very slow gravity tractor where you use the satellite to pull on the rock. Or if you're short on time or have something big, then you have to start thinking nuclear. And that's when you call in Bruce Willis. Yeah, there it is. We can never have that's when you call in Bruce Willis. Yeah, there it is. We can never have one of these events without mentioning Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis, multiple mentions every day at the Planetary Defense Conference. We have it on speed dial, yeah.

Did you on purpose leave out the cute name of that technique? No, not on purpose. Laser bees. A little swarm of bees going there. While I've got the floor, I'll mention what we like to say, that this is the only preventable large-scale natural disaster. So, I mean, we can prevent these impacts. They don't happen often, but they will happen, and that makes it different than a lot of things. Just one more slide. And it's something that I thought was maybe the most exciting, the most dramatic, and perhaps the most instructive part of both of the planetary defense conferences that

I've attended. We've got a shot not from that, but something that came out of a similar exercise that was just conducted recently, right, Paul? Yes, and we conducted an exercise with FEMA last October, and this was the third in a series of exercises we've had with FEMA. And at each one, we go through a simulated exercise with an asteroid that I kind of invent that is... And he does it.

He's in charge of coming up with this disaster. The puppet master. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I have a lot like him. With Lindley's instructions on the general design, I put together a hypothetical scenario, and the first exercise impacted somewhere in D.C. I think it was near Pasadena, Maryland.

The second one, Pasadena, Texas. So you know where the third one had to hit. And this one was held in Los Angeles. So we had the local authorities here, FEMA folks and some state authorities. Federal emergency management. Emergency managers. And so the point of this,

and Lindley can elaborate too, but the point is to get the teams to talk to each other and to understand what kind of information we would pass back and forth if this were really going to happen. Now, this is extremely unlikely, something like this. Maybe one in, I don't know, 100 million or something like that, that we would have an asteroid of this size, I think it's a 100-meter object, headed for Los Angeles or Pasadena, in fact. It's very unlikely, but it's possible, and we should consider what we would do.

So watch the skies. Lindley, this kind of exercise, it brings out angles that I didn't expect, and I think a lot of the other participants were surprised. It actually becomes quite heated. I was yelled at by Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweikert in a fun way. Join the club. I was going to say, I've had a rubber octopus thrown at me by Rusty, so you've got to watch out.

But this is important work. This is part of the interagency work that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA does to, in this case, prepare the emergency response community with what they might face if we were to find an object that was on an impact trajectory of the Earth, and for them to explore how they would use their capabilities and some of their existing procedures, adapt some of

their existing plans and procedures to respond to this potential disaster and save lives and protect infrastructure. I told you this would go fast. We've got to get to getting questions from the audience here at the Crawford Family Forum before we, well, it's almost midnight for Lindley, so before we have to keep him up even further past his bedtime, if we can bring up the lights and raise your hand if you've got a question for us, and a microphone will hopefully come up more way. It's all right. I have my sippy cup with me. And I have one here as well.

Let's go to the audience for one of these first. Hi. Ma'am, what is your name? Ocean McIntyre. I know that the ARM mission is currently in jeopardy, and I'm wondering if that's canceled or something happens to that, is there something else in the pipeline that would replace it? or something happens to that, is there something else in the pipeline that would replace it? Lindley, that's one for you. And why don't you start by telling us what ARM stands for?

Okay. Well, ARM is an acronym for the Asteroid Redirect Mission. The purpose of that mission is to test the technologies that would enable us to, on our journey to Mars, we would use a solar electric propulsion spacecraft to tug large masses, habitat modules, and cargo to position it at Mars prior to launching the human crew to go to Mars. So we would make sure that everything was there and positioned robotically before we would launch the human crew to go to Mars. So we would make sure that everything was there and positioned robotically before we would launch the human crew. So it is testing the advanced solar electric propulsion technologies that are needed for that. And what was determined to be a good way of doing that, plus demonstrate a number of other capabilities for the agency,

was to go to a near-Earth asteroid, collect a large boulder off its surface, tug that boulder back to orbit around the moon, and then the human crew would be launched to go up to that piece of an asteroid, explore it, sample it, and return those samples to the Earth. That enables a number, to demonstrate a number of capabilities. First of all, the solar electric propulsion capabilities that are needed to get to Mars, the robotic capabilities of an autonomous spacecraft to go to an asteroid, collect a boulder, bring it back. of an autonomous spacecraft to go to an asteroid, collect a boulder, bring it back. And then with the human crew,

the combined robotic spacecraft and human spacecraft operations in distant orbit about the moon. But also before it leaves the asteroid with that large boulder, it allows us in the planetary defense community to demonstrate the gravity tractor technique of positioning the spacecraft station keeping with the asteroid and over a period of time we use nature's tug rope gravity to slowly move the asteroid off of its trajectory very controllable manner so it's it's an

important technology demonstration capability for the agency and we've put a great deal of thought into this mission and all of the capabilities that it would demonstrate for us. And I didn't mention working on in-situ resource utilization and in-situ resource utilization and demonstrating capabilities to collect resources, particularly water from the asteroid, and learning things that may be important to the asteroid mining community for their future endeavors. Yeah, which there are already a couple of private companies that that's their ultimate goal is to mine these. Of course, when you have water, you can make stuff you can breathe and you can make rocket fuel. My understanding is it's not looking too good for ARM right now, but we'll see what happens. I want to keep us moving here.

I did get a question handed to me from Facebook Live, and Amy, it's one for you. Will NEOCAM allow us to track 90% of the, it says 140s, I assume they mean 140 meter objects. So with our current best estimate of the performance of the observatory, combined with the existing surveys that we already have on the ground, we'll get pretty darn close within about five years. And you told me before we started the show tonight, you're well underway with developing the spacecraft. You're actually working on the creation of these detectors.

Right. So one of the things we'll be doing over the next year with what's called Extended Phase A. So this is a part of the NASA program structure. We're basically already starting to look at building some hardware, some detectors. And these are the electronic eyes that we use to see the asteroids. It's a lot of fun. Actually, I really enjoy working on the detector stuff because I'm- You like going in those clean rooms. Yeah, I'm a bit of a lab geek, so I happen to like it. But basically, yeah, these are the

little wafers. They're about this big. And each one would be patterned with a detector, which is basically, it's like a camera chip in your cell phone, except it works at these longer infrared heat-sensitive wavelengths that we need to be able to spot the asteroids. So yeah, we're gearing up to go turn on the factory again and start cranking out chips. It's a lot of fun. Let's see if we can get in at least a couple of other questions from the audience here.

I think there's somebody way in the back. Hi, what's your name? Hi, Laura Mae Abram. Earlier you were showing this map, which had obviously Jupiter's orbit, and a lot of the NEOs were kind of coming near it. Is there any chance that some of the Trojans could actually become NEOs?

Is that something that they could become unhooked from Jupiter's orbit and then become NEOs? PAUL SCHIFFRIN- Paul, was that Jupiter or Earth? The big circle was Jupiter. but those orbits are pretty stable. It takes a long, long time for those orbits to change over time. Now, Jupiter moves them a little bit, but on the scale of that diagram, those orbits are pretty unchangeable for thousands of years. So the answer is, in the short term, no, those orbits won't change,

or the orbits of Trojans won't change. Another one out there. Let's see if we can pick up somebody right up in the front here. Hi, sir. What's your name? Ron Theaters. And I had a question related to the Spitzer telescope. Is it technically capable of doing this type of work? And is there any opportunity to use it? Amy, you've been a part of that team, right? Yeah. So I worked on Spitzer. And Lindley, I'm sure, will chime in also. So Spitzer is another infrared telescope that's out there. It's in a different orbit.

It's actually orbiting the sun, so it's not orbiting the earth, and it's now pretty distant. Spitzer has a much more narrow field of view. So it's a much older telescope, so its detectors are smaller. The advances in electronics have made a huge difference, and so Spitzer just has smaller detectors because it launched in 2003. So its field of view is relatively tiny. It's designed for higher magnification viewing, basically. It's kind of like a zoom lens in that sense.

So we use it to observe asteroids that are already known, but it's not a discovery tool so much. Yeah, it's not useful for trying to survey and discover the objects, but we do use it to characterize the objects that it can see that would pass within its field of view close enough to it. One of its limitations is getting the data back from it now. We are in overtime. Let's see if we can get one more in in the back there, sir. Hi. Hello. Sheldon Hirshon. I noticed on the bolide slide that there seemed to be clusters

of impacts. Did I misread that or is it capable, is it true that some of these impacts cluster around particular areas Paul no because those were taken over 20 or more years so they would not be correlated with each other if that's what you mean but the eye does amazing things when it sees patterns and and I know whether they're there or not you see whether they're there or not so there's no clustering really even though we're going to say're there or not. So there's no clustering, really. Even though we're going to say goodbye to some of our panelists, there's a great deal of fun left with our What's Up segment, which is, as I said at the beginning, a part of the show that has been going on with Bruce for the last 14 years.

But before we do that, I want to thank once again these really, wasn't I right, terrific panelists, Amy Meinzer, Paul Chodas, and joining us at midnight, plus three minutes, from Washington, D.C., Lindley Johnson. Please thank them for us. Great job, folks. Great job, folks. Okay. We now go into that What's Up segment, which finishes the show every week. For that, I'm going to turn once again to my colleague, Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society.

Hi, Matt. Good to see you. Yeah, what have you been up to? There's this thing. It's not important right now. Tell us about the night sky. All right, we've got Venus looking super bright after sunset over in the west with Mars to its upper left looking much dimmer.

They will be separating over the coming weeks, getting farther apart. Note that on the 28th, moon the crescent moon will be near Venus making for a lovely and beautiful sight You can also check out Jupiter coming up around 10 p.m. And Saturn in the pre-dawn East We move on to this week in space history It was 10 years ago that the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Jupiter, taking great data as it did a gravity assist to then head it out to Pluto, where it got in 2015. And not done yet.

Not done yet. Look forward to New Year's 2019. We move on to random space facts. Which is even better with the echo behind it. Let's get them to do that for us. I think that would be so much better. On three, random space facts. One, two, three. Random space facts! Well done. On the first take. The Tunguska asteroid airburst that we talked about that occurred in 1908 leveled trees over an area

about 50 percent larger than the area of the city of Los Angeles. And just for those local here in Pasadena, that's about 33 Pasadenas. All right, let's get to the contest from two weeks ago and let everybody know who won that one. All right. I asked you, what was the first star to be photographed besides the sun? My hint was it also was used to define zero apparent magnitude in visible photometric scales. How did we do, Matt? Well, we got a huge response, much bigger than usual.

Don't know why, but I'm glad. got a huge response, much bigger than usual. Don't know why, but I'm glad. People who wrote in, you'll hear in a moment how to enter the next regular contest. What was that star? That was Vega. Bright star, easy to see in the northern hemisphere. Our winner this week, as chosen with the help of random.org, if you ever need a random number, it's the right place to go, because he had the right answer, I know now, was Zane George in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, who said, indeed, Vega, in 1850, near the birth of photography.

Yeah, it's really quite impressive. Did he have more information? He did not, but we got some stuff from other people. But what have you got? I've got that it was William Bond and John Adams Whipple at the Harvard College Observatory using a daguerreotype. A whole bunch of people gave us other information, like the fact that that first image of another star, other than our sun, doesn't exist anymore. There are no copies of it anywhere, which is kind of sad. They should add a backup drive.

This is what happens when you don't back up. You're daguerreotypes. I love that. You already talked about how it is sort of the standard zero-magnitude star. I don't know how many people who entered also told us that it was once upon a time the pole star, the northern star. Well, our pole star, the northern star. Well, our pole star varies. The Earth wobbles, and about every 26,000 years, traces out a circle. And I did not know that.

I mean, I knew that other stuff. I just said that to sound smart. But I didn't know about Vega doing that. You know what else we heard from a whole lot of people? If you are a fan of Carl Sagan, you know that a pulsed sequence of prime numbers also came from Vega, indicating that we are not alone. Contact people, come on.

Yeah, supposedly those were coming from Vega. Oh, I love that. We love it when people give us numbers in terms that people can easily understand. And so we got from Paul Code in Los Altos, California. If you want to know how far away Vega is, it's actually in our neighborhood. If you lined up Chevy Vegas from here to Vega, about 54 and three-quarter quintillion Chevy Vegas from here to Vega. About 54 and three-quarter quintillion Chevy Vegas. Which year?

We got the most interesting stuff from people. Finally, this from Dave Fairchild, our Poet Laureate of Planetary Radio. He sends us this great stuff all the time. Billy Bond and Johnny Whipple very likely are the first to click a shutter to daguerreotype a star. It happened back in 1850. Harvard was the place and caught at zero magnitude was Vegas smiling face. Bravo Dave Fairchild. Why not? A little art. Get a little poetry into our lives here as we talk about the possible end of civilization. We're talking about preventing the end of civilization. Here, here. Subtle but important difference. Before we go to the contest, the new contest for people

listening to the radio show, let's go to the contest for the people here in the Crawford Family Forum. And he's warming up his arm because, look at this, I have a bag of rocks. I hope you can catch. Say it with me. These are Planetary Society rubber asteroids. And boy were these back us up, you guys, Paul and Amy at the Planetary Defense Conference. Here are all these distinguished scientists, politicians, policy makers.

They get their hands on these, and suddenly it's like a food fight with asteroids all over the place. Okay, give us the first one. I'm going to mix things up. Some of these are a test of what you heard tonight. Some of them are not. We'll start with one that may or may not have been. I guess it was mentioned, if you're listening carefully. What near-Earth asteroid is the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission going to?

What near-Earth satellite? I'm going to go with asteroid. Yeah, asteroid is better. I don't know who our folks are picking. Yes, sir. Bennu. That is correct, Bennu. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Overshot, but that's okay. Did you calculate that orbit, Paul? All right, next one. How about what IR telescope project in space is hunting for asteroids? Oh, too easy. We just went through this. All right, I'll make it harder. All right, Amy's going to hit you if you don't get this.

Oh, yeah, Amy's disqualified. Let's see. We're on over here. Hi there. What are we talking about here? What spacecraft? Neo-Eyes. You've got it.

That is correct. All right, see if I can do better. Give these people a hand when they get it right. Come on. Almost that time. Third time's a charm. You got another little person? I can't really see out there, so I'm just going to assume all of these were perfect throws and you caught them all.

We need infrared. What are the only two near-Earth asteroids that have had spacecraft visit them so far? Young man right here. Hi. What's your name? Casimir. And you visited the Planetary Society earlier today, didn't you? Kazimir knows more about

what's going on up there than I do, which is not saying much, but it's amazing what his knowledge is. Go ahead, Kaz. Itokawa and Eros. That is perfect. Fantastic. Alright. Stay on your feet. Up, Kaz. You ready?

Here we go. Well, it went to dad instead. God, I am just doing terribly. I'm sorry. You got one more at least? I have this rotator cuff issue. You want it hard or you want it easy? What do you guys want, hard or easy?

Hard. Wow, good group. We've had two people. maybe this isn't hard, two people from JPL up here on stage. What does Caltech JPL FFRDC stand for? The whole thing. Caltech JPL FFRDC. Somebody, I'll bet, who has inside knowledge? No? Somebody else. I'm a JPLer. If we don't, I don't think we got anybody else, so it's up to you, sir. Thank you, sir. inside knowledge? No? Somebody else. I'm a JPLer. If we don't... I don't think we got anybody else, so it's up

to you, sir. Thank you, sir. Federally funded research and development center. And do you know what JPL stands for? Jet propulsion lab. Do you know what Caltech stands for? California Institute of Technology. You want to keep going? All right. That's wrong. It stands for science.

That was a hard one. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bonus time. You got an easy one? Oh, I always have an easy one. Okay.

What was February 14th or 15th, depending on time zone, the fourth anniversary of? February 14th or 15th, the fourth anniversary? Fourth anniversary. Anybody got it? Way in the back there. Yes, sir. Chelyabinsk. That is correct. Chelyabinsk. Right. Oh, man. All the way in the back. A real challenge all the way to the back of the room. Finally got one. Apparently I should have stood up before. Nice job. Let's go on to the contest that is intended for the folks at home. This is intended for the folks at home.

This is intended for the folks at home or the folks in the audience, but you can't answer here. Please don't shout out the answer. If you know it, go home and go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Find out how to get your entry. But here's the question. Where in the solar... I love this game.

Where in the solar system, where in the solar system would you find a crater named Valentine after St. Valentine? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and get us your entry. You have until Wednesday, March 1st. That's Wednesday the 1st at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to that most romantic question. And I think with that, we're done with What's Up. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about how you would save the world. Thank you, and good night.

And before we go, toss a couple more out there. I'll take one, you take one, we'll just throw them out there. I'm going to throw one that way. Did you get it? Whoa, that one bounced. Okay. I want to once again thank all of these outstanding panelists, Amy Meinzer, Paul Chodas of JPL, Lindley Johnson of NASA Headquarters,

in the audience, Adam Greenberg from UCLA, and of course my colleague at the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts. Thank you. There are also more terrific folks here at KPCC, Southern California Public Radio. They always make this so easy and so fun

for us. I hope you're all members. I can't mention them all, but they include the producer that I've been working with at foreign programs and live events, Charlotte Duren, technical director Tony Federico, who's been helping to make all those slides and all the other stuff work here tonight. Tony, it's great to work with you again after

all these years. We have a little history going way, way back on KPCC. There is one other person I want to mention because I have known and loved her since before she was born. Nepotism. She works here somewhere.

Claire Kaplan, my daughter, who works for the station. You've seen her wandering around. The most terrifying and majestic near-Earth object of all is Southern California Public Radio's managing producer of foreign programs and live events, John Cohn.

I want to thank all of you here in the forum as well and watching all over the world online, on Facebook Live and elsewhere. I hope you've had at least half the fun that I've had doing this. We are out of time, but the clock is still ticking for planet Earth and civilization.

You've heard how humanity is preparing for, as Bruce called it, the only preventable natural disaster. Will it be years or will it be eons before we have to act to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs? What's important and utterly new is that we have the power to act now, that that power is within our reach. I'm Matt Kaplan. I'll be back with another episode of Planetary Radio next week. Good night, everybody, and clear skies. Planetary Radio Live on the evening of February 16th. Back to our usual exploration of the final frontier next week. Planetary Radio

is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its watchful members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.