Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Saving the Planet: The Apophis Mission Design Competition

Episode Date: March 3, 2008

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Saving the Earth and winning a prize as you do it, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Apophis is the 300-meter rock discovered just four years ago that might make a big hole in our planet within 30 years. We'll hear about a just-completed competition

sponsored by the Planetary Society that resulted in the design of missions to Apophis that would help us determine just how much danger we're actually in. We'll also hear about something that scientists have just christened the flyby anomaly. Is it evidence that there are forces in the universe that we know nothing about? That's what has Bill Nye the Science Guy pretty excited. Emily Lakdawalla sees riverbeds on Mars.

But there's something funny about them she'll explain during her Q&A segment. And Bruce Batts will light up the night sky in this week's What's Up Extravaganza, including a new space trivia contest. What did 15 women at JPL have in common? They were members of the first 100% female Mars Exploration Rover Tactical Operations Team. That's just one thing you can read in the latest comprehensive update on Spirit and Opportunity. It's at planetary.org. Don't miss the great picture snapped by Opportunity of the dunes at the bottom of Victoria Crater.

Last week's space exploration conference in Denver, Colorado, must have been fun. Among other things, NASA demonstrated a lunar rover prototype equipped with a drill. The idea is to get down to where the moon may be hiding water and oxygen-rich soil. And if you think it's easy to design a robotic drill that works in one sixth of Earth gravity, well, you're wrong. I'll be right back with the Apophis competition. Here's Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of the Planetary Society. Now, if you were driving a car or being driven in a car, and I told you that your speedometer was off a millionth of 60 miles an hour, instead of going 100 kilometers an hour, 61, you were going

somewhat more than that, by a millionth of a kilometer an hour. You'd going 100 kilometers an hour, 61, you're going somewhat more than that, by a millionth of a kilometer an hour. You'd have no way of knowing. That'd be impossible. Car speedometers aren't that accurate. But when it comes to spacecraft that have flown near the Earth, we can measure that small a difference in what we expect and what they're actually traveling. Why is that? Because we're rocket scientists, for crying out loud. So these spacecraft, like the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous and the Rosetta spacecraft, and to a much, much lesser extent, the Messenger spacecraft, have all been going by the Earth on their gravity assist maneuvers about a millionth of their total speed too fast.

Now, do you know why this is? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. What about relativity? No, this effect is much, much bigger than anything we'd expect from relativity. It's just happening. Is it the same as the Pioneer anomaly, where these two spacecraft aren't slowing down as much as we'd expect? Nobody knows. So, you see, by observing these spacecraft very carefully, we may make a remarkable discovery. Oh yes, it could be some

problem in the software that we keep making the same mistake over and over again, the same errors, the same systematic or systemic errors in our tracking techniques. Or it could be a brand new branch of physics that will change the course of human history forever! Well, I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy, Vice President of Planetary Society. Talk to you next time on Planetary Radio. By the way, there's more about the just-revealed flyby anomaly at planetary.org. A group of engineers, scientists, reporters, and others gathered at Planetary Society headquarters last week. Some were there to pick up cash they had won

in the Society's $50,000 asteroid tagging competition. Bruce Betts will explain what's meant by tagging in a minute, but first, let's hear how Executive Director Lou Friedman got the presentation off to a somewhat sobering start by looking a century back in history. So about 100 years ago, there was this 15-megaton explosion in Tunguska. You know, not a lot of people can take a survey on the street that know that we've had a 15 megaton blast here on Earth early in the century. And just for comparison purposes, that's a thousand times bigger than

the 15 kiloton explosion at Hiroshima. It was awesome. If it had been a half a day different in timing, it could have wiped out a city, a region, or a large populated area. It would have really been the natural disaster of the century and maybe even of human history. This kind of thing can happen not just once in all of human history but at that size it can happen once every few centuries some estimates are as low as once per century some are as high as once per few centuries but the point is that large asteroid impact is a real phenomenon there's no doubt about it that it can happen, and there's just only doubt about when it will happen.

The asteroid deflection problem, whenever it occurs, or the asteroid information problem, whenever it's really needed, is an international issue, and it has to be attacked globally. Very little is going on on that subject right now. Even if there's a quibble about whether or not from NASA as to whether or not this is the exact way they would go about mission design, the importance of the process here to involve it as a global effort is something that I think is a pace setter and will be important. And in that sense, we wish more was being done by the space agencies to work on this

problem globally. Which brings us to Apophis, the near-Earth object or asteroid discovered just four years ago. Our own Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, took the microphone to explain the competition centered on this space rock that has been waged over the last year. Planetary Society has run this competition for how to tag an asteroid. Tag in this case meaning figure out the orbit very precisely of an asteroid because after all it doesn't do you much good if you know an asteroid's out there but you don't know if it has Earth's name on it.

So this is the next step beyond finding them and then detecting them with telescopes, but some in the case of Apophis, as we'll see, are very hard to figure out whether they really represent a danger or don't represent a danger. So this is an unfilled niche that we were trying to get some attention to and got some excellent designs for. Apophis, if it hit, would cause regional devastation, whether that were on land, taking out cities, or if it hit in the ocean, it would create enormous tsunamis. The amount of damage to be done would not be the species-killing, dinosaur-wiping-out type asteroid of 65 million years ago, but it would be one that would be comparable to any

natural disaster that we have today. We know that Apophis will miss our planet in 2029, but not by much. So why should we be worried enough to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with this space rock? Well, because Apophis will be coming back around in 2036, and exactly where it comes back will be determined by exactly where it passes the Earth and what gravitational influence it gets in 2029. Because of this effect, there's actually just a few hundred meter wide space, often referred to as a keyhole, where if Apophis goes through that, it actually would be put on a trajectory to come back and impact Earth in 2036. And so in doing this competition, we are using Apophis as an example in order to get a concrete mission design. But the mission designs these teams came up with are applicable to any number of near-Earth objects for which we may need to define an orbit very precisely. Investor and entrepreneur Dan Jirassi is a lifetime space enthusiast and amateur astronomer.

He's also chairman of the Planetary Society's board of directors. Dan immediately embraced the Apophis mission design competition when it was suggested by Lou Friedman. More importantly, he donated the prize money that made it possible. It was all part of his belief that the society must do more than cheer from the sidelines. It has to be in the game. This competition, I think, is very representative of what we've been doing and what we hope to be doing as we go forward, which is to not only talk about things of a space science's nature, but actually do some science and stimulate and act as a catalyst, really,

to get people thinking about real solutions to real issues. Apophis isn't science fiction. It's not a blockbuster Hollywood movie. It's very real. Thirty-seven teams from 20 countries and six continents came up with potential Apophis mission designs. There were really two competitions. The open category attracted entries from experienced companies and professionals.

One submission stood out. Spaceworks Engineering of Atlanta, Georgia teamed up with SpaceDev of Poway, California to design the Foresight mission. They did a heck of a job meeting their primary design criteria, keeping their proposal simple and cheap. Foresight would be just 85 centimeters, or about 3 feet across, and weigh 225 kilograms, or about 500 pounds. Launched toward Apophis by a relatively inexpensive Minotaur IV rocket, the team estimates that the entire mission would cost less than $135 million, which is pocket change in the world of deep space probes.

John Olds is principal engineer and CEO of Spaceworks. He flew to Southern California to pick up the $25,000 first place award shared with SpaceDev. First of all, we're very grateful to the Planetary Society, its directors, and its members for sponsoring such a thing. Prizes are unique things. You never know what you're going to get with a prize, but from the competitor's side, it's a very low cost of entry.

It's very intriguing. It's kind of fun. It's competitive. So we had a good time doing it, and we're thankful for that. And also to Dan Garossi for funding it, of course. We're very appreciative. Next steps for us, we look forward Dan Garasi for funding it, of course. We're very appreciative. Next steps for us, we look forward to working with the Planetary Society to promote this idea that a low-cost mission could be

mounted by some organization to go out and actually track Apophis. So we're looking forward to working with the Planetary Society, and we as a team are going to continue to look for opportunities to further develop this concept. Thank you very much. That was John Olds of Spaceworks.

We'll hear more from John in a few minutes. Next up was the first-place team in the student category from the Georgia Institute of Technology, oddly enough located in Atlanta, just like Spaceworks. Their Pharos spacecraft, named after the Alexandria Lighthouse of ancient times, would be about three times the size and cost of Foresight, but would also carry more instruments, along with additional items, described here by team leader Jarrett LaFleur.

A rather unique aspect of our design was our ballistic units and operational impactors, which we called buoys for short, and they would be launched from our spacecraft from Pharos and impact the asteroid at about 80 meters per second. And from the corresponding impact deceleration and various temperature sensors, we could actually understand more about the composition and possibly internal structure of the asteroid.

Their work won the Pharos team a $5,000 prize from the Planetary Society. In addition to the cache, the Foresight, Pharos, and other submissions will be reviewed by NASA, the European Space Agency, and other groups that could turn their dreams into a real mission to Apophis or another object that threatens our planet. When we return, we'll talk with the winners and with Planetary Society Chairman Dan Jirasi. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here.

I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do, too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen.

You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We continue our special coverage of the

presentation that concluded the Apophis Mission Design Competition. After the checks were handed out, the group gathered at Planetary Society headquarters moved outside on that warm morning last week to celebrate with the winners. I asked Planetary Society Chairman Dan Gerassi, who donated the $50,000 in prize money, if he was surprised by the large number of entries received. I think I was more surprised by the level of experience and expertise that we attracted to this competition. I fully expected that we'd have a lot of student submissions from universities around the world, but the caliber and the quality of the advisors and of the teams that were not

from schools, from serious companies, serious people with great backgrounds in the space industry, I was pleasantly surprised. And it just tells me that people see this as both a serious issue, but they also see it as a solution that's within reach. Dan Jirassi of the Planetary Society. Nearby were representatives from the team that won first place in the open category. We heard a few minutes ago from John Olds, CEO of Spaceworks. He was joined by Jesse Koenig of SpaceDev in Poway, California, the company that shared in the triumph of their mission called Foresight. John Olds told me that his colleagues made planetary protection

a primary goal at SpaceWorks. Everybody around the table on the team said, this is something that we as aerospace engineers can make a difference on. There's a John Young quote that said, if the dinosaurs would have had a space program, they wouldn't be extinct. So that's the kind of thing that aerospace engineers can make the difference, and it appeals to everybody. When you go home and talk to your mother, your grandmother, and they say, what are you working on?

You say, I'm working on saving the Earth from being hit by an asteroid. They immediately resonate with that. You know, that's really great, as opposed to a particular technology in a particular spacecraft, which is maybe a little bit esoteric. So our company does have this philosophy, and we do think that this is one of the things where we can contribute some of our time and effort to make a difference. And so we're hoping that this will. You know, it's a little bit tough because it's a new field, which I think is perceived from within the aerospace industry. It's perceived as kind of a fringe field right now. So a lot of the space industry comes from the defense world because that's where a lot of the dollars come from that go into the space industry. And people from that world, I think, might get a

little bit cynical toward subjects like this, which are out of the standard money line coming from the government. But I've seen the attitude start to change. And like I said, Space Dev's been great about supporting it. And I think they're starting to change. And like I said, Space Dev has been great about supporting it. And I think they're starting to see that, like I said, this issue will just be getting more important in the near future. So we'd like to stay involved as well. And you know what? It's only going to take one near miss for a lot of budget to suddenly become available. And maybe a mission like the one you guys have designed actually heads out for, if not Apophis, someplace else.

Yeah, we hope so. It's a sound design. It has a very lean philosophy, very cheap philosophy, and we'd like to promote it as much as we can. John Olds of Spaceworks and Jesse Koenig of SpaceDev, winners of the Apophis Mission Design Competition's Open category. We'll wrap up our special coverage with Jarrett LaFleur and Jonathan Sharma of Georgia Tech. They came to Pasadena as representatives of the Pharos Mission Team, winners in the Student Category.

That was quite a presentation. As Bruce Betts said, you guys apparently put far more into this and got more out of it than any of the other student teams that entered. We tried really hard. We spent a lot of work and effort on this. There was a team of six of us spending. I stayed up all night countless times. We had a little operations center in the school library. and at one point we had 24-hour operations.

This was just before the deadline, of course. We had some deadlines because this was actually a class project or a capstone design project, so we had several milestones throughout the semester. So before deadlines, we had a knack for pulling all-nighters and staying up for long hours in the library. And you obviously have mastered the number one most important skill for any aerospace engineer, and that's the PowerPoint presentation. Yes, we've gotten a lot of compliments on our presentations throughout the part of the capstone class.

We certainly learned how to do a few tricks in PowerPoint. But for all those sleepless nights, I get the feeling that this was a good deal of fun as well. Oh, yes, yes. We had fun on the sleepless nights as well. We've had, like, a little... In the library, we had a lot of fun, little pizza parties at 3 in the morning, making forts out of chairs. There's all kinds of inside jokes we have with our members,

and you really get to know the team, and it's a great bonding experience, you know. Much as we hear from the people who do this for real at places like JPL right up the street. Guys, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio, first of all, but also for being part of this competition, and once again, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having the competition, even. It's awesome. It's been my dream since a kid to do this kind of thing. So I'm very happy.

Jared LaFleur and Jonathan Sharma of the Georgia Institute of Technology. We thank and congratulate all the teams that worked so hard on the Apophis Mission Design Competition. You can read much more about it at planetary.org. We'll learn much more about the night sky with Bruce Betts in this week's What's Up, right after Q&A with Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Mars has a lot of things that look like dry river valleys,

but they don't have any tributaries. Are these river valleys or are they something else? Like so many landforms on Mars, large channels are both familiar and alien. Like rivers on Earth, Mars valleys wind back and forth in sinuous channels. They travel from high ground to low ground, which usually means they flow from Mars' southern highlands to the northern lowlands. They sometimes split into multiple channels, and they may contain streamlined islands. Although some researchers have proposed that wind or lava once flowed through those channels,

most agree that water is the most likely fluid. But if you were to take a walk up one of these ancient Martian riverbeds, you'd notice some things that were very strange. Unlike earth rivers, they usually have no or very few tributaries. No tributaries also means that they have nearly the same width along their entire length, which may reach hundreds of kilometers. The one place you sometimes find tributaries is near a channel's source, but even these are strange. They tend to be short and stubby with round heads instead of branching into smaller and smaller streams.

Taken together, many of the features of Mars' channels suggest that they did not form by an Earth-like water cycle, where water falls from the sky, flows across the surface, collects in lakes and oceans, and evaporates to start over. Instead, it seems that Mars' large channels originated from below, from groundwater pouring out onto the surface. Groundwater springs wouldn't need a very much warmer, wetter Mars. Liquid water is stable deep underground on Mars even today.

Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. We promised you he would be live and in person. Well, he's in person anyway. It's Bruce Betts, back for a new edition of What's Up. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he is here with us each week to tell us about the night sky and other things. It's so nice.

Even though Skype sounds good, it's so much better to be sitting across the table. Yeah, I keep meaning to tell you we should pursue underwriting with Skype for the promotion. We should. Not a promotion you give them. They really ought to be giving us a few bucks or something. Yeah. So if any of you are listening out there as Skype executives, go ahead and contact us. Here we are. Here we are. Let's tell people where things are in the sky. How about that? Saturn's just passed opposition. So opposite side of the earth from the sun, which means it's rising

around sunset and setting around sunrise. So you can see it in the east mid evening and high overhead in the middle of the night. Looking kind of yellowish. We still have Mars up there in the east mid-evening and high overhead in the middle of the night looking kind of yellowish we still have mars up there in the evening sky as well it'll be high overhead just after sunset little bit reddish it's uh kind of above orion if you picture the constellation as a great hunter it's over his head in the pre-dawn sky things are totally cool although i usually sleep through it but we've got a whole host of planets, but they're all really low off there on the eastern horizon. Jupiter keeps getting higher. Jupiter extremely bright. And then even brighter Venus lower on the horizon to Jupiter's lower

left. And right now Mercury is snuggling with Venus. That's right there within two or three degrees of each other. Venus being much, much brighter. Binoculars might help with this one. But you're going to have to get a pretty clear view to the low eastern horizon to see them, but worthwhile if you can. Someone told me that it is a particularly good time to be looking at Saturn. And I haven't taken out the telescope, but it is real bright right overhead. It is a good time, of course. At opposition, you not only have it a smidge closer to us than other times of the year, but also nice overhead viewing. And you even get a little bit of an opposition effect causing a brightening of the rings, although that's pretty focused around, I think, a few days of opposition, but I'm not sure.

In any case, it is a lovely time to look at Saturn. On to this week in space history. 1969, Apollo 9 was launched and went about its business of testing the lunar module floating free in space for the first time in Earth orbit. And 10 years later, 1979, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter for the first time and took all sorts of fabulous data that revolutionized our understanding, including those pesky volcanoes of Io. On to random space fact. That was a new effect. Oh, thanks. Sort of a Circus Barker effect.

Hey, did you know that there was one time when NASA flew not only the same crew but the same payload twice on two separate missions. No. 1997, not even all that long ago. STS-83 had a bad fuel cell, so they brought it back after three days. They cycled the orbiter, turned it around, and launched them again with the same exact crew of seven. It was the first flight of the Microgravity Science Laboratory. Launched them three months later, called it STS-94. Huh.

I had completely forgotten about that. Yeah. Those were the days. That's what I'm here for. On to trivia contest. And we asked you about the Crab Nebula. I hear everyone's talking about it. Everybody.

It's on everyone's lips. It is. It's the great seafood of the sky. And we asked you, there's the pulsar remnant from the supernova. How fast is this neutron star spinning and giving us pulses? And the answer is just so amazing. How'd we do? A lot of entries, a whole bunch of them. Everybody got it right. I don't think I saw anybody who was very far off. Most people said 30.2 RPM, but 30 would have been close enough. And that's exactly what Michael Seresco, Seresco, did I get that right? Yes, I did, of Adrian, Michigan, came up with. But he put it in other terms as well, just for us. You ready? 18,327,272 times between each weekly trivia question.

Wow, I like this, expanding this whole craze, different units to all sorts of things. something pointed out by John Gallant, another listener. He said a point on the equator of that pulsar moves at roughly 6.4 million kilometers per hour. That's a big wow. Isn't that something? We also got, I will mention one other thing. John Wilmot, thank you, John. He provided a link to the Chandra X-ray Observatory site where you can actually see animations

of the Crab Nebula, the pulsar, doing its thing. And so we'll put that up on the website. Cool. So that'll be at planetary.org slash radio. Absolutely. Which is also where you can go to find out how to enter our next trivia contest and win a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

This time, something sort of simple, but not as simple as, say, biggest moon of Jupiter, biggest moon of Saturn, biggest moon of Neptune. Most of those pretty obvious. What's the biggest moon of Uranus? The biggest moon of Uranus. The largest moon in diameter.

The largest diameter moon of Uranus. Come tell us. planetary.org slash radio. You got until March 10, 2008. March 10, that's a Monday, 2 p.m., to get that to us. And we look forward to hearing from you. We always look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for doing a real nice job hosting the Apophis event that we covered today.

That was a very nice thing. Well, thank you very much. It was a very exciting competition. We were giddy with excitement that we got such great proposals, including those winning proposals. Okay, we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the sticky side of tape. Thank you, and good night. I've always preferred double-sided tape, which just seems brilliant to me for some reason. He's Bruce Betts, who also seems brilliant to me.

He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's here every week with What's Up. Wow, I'm as cool as double-sided tape. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.