Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Saving the Planet: Voices From the Planetary Defense Conference

Episode Date: June 30, 2015

We’ve already brought you Planetary Radio Live from the 2015 PDC near Rome, Italy. Now you’ll hear a small sampling of the scientists, engineers, policymakers and media experts who spent five days considering how humanity will respond to a potentially disastrous threat. Bruce Betts celebrates the great Jupiter-Venus conjunction in What’s Up. Bill Nye and Emily Lakdawalla return next week.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Saving the Planet, voices from the Planetary Defense Conference this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, just barely back from my vacation and hoping you have or had a happy Asteroid Day. Actually, every day is a happy Asteroid Day, so long as your planet isn't hit by a big one. The official Asteroid Day comes each year on June 30th. It marks the anniversary of the monstrous 1907 impact over Tunguska that leveled 2,000 square kilometers of forest.

We'll hold our own small celebration as we visit with a handful of the participants in last April's Planetary Defense Conference. Bill Nye will return next week and we'll also go to Emily Lakdawalla for an extended preview of the New Horizons probe's imminent encounter with Pluto. And thank you all for coming. I think we're done. I think we're done. That's how William Ehler of the Aerospace Corporation ended the 2015 Planetary Defense Conference near Rome in Italy. Bill created the PDC in 2009 and co-chaired this year's biannual gathering. The applause capped five very full days of presentations, discussions,

and a Planetary Radio live show that you can hear in our April 21st episode at planetary.org slash radio. The conference also included another dramatic multi-day simulation exercise that I hope to bring you more of in an upcoming show. Paul Chodas manages the NASA Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Lab. He was the master planner of this year's simulated deep impact. Good morning, Paul. Good morning. Give us a preview. What is going to happen as the exercise really takes over the PDC? Well, we're partway through the exercise. We've done four injects so far, and where we left the

exercise last night is that the kinetic impactor spacecraft were about to be launched from the earth and we have six of them going to be launched and we're going to see this today what those spacecraft did and and and the scenario may take a few turns that are unexpected let's hope from the from the guy who was right in the middle of the planning of those turns but it's a very dynamic process because, I mean, things were shaping, being shaped, even as the conversation continued yesterday, a lot of political heat. There were a lot of very interesting comments, and we can adapt to some of those in real time, but I have to say that we don't have the flexibility to adapt to all of those ideas,

and there are some great ideas out there. All right, I'm looking forward to the excitement. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Matt. Want to see all of the simulation updates that were parceled out to conference participants? We've got the link on this week's show page reached from planetary.org slash radio. By the way, despite the best efforts of the scientists, engineers, policymakers, non-profit leaders, and media reps attending this year's PDC, the simulated asteroid obliterated one of our planet's biggest cities.

It was the most dramatic demonstration of why the conference is so important and why it attracts experts like Tom Jones. You'll remember him as the scientist and four-time space shuttle astronaut who has written Skywalking and other books. Good to see you again, Tom. It's great to be here at the Planetary Defense Conference and run into so many good friends from the Planetary Society. Four times that you've been up there where these things live,

but in recent years you've become quite an authority on these, so I'm not surprised to see you here. I like participating in this whole field. I started out as an asteroid astronomer, looking for water on asteroids way out between Mars and Jupiter. But when you're an astronaut, you learn about the other sides of the asteroid coin. And there are many sides to that coin. There's the exploration potential, which I'm very excited about.

And the asteroid hazard actually works into what the Association of Space Explorers does. This is a society of space flyers, cosmonauts, astronauts around the world, and we're interested in protecting the Earth's environment. And when you see shooting stars from the top of the atmosphere looking down and you see the impact scars on the Earth, you get engaged with how we can use space technology to protect the planet. That's a new twist on the overview effect, I think. You wrote a piece with a colleague in the Huffington Post, I think in January,

talking about where NASA is going and calling for more support. And a piece of that was to further the asteroid redirect mission arm. Where does that kind of effort fit into what people are talking about here today? Right. Well, this NASA proposal, asteroid redirect mission, robot mission to redirect an asteroid into the moon's vicinity and send astronauts to it, it's exciting. But there is a planetary science application to this. The current plan for NASA is to grab a boulder off a larger asteroid

and bring it back. And before they leave to come back and bring this rock in for astronaut examination around the moon, they will hover around this larger asteroid with the mass of that boulder. The whole spacecraft and rock might weigh something like 20, 25 tons. And they'll be able to use that tug of the gravity between the asteroid and the spacecraft to actually change its course. It should take them only a couple of months of that slight gravitational tug

to change the velocity in a measurable way. And that's a demonstration of one of several techniques that would be effective in diverting a future collision. That's the gravity tractor technique that's been talked about here? If I didn't say that, it is the gravity tractor. That's called the gentle push method. And then there are things like the slam-bang kinetic impact where you slam a hypervelocity bullet into an asteroid,

and in the final measure you could use a nuclear explosive, for example. But gravity tractor would work very well on smaller asteroids, and they're the most numerous. You've been part of and have been following this field for many years, obviously. What kind of progress do you think you've seen? I mean, is it adequate? Been working on planetary defense issues for about 10 years, mostly on the international cooperation aspects of it. But it's made great progress just since the last Planetary Defense Conference two years ago. The search technology for finding asteroids has advanced. We're finding almost 2,000 a year with NASA mainly leading that effort.

We've advanced the technology ideas for diverting asteroids, so not just gravity, tractor, kinetic impact, but now there are things like laser ablation and particle beam deflection techniques. So those are new. And finally, on the international cooperation front where the Association of Space Explorers has participated, we've seen a lot of progress at the United Nations on getting the space agencies to effectively work together. Session is starting up here again, Tom. I counted. I think this is your fifth appearance on the show. Thank you again.

It's always great to have the invitation and talk with planetary-minded friends. The hundreds of attendees at this year's Planetary Defense Conference heard scores of presentations about near-Earth object detection, tracking, and possible deflection schemes, but the conference is equally devoted to social science, management,

and communication issues. Linda Billings is a consultant to NASA science, management, and communication issues. Linda Billings is a consultant to NASA's Near-Earth Objects Program who focuses on these. And Linda, it's good to see you again. You were a major player two years ago in Flagstaff, Arizona, and have a big role here again in 2015. When you gave your presentation, you introduced yourself as a social scientist, a former journalist. Why is that so important an element to have represented here? Because we need to think about how all different kinds of people and social groups are going to respond if and when the time comes that we're dealing with an actual threat.

What we're talking about at Planetary Defense conferences are the risks of impacts and the hazards that are associated with those risks. And we don't have any threats on the radar right now. And we may not for another 200 years, but on the other hand, as our favorite asteroid scientist Don Yeomans likes to say, it could happen tomorrow. It is not predictable. We are still counting the population of asteroids that come within a certain distance of Earth. 1.3 astronomical units close to the Earth is a near-Earth asteroid.

Now, that doesn't sound very near to most Earthlings, perceive the messages that we're delivering. Scientists tend to have sort of this unconscious habit of thinking that if they provide people with the appropriate information, then they've effectively communicated. The problem, well, there are a lot of problems with that, but the first problem with that approach is that the scientist is deciding what non-scientists need to know. What other people might need to know, a political leader, someone in the neighborhood, a local politician, what these people need to know about asteroid impact risks may not be what the scientists think they need to know. You made a number of major points, and one of the ones that stuck with me was fewer numbers, more words. What did you mean? The way that scientists in our community use numbers amongst themselves is critical. But when we're talking about probabilities of impact

and describing them in numerical terms, the way I describe it is that most people's brains, including my own, kind of go, we can't relate it. It's not concrete. And so we need more descriptive, qualitative ways of talking about these risks and hazards. And what some members of our community are working

on very hard is to focus on better descriptions of the effects of impacts, which is what other people really need to know. What is your sense of the progress that has been made in this area? Apparently, the progress in terms of the science and the tracking, I mean, we've heard some very impressive numbers. What about on the communication side? We've made a lot of progress because the leader of our NASA program understands the importance of focusing on communication. Is that Lindley Johnson?

Yes, indeed. It's Lindley Johnson, our fearless leader. We've also made a lot of progress in getting other groups to sort of come together in the ways that we talk about these risks. And it's really working well. We're getting away from the death and doom and gloom kind of language and focusing more about the risk and to take seriously the risk, but not to use this kind of inflammatory language, which I think tends to shut people down. Nehum Melamed was another conference organizer and presenter.

I'm the asteroid deflector for the Aerospace Corporation in California, USA. Did you say your title is the asteroid deflector? I just made it up. I love that. So you're at aerospace, like Bill Ehler, one of the creators of this conference. We are colleagues. I work with him every day and help him design that conference. Behind us here is Paul Chodas, who you told me you're working with,

and you showed me this fascinating tool. Tell us about that. Well, this is an asteroid deflection simulator that we at the Aerospace Corporation, in collaboration with Paul Chodas' group, developed for NASA. And we just made the tool available online, worldwide, for the general public to try asteroid deflection on the go. on the go. I was fascinated with this sort of granularity or the variety of data that can be used to test out how we would mitigate a threat from a particular object that is in the database. For example, you even have a little drop-down list of different boosters, different rockets. In all likelihood, a new threat will be a global event that will require collaboration and cooperation among many world nations and will probably require the utilization of several launch vehicles

to put together a launch campaign, a deflection campaign. What we have learned at this conference, what we are relearning at this conference, is that this is not just something that is important for young students of physics to learn, but that there is an educational challenge for government leaders, policy makers, the media. Did you have that in mind as this tool was developed? Indeed. One of the challenges that we had to face in the development of the tool is how to simplify the complexity behind the neo-deflection problem so that non-specialists can intuitively understand it without having to go through a complicated educational program.

The current tool is an interactive tool that allows anybody to develop insights into neodeflection without being a broken scientist. Fascinating. I look forward to playing with the tool and seeing if I can help to save the Earth. And I would be delighted to support you. Nehu Melamed of the Aerospace Corporation. More voices from the 2015 Planetary Defense Conference are moments away. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here.

I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos, which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television?

No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merc? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right?

Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety.

You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, this week offering you a sampling of the men and women who traveled to Frascati, Italy in April of this year for the Planetary Defense Conference. They came from nearly everywhere on our planet and from a possibly surprising array of disciplines. I'm Jason Reinhart, and I'm with Stanford University. I'm a PhD student there in management science and engineering. Jason, I was intrigued by your presentation yesterday or a couple of days ago here at

the PDC because you were dealing with probabilistic effects. I mean, it seemed to impress this very sophisticated crowd. Yeah, thanks. We took a risk and analytic approach, and so when we do a risk analysis, we try to build a top-down model that is going to try and incorporate a lot of the scientific findings that are out there, a lot of the physics models that are there.

It's a bit more focused on consequences and outcomes and measuring probability distributions over that. I think it's a little bit novel for this community. Most of the time, they tend to focus on probabilities of impact, but don't think about consequences other than who might be affected, or they think about consequences in terms of what kind of damages might happen, but less than the probability. I've seen very few things that have put both of those things together. And what were some of the conclusions that you reached? I mean, you presented some pretty dramatic graphs. Yeah, some of the conclusions are that while the probability of something happening is quite low,

on average the number of annual deaths or something like that is often, you know, it's lower than most people would think. The tails on these distributions are quite long, which means that there's still significant probability mass for very large events. And so it just goes to show that these are the kind of catastrophic events which means that there's still significant probability mass out for very large events. And so it just goes to show that these are the kind of catastrophic events where, while they may have low averages, they could have very large impacts, very large, far-ranging effects in terms of fatalities and infrastructure damage and things like this.

So you can't ignore those low probabilities because the consequences are so big. Jason Reinhart of Stanford University providing more evidence of the wide spectrum of expertise that benefited this year's PDC. But the attendees differed in other ways, including age. Here's Travis Brashears, followed by his mentor at UC Santa Barbara, Philip Lubin. Travis, I was told by somebody that you are very likely the youngest person at the conference. And even if that's not true, I bet it's true that you're the youngest presenter. Yeah, I think so. What are you going to be presenting about?

I'm presenting on directed energy deflection laboratory measurements. So we are using lasers to move asteroids. And so we needed to experiment to prove this, and so that's what I'm doing in a laboratory right now. You were familiar, I think, with the Planetary Society's backed Laser Bees program. Yes, I was. It's very interesting. So we'll have to look at both of them

and see if my experiments will help. Or Laser Bees helps you. But let's make it real clear here. You're still a high school student. Yes, I'm a senior in high school, and I'm choosing colleges right now. How did he end up talking to you, a professor at UCSB? There's a research program at UCSB during the summer for high school students called the Research Mentorship Program,

and Travis was recommended by the group to work in our lab, so we brought him over, and he's turned out to be just one amazing young man. So he's truly spectacular. At the other end of the age spectrum, the far end, was space exploration pioneer James Burke. I won't tell you his actual age but he did graduate from Caltech exactly 70 years ago. Jim went to work for the Jet Propulsion Lab in 1949. Now retired, he has done a lot of writing and editing for the Planetary Society and is also deeply involved in the International Space University. I wanted to make a point of talking to you today because I've already spoken to a guy who I think is probably the youngest attendee at the conference, 16 years old, making a presentation.

I hope you won't mind, I hope you'll forgive me, but I suspect you are the most senior attendee. I think I'm definitely the oldest person in whatever gathering we find ourselves in. Unfortunately, my contemporaries, including all four of the system managers on Ranger, went on their way. Too bad. But I'm still functioning and greatly enjoying this particular meeting, obviously, because it's on a very interesting and important subject. Has this been a topic that has held your interest for many, many decades, really? This topic, no. Asteroids as a scientific item of interest, of course,

as part of the solar system, and asteroids and comets, you kind of get around to those after you've been to all the planets. The threat aspect of asteroids has only recently become a matter of public consciousness, and I'm darn glad it is, but we're still lacking on the essential element, which is a worldwide institution responsible for and capable of and funded to take care of the problem. Speaking of Ranger, I mean, a great deal of discussion here

has been about impactors sending spacecraft out to strike an object in space. You were one of the first to attempt to do that. We attempted to do it two ways. First, we attempted to do it with a solid propellant retro rocket, which would subtract off the approach speed and leave you with an unknown residual speed that had to be taken out with a balsa wood impact absorber. The Soviets had the same problem. They used an airbag to take out the residual difference in speeds. Both of us had many failures before

one of us got a success, namely the Soviets. Space is still hard. The challenges have grown, but it is still a difficult game to play. I wonder what you think of the progress that you have seen in the more than 50 years since Ranger? The main element of the progress is that the chaotic management situation that existed in the early days has been sorted out so that now our troubles don't exist among the people in the program. The difficulty is selling the program in the first place and keeping it funded and making it stay on schedule. All of those things, of course, are still the same as they were, but the management hassles at the beginning were really unbelievable.

Speaking specifically about our ability to determine the threat from asteroids and comets, do you think we're on the right track? We're definitely on the right track technically, but we're completely on no track with regard to policy because the use of nuclear explosives in space is prohibited seven different ways. And you just saw a nice paper about that late this afternoon, where the legal knot hasn't been untied and isn't going to be untied unless something really changes. Now, of course, if the population of the world is faced with an existential threat,

somebody's going to say, well, never mind the treaties, we've got to do it. Tell me again why you feel comets should be getting more attention here. Comets can come from anywhere, and you don't get the kind of advance warning that you do with them. This asteroid, 2015 PDC, was identified seven years in advance, and a number of years went by while they were getting ready to do something about it. And of course, there were delays. That's too bad. But at least they finally did manage to mount several different programs to see if they could deflect it and keep it from

hitting the Earth. In the case of a comet, you might have only a few months of warning at the most, not seven years, and what are you going to do? That's where you begin to think about nuclear explosives. Voices from the 2015 Planetary Defense Conference. I want to thank Bill Ehler and the other conference planners along with conference sponsors that included the International Academy of Astronautics, NASA, ESA, Airbus, the Aerospace Corporation, and SpaceDisc. Back with Bruce Betts in a moment. Time once again, yet again, for What's Up on Planetary Radio. I am with the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society.

That's Bruce Betts. You have one or two or more random space fact videos having to do with asteroids, don't you? We do indeed. We've got at least three so far, including hanging out with special guests, with Bob Picardo in one, Amy Meinzer in another, and the Vatican in the other one. Amy's great, and Bob is a cracker. People ought to see this one. His ad libs are just hilarious. We're reposting those on social media, and of course you can always find them at planetary.org.

I've got a blog on planetary-sided asteroid activities as well, and all sorts of other information online. Great. Tell us what else is up in the night sky. It's finally happened. Venus and Jupiter, finally, almost, really close, June 30th, July 1st, about 0.3 degrees apart, low in the west. In the early evening, super, super bright objects looking super, super cool. They will then begin to separate apart. Unless they change their minds. Maybe they like hanging out together.

They've got kind of an antagonistic, kind of a love, hate, love, Jupiter. It's a mythic thing. There it is. Thank you. That's the dumb joke I was looking for. That was actually good. I'm very impressed, man. Thank you very much for that.

You can also see Saturn looking disinterested farther over on the south and east in the early evening and just avoiding the other planets. But why would you? Exactly. On to this week in space history. But why would you? Exactly. On to this week in space history. First, a somber remembrance.

In 1971, the Soyuz 11 crew died during reentry. And so we remember that. And now on to asteroid-related, impact-related things, actually. We've got 1908, Tunguska Impact. 1908, Tunguska Impact, hence the asteroid day that's been set on the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska Impact that leveled 2,000 square kilometers of forest in Siberia where, fortunately, there weren't any humans at the time. Good way to clear a lot of land if you don't mind the shockwave. See, there's the kind of positive can-do attitude we're looking for. That's what I'm here for. One person's natural disaster is another land-clearing opportunity.

In human disasters that don't actually hurt anyone, it's been 10 years. Can you believe it? 10 years since Deep Impact slammed a big ball of copper into Comet Tempel 1 and made an impact. We had a big party that night nearby, and it is hard to believe it was 10 years ago. We did. That was a good time. Good live event with the images coming back, suddenly going from placid comet to holy mackerel. Look at what they did.

All right. On to Rundle Space! All right. On to... RANDALL SPARKS! Whoa. Bruce Batts is Superman. Shh. Quiet.

So, we've got this Pluto encounter coming up. Very soon. New Horizons. Nine years of travel. Here's a Pluto fact. From the side of Pluto, they can actually see Charon, its big moon. They're tidally locked with each other, so always face the same side to each other. We've given you that random space fact before.

So this one is from the side of Pluto that can actually see Charon. Charon appears about eight times larger in the sky than the Earth's moon appears as seen from Earth. Ooh, because it's really close. Because it's really close. Because it's really close. So it's a decent size. That must be something to see. By the way, next week's show, special preview of the New Horizons Close Encounter with Pluto. We're going to spend extra time with Emily Lakdawalla.

So just a little preview there. Trivia contest. Still no winners. Yeah, no prize. Still no losers. But don't worry, you can win and lose with the following new question. Of the names of moons of Pluto, the moons that are known before the New Horizons encounter, there are five of them. Which of those names that are mythological, which of those mythological figures had a family relationship in mythology?

We're looking for two moons that were related to each other. Well, okay, the moons perhaps, perhaps not, but the mythological characters that are named after are related to each other. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. And this time you've got until the 7th of July.

July 7, Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time, to get us your answer. And you might just be the winner of a Planetary Radio t-shirt. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about bulldozers and other ways to clear land. Thank you, and good night. I'm sticking with airbursts of asteroids. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society,

who joins us each week here for What's Up. Don't miss Emily's Pluto preview next week. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by the Society's watchful members. Daniel Gunn is the Associate Producer. Josh Doyle

created our theme. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.