The Infinite Monkey Cage - Asteroids

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Brian Cox and Robin Ince journey through the asteroid belt to discuss space rocks with Dr Who companion John Bishop, professor of planetary science Sara Russell and astrophysicist Alan Fitzsimmons. They learn that these seemingly innocuous rubble like rocks can hold secrets to the formation of the solar system but just don’t jump on one – you may shoot straight through it! They find out about the latest space missions that are trying to bump into or grab bits of asteroids and how these technological feats are helping to avoid the end of life on earth as we know it.Producer: Melanie Brown Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcast. You're about to listen to The Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays wherever you get your podcast. If you're in the UK, the full series is available right now, first on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now, my favourite is 624 Hector,

while Brian's favourite, I believe, is 4179 Tuttalia. Go on, what are you talking about? I am talking about... Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah- Nah- Nah-nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Nah- Anyone know what that is? Oh, there we go. What do you reckon? Because, Brian, you haven't got a clue, have you? It is the arcade game Asteroids. Now, I was not intending to do the noises.

We were going to use a recording. But it turns out Atari are very litigious, even with their games from 1979. So I've had to end up becoming like a cheap version of Michael Winslow from Police Academy. It's genuinely true. We were told the BBC cannot afford the licensing fee of the beeps. And so I literally, when we were writing, I just went, what, we can't afford the...

And they went, that'll do. So, yeah. Asteroid, my favourite, by the way, my favourite asteroid is 18610, or 18610, Arthur Dent. That is such a beautiful thing. Three and a half kilometres in diameter,

middle of the asteroid belt, dressing gown. He's got a so-called Bieber box on, which is like a twin asteroid going around themselves. Yeah. So, what are we going to be asking today? Well, today we're asking, what are asteroids? What is their composition and history of formation?

And what can we learn from them about the history and formation of the solar system as a whole? And, of course, we'll also be talking about whether they will be the ultimate death of civilisation, possibly within two to three years. That's because the BBC said that people listen to shows more often if there is a greater sense of jeopardy. So that's not scientifically accurate. It's just for the nature of storytelling and it's also for any fans of Armageddon, obviously.

Again, we were going to have a bit of Aerosmith there. We're going to play the music. They're very litigious as well. So the best we can... Loving an elevator! Living it up when you're going down! I'll admit, it's not the one in Armageddon, but I think it's better loving the elevator. I don't like their ballads. Well, to guide us through the asteroid belt, we're joined by a professor of planetary science, an astrophysicist, and perhaps most importantly of all, a Time Lords companion, and they are. Hi, I'm Alan Fitzsimmons. I'm Professor of Astronomy at Queen's University Belfast, and my day job is studying asteroids and other things orbiting the sun out there beyond the

Earth-Moon system. And over the years, I've looked at and discovered asteroids that come close to our planet, and I'm kind of thinking that if there's a silver lining to an asteroid impact it would be that we'd never again hear the phrase X formerly known as Twitter. So true. So I'm Professor Sarah Russell and I am from the Natural History Museum here in London where I study meteorites. So most meteorites come from asteroids, so they're the objects that Alan studies

when they're floating in space, when they've landed on Earth. And I think the silver lining to having an asteroid crash into the Earth would be loads of new meteorites for us to study. I'm John Bishop. I'm a comedian. I used to play a computer game called Asteroids. And I'm a big Aerosmith fan. And I think if there's a silver

lining of an asteroid hitting Earth, it'll mean that we never have to watch another film where an American who's got a dubious personal life going on somehow saves us from an asteroid hitting the earth so let's start off and with we will start with the definition which is what is an asteroid because i

think people think of so many you know when you think of asteroids and meteorites and we think of meteoroids and we think of shooting stars and we, and we think of meteoroids, and we think of shooting stars, and I think people get very confused by all those things. So what is the definition of an asteroid? Well, an asteroid is really anything that's smaller than a planet made of rock orbiting the sun. Now, that means we can go from the largest asteroid, which is the asteroid Ceres,

that's 933 kilometres in diameter, out there between Mars and Jupiter, all the way down to about something about a metre across. Anything smaller than a metre across, if you can't put your arms around it, it's probably not an asteroid anymore, it's just a boulder or meteoroid or something like that. We've got over a million of these objects now discovered by astronomers all between those two planets so so most of them are quite far away and because of their size they're quite small so the

word asteroid comes from star like and it's because even with a decent telescope the asteroids just appear as points of light you can't see any details on them it's only with the largest telescopes we have on Earth that you can see anything else than just a star-like object. Sarah, are all the asteroids in the asteroid belt? No, they're not. So most of them are in the asteroid belt, but some of them are closer to Jupiter

and some come into the innermost part of the solar system. So there's this whole group of objects called the near earth objects and these are the ones that we have our eye on as potential impactors to the earth and they can potentially make meteorites so a meteorite is any extraterrestrial natural object that falls onto the surface of the earth or another planet and are there any further out than jupiter yeah the further out you go you get to something called the snow line, where things get colder as you go further away from the sun. So they become more and more icy, and then they sort of morph into this other kind of body

called the Kalpabelt objects, which sometimes come into the innermost part of the solar system as comets that we can see with the tails. So where's the edge? If I said to you, where is the edge? Where's the edge of the solar system how far do you have to go before you say we're no longer in the solar system yeah probably about a tenth of the weight of the nearest star we have what's called the oort cloud and knowing that

structure of the solar system from where the asteroids are in the inner solar system out to the cometary region that's how we decipher what's happened to our solar system over the four and a half billion years we used to think that the solar system was kind of regular you had the you had all the eight major planets and pluto in kind of uh fairly regular orbits and then a lot of flotsam and jetsam but it turns out that by looking at that flotsam and jetsam but it turns out that by looking at that flotsam and jetsam particularly the asteroids we now now understand that the early solar system was mad basically the planets were going everywhere but jupiter moved in jupiter moved out saturn moved in with with uh jupiter a bit of a lobster that moved out and all of those processes

through the the gravitational pulls of the planets went into sculpt the solar system as we see it today well sarah you mentioned the asteroid belt now is it is that is it a belt is it like is it like a sphere around saturn is it thin is the asteroid belt everywhere because can you fly past it basically Yeah, well, it's shaped like a donut. But even though, you know, when you watch kind of Star Trek and stuff, when you go through an asteroid belt, everybody's, like, getting kicked around by these rocks. It's not really like that. It happened to me in Doctor Who.

Very shaky. Yeah, but actually, even though there's a belt of rocks, they're actually millions of miles apart. So several, like, lots of spacecraft have been through it, no problem at all. But then we've got the Oort cloud, which is not a belt, it's a cloud. So why is the Oort cloud a cloud, which is basically more spherical, and the asteroid belt and everything else flat? Well, there's two reasons for that.

First of all, when the objects in the Oort cloud, which there are probably both asteroids and comets out there when that was created it was created by jupiter and other planets throwing material out there in the early days of the solar system and amazingly once they get out there they're traveling so slowly they can be affected by the gravitational field of the milky way galaxy as a whole and that spreads them out into more of this spherical cloud surrounding the solar system as a whole. But that's a long way out.

And to be honest, it's so far out, we've never seen it. So we're kind of taking what we measure in the inner solar system and projecting what it's like out there. It does raise the question, doesn't it, John? Like, we've never seen it. I know. But it's a big spherical structure. I does raise the question, doesn't it John, like, we've never seen it. But it's a big, very big structure. I listen to this podcast

and the amount of times you have people on talking about stuff that no one's ever seen. Pretty often, to be honest with you. It's the most made-up podcast on the planet. And why don't I know if you hear some of the ones about economics, you might find out.

So Sarah, how do we infer that there's this giant structure as you said a tenth of the way up it's a neary star yeah further yes so occasionally objects from this oort cloud come into the innermost part of the solar system they can have quite a eccentric chaotic orbit and when they come into the innermost part of the solar system we can see them as as comets and then when we look at the trajectory to see where it's come from we realize it's come from way out of the solar system but just an answer to john i would say the great thing about asteroids and meteorites which are mostly from asteroids is that they are a part of astronomy that you can actually see and hold and and measure in the lab so it's it's a very

sort of well you can't do it for the natural history museum we can visit the natural history museum john so when you say you can hold them, from your experience, what was the first one you ever picked up and what did that feel like? I was at university and I had just been to a lecture about meteorites and was told this was four and a half billion years old and it absolutely blew my mind that I got a chance to hold something that was older than the Earth. And not only that, but they contain tiny grains inside them that are older than our whole solar system

that they formed in stars that were ancestors to our solar system. I just wanted to ask, Sarah, you gave a very specific number there, a date. So you said these things that we find on the ground here that we have in the Natural History Museum, some of them are older than the Earth and there are grains in there that are older than the solar system. How do we know? These are very, very tiny grains inside meteorites.

You can't actually see them, and we're still not sure they actually exist. You can see them, actually, if you have an electron microscope. So, yeah, they definitely do exist, and they have isotopic compositions that match what you would expect a red giant to produce or a supernova to produce. So they have compositions that are just way beyond what we find in our average solar system. So you see a small grain and it has essentially the composition of an exploded star. Exactly.

Not a four-inch solar system. Oh, you explain it so much better, Brian. Yeah, exactly. And how do we put the date on these things? So we can measure the age of the meteorite really accurately, and we date them by looking at radioactive isotopes inside them. And when I think of how many people seem to have a problem with understanding the length of the life of the universe,

or indeed of the existence of the universe or indeed of the existence of the solar system there is something isn't there in having something tactile and having something that you can hold a lot of astronomy is kind of very kind of conceptual and you it can be quite difficult to grasp but if you have something that you can literally grasp in your hands and think this came from space i think that's powerful. How many fall to the earth every year? It's relatively common, isn't it? Because you said we've got a lot of them. We've got about 70,000 in our collections around the world. About a dozen or so are reported every year, but there's a load more than that that fall that are not collected.

What would be the common size of something that actually lands on earth? Well, the vast majority of material that lands on earth is actually in the form of of dust so every time you see a shooting star that's that's a tiny sand-like particle that's coming through our atmosphere and just burns up and we think that about 40 000 tons of material every year comes to earth that way so the earth is still growing uh every year it gets gets bigger because it because it's getting all of this extraterrestrial material. But the larger ones, ones that are big enough to pick up, that happens only a few times a year.

The number of samples you've got at the Natural History Museum. And there must be times where you break someone's heart. There must be times when you go, I think that must be from next door's patio. You're obviously not getting on with your neighbours. They're throwing things. They're getting the cat out of the garden or whatever. I can't tell you how often I've had that conversation. So we get loads of people all the time who think they've found a meteorite

and, yeah, sometimes it is like half a brick that obviously their neighbours have thrown, tossed over the fence or whatever. The worst, almost heartbreaking times for me is when people come and say, you know, this has been in our family for generations. My great-great-grandfather saw it fall. This is like the anti-roll show.

Yeah, it's awful. But yeah, so the real meteorites don't happen very often. So one fell in the UK in 2021, and that was the first one for 30 years. So it doesn't happen very often. Was that the one in the Cotswolds? Yes, exactly. That was Winchcombe. Made a dent in someone's drive, didn't it? It did.

And scattered all over the lawn, but it was in lockdown. So all the pieces weren't collected. Why did it get such a silly name? What's the name? Well, it's called Winchcombe, so all me's write. It's because of the name of the town. The BBC. Well, that shows you how often I go to Cotswolds.

The BBC would like to apologise to everybody who lives in Winchcombe. John's agent went, we've cancelled the gig in Winchcombe. Also Cheltenham and Gloucester. Just to be safe, John, just to be safe. Meteorites are always named after the place where they land. Always named after the place where they land. So they're like Wombles, they have geographical names always. Can I just ask you know when you

realize that about wumbles oh i love it in a series where i really learned something when you look at them is there anything within the structure of meteorites that that is not identifiable as anything relatable on earth it has all the same elements as on earth so the periodic table is the same everywhere so it has it's the same elements but they can combine together to make different minerals because they formed at different pressures and temperatures so they often contain minerals that we don't find on the surface of the earth and also they tend to contain a lot more metals and that's that's that's not because they have a lot of metals it's because the surface of the Earth doesn't have enough metal

because it's all sunk to form the Earth's core. Alan, what can the composition of these objects tell us? Why are we so interested in them scientifically? Well, the important thing for asteroids out there in space is that when we look at the asteroid belt, there is what we call a compositional gradient. That if we look at asteroids in the belt closest to Mars, they are pretty stony.

If you pick up a stony meteorite, one of Sarah's stony meteorites, and compare it with a rock from Earth, it's not that dissimilar. It feels a little heavier because, as Sarah said, it has more metals in it. But you've got to have a practiced eye to actually tell the difference, as we've heard. But as you go further out in the asteroid belt, as you approach the planet Jupiter,

we find that their makeup changes. We see that they have progressively a lot more lighter elements, such as carbon, in them. And so they progressively become darker. such as carbon in them, and so they progressively become darker. And that's telling us something about the structure of the planetary system in its first days of formation, that nearer the sun we had very generally denser elements because all the heat from the newly born sun was actually driving away the lighter atoms.

But as you go further out in the solar system, you manage to retain more of those lighter elements. So you get a much clearer idea of the primordial composition of the material from which our solar system formed. And that's pretty important when we want to go back in time and find out exactly what was the process by which our solar system came into being and what was here at that time so actually i've seen these different types of asteroids and and linking them to the

types of meteorites that sarah studies is actually really really important it gives us this global picture of the structure the current structure of our solar system and what it was like back then at the solar system formation and what are the specific questions we're going to talk about these two missions that you're both involved in which are going to asteroids so what are the very specific questions you ask when you're planning a mission you say right we're going to go to that region or that particular asteroid what are the questions that you want to answer well a lot of the time it can be linked to that formation and origin process if we're going to an asteroid how did that asteroid get there

and how can we explain its its structure and its composition given out what we think we know about the history of the solar system so to to give an example, the asteroid that recently had samples returned from it, Asteroid Bennu, and Sarah's part of that analysis team, that's an asteroid with a lot of carbon in it, so we believe that that asteroid originated further out in the solar system, and so it's given us a much clearer idea of what material was there when it wasn't affected from being too near the sun.

Could you talk about the OSIRIS mission a little bit? Because it's quite an ambitious thing to do, isn't it? To go to an asteroid, get some stuff and bring it back. Yeah, it's been an amazing mission, Brian. So this is aa mission that launched in 2016 it went to visit asteroid benu which as alan said is a carbon rich asteroid and benu is only 500 meters across so it doesn't have very much gravity or anything so so it's basically the spacecraft was kind of flying with benu rather than in orbit around it. And it spent some time going around Bennu, getting lots and lots of data.

And then it did this manoeuvre called the touch and go manoeuvre, where this arm came out into the surface, grabbed some of the rubble on the surface of the asteroid and then brought it back to Earth. So it came back to Earth in September 2023. Who picks where to grab? Because we've all grabbed in the wrong place. Speak for yourself, John. It's the first time we've directly had a cancellation on the show, isn't it?

But seriously, if you were to say just grab a beach, you could grab something worthless or something... Well, you're thinking of those grabber things, aren't you? Yeah, that's right. But how do we know? I thought, you know, in the end, it came back with a soft toy. I mean, hope he was going to get that bottle of wine with the tenner wrapped around it. There was an amazing amount of debate in the team

to decide where to actually sample. So the engineers always want to go to actually sample so the engineers always want to go to like the safest possible place and the scientists want to go to the most exciting place and then they have to find but within that 500 meter mass yeah what's so different about that small space well we were we got there we were amazed. So first of all, we thought that the surface was all going to be sort of powder, like the astronauts walking on the moon walk on this sort of very fine-grained powder. But actually it was full of boulders, and it was full of craters, and there were darker bits, and there were lighter bits,

and there were like these big veins of white stuff going through it. So there was loads of interesting stuff going on. It was also what we call an active asteroid. So every so often, some stuff would spurt out of the centre of it and just go into space. So it was a really interesting asteroid. Did you know what the white stuff was? It was that part of the grab? We do have some white stuff that

we have grabbed yes so not every sentence is this is going to sound as scientific as it is someone's just turned it off it sounds like we're talking about washing powder what is it what is it actually no no that's fine because i can can imagine it's, you know, you're going to get bored, there's a lot of waiting around, isn't there? You've got to keep the energy up, and that's another cancellation on the show. I wasn't expecting two in a row quite so fast. Yeah, so the white stuff, we realised quite quickly

there was a lot of this material called carbonate, which is a rock that forms under the under the action of water so the cliffs of Dover are made of carbonate material but one of the surprises when we got the material back is there's another white mineral in there a phosphate mineral so we're still trying to work out what that means but it also probably formed through the action of water and one of the most beautiful things about this mission, which is like all space missions, is that it discovers things that you didn't expect

or didn't predict. So when OSIRIS-REx went down to do its grabbing, what they found out had happened afterwards was that when the sampling mechanism went down and touched the surface, it didn't stop.

It just went straight through as if it wasn't there. And if it hadn't been pre-programmed to follow its thrusters, the whole spacecraft could have just buried itself in the asteroid. But that actually tells us something about the structure of this asteroid. It tells us it's very porous, and it's almost what we call a rubble pile asteroid. It's composed of little bits of smaller asteroids that really are very weakly held together. And you'd better be careful if you want to put on a spacesuit and jump onto an asteroid,

because you could end up just going straight through it and out the other side. It's strange, because you're painting a picture of this, as you said, a rubble pile. How do you get liquid water in a pile of rubble? Because it wasn't always a rubble pile, so we think it had a parent asteroid, or maybe more than one parent, probably in the outermost part of the solar system or beyond Jupiter originally.

And there, there could have been liquid water, so it wouldn't have been quite so porous. But then that got disrupted and probably was hit by something and then reaccreted into this loop. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks

for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working.

Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is Rubble Pile. People have hypothesized that the asteroids could be a stepping stone to fare the space travel because if you could land on one there'd be enough water resource to be able to take off or is that just science fiction yeah no that's absolutely not science fiction so um yeah one of the aims of the aceris rex mission was to investigate asteroids for use as a potential resource and although it doesn't

have liquid water anymore it still has water trapped in its minerals so it's mostly made of a clay mineral so it's basically like a mud and it's got about 10% water in it so so that's something that you could use as a as a gas station if you're going through space and you needed to stop off. Did you say mud, clay-like mud? Yeah. So you could take a kiln as well. A little vase to take home. So I was always under the impression until I started looking at the asteroids

that water was a rarity in space, but it seems to be that it's everywhere, except where we've been looking on mars those dowsers weren't as good as we'd hoped to be set up were they yeah absolutely so h2o is two of the most common elements in the universe uh but yeah mars has kind of dried out though unfortunately well this this brings us to future missions and also maybe you could talk a bit about the dart mission because robin was talking about you know armageddon moving asteroids that are coming towards the earth well well dart was the the first experimental test

of a technology we might use to deflect threatening asteroids in the future really instead of darts maybe it should have been called billiards because we know that if you hit something with something else it will that something else will move the whole point of dark was seen could we deflect an asteroid to change its path now we could try that with an asteroid just orbiting by itself around the sun but then you've got a problem about measuring exactly how much did you move it. It's much easier, it turns out, if you move the moon of an asteroid

that's going around it, because then you can actually see how that moon's orbit changes. And also, you don't have the problem of maybe knocking the main asteroid onto a collision course with the Earth. All you do is change the orbit of the moon, which is a good thing. If the big thing that we're worried about is an asteroid hitting the earth and

everyone accepts that that's what killed out the dinosaurs did that asteroid strike change earth's orbit it may have done but at such a small level it would have been immeasurable where all the effects of the dinosaur killer 66 million years ago were really on the surface of the Earth. The Earth as a planet didn't really notice. It was the poor things living on the surface of the planet that actually did notice. They didn't have a very good day of it, to be completely honest. But the important thing is, of course, dinosaurs didn't have a space program. But the important thing is, of course, dinosaurs didn't have a space programme. We do.

So that's why DART was launched by NASA to do this first test of, could we move even a small 160-metre diameter asteroid? And by gun they moved it. It was a fantastic success. Just to set the stage, so 160-metre asteroid coming in at the right angle, what kind of a threat would that be? OK, well, let's play our favourite game then. Let's have the asteroid have a projected impact point of, say, BBC in London. You work for the Daily Telegraph. Yeah.

You work for the Daily Telegraph. No! So you lose the BBC, you lose London, and you lose the home counties. Really? It's interesting to notice it had an effect there. He didn't care about BBC, he didn't care about London. Berkshire.

Tumbray? Oh! So there's a massive reduction in the sale of gilets. The good news is Winchcombe's safe. And that's the strangest thing about these movies and TV shows about asteroids heading towards the Earth. The asteroid that participated in the extinction of the dinosaurs was only 10 kilometres across, and it had global consequences.

We believe the threshold for global consequences is an asteroid only one kilometre across. And because these things are travelling so fast, it's the kinetic energy of the asteroid. Imagine something the size of a small mountain moving at 15 kilometres per second, 10 miles per second. What happens, basically, is that when it hits the ground, it gouges out a crater on the Earth's surface. And all that material that used to be on the Earth's surface is thrown up into the stratosphere and immediately starts global cooling, disrupting the food chain.

And the last simulations I saw was that if we had a one-kilometre asteroid hit the Earth, then it's a possible mortality rate of 25% of the Earth's population within one year because of just farming is not happening anymore. So that's the bad news. That's lifted the rumour. There's good news. The good news is we've pretty much found all of those one-column motor and larger asteroids over the past 20 or 30 years through dedicated astronomical surveys and they're not coming towards us for at least the next 100 years so we don't have to worry about it 100 200 300 meters would be devastating for a city or a country a region so of those how many do we do we think we have there's a number of ways

to calculate this number um using the telescopic surveys we've been doing over the past 20 or 30 years um and both those those techniques really converged on the same number that uh for the uh for going down to about say 120 meters across because you do the calculations and it turns out that if you're smaller than 120 meters you might or might not make it to the earth's surface depending on the composition of the asteroid and its structure above 120 meters no it's going to make it to the ground and make a crater and out of those we've probably found about a quarter of them so far. Has anyone staked the claim to the to the mineral wealth that's out there? Well that is Sarah I mean that is a big question isn't it which is I presume that private money

is now kind of gets more and more interested the moment that you start talking about minerals absolutely phosphates and all of those things and that that is one of the big questions, isn't it, in terms of when do we get that who owns what in space? Yeah, absolutely. So there are billionaires now kind of planning their next big adventure of mining asteroids. And I think at the moment, it's pretty much finders keepers. But obviously, that's going to have to change. so we're going to have to really kind of rethink our ideas about who owns what in space. So at the moment, the laws are governed by the Outer Space Treaty, which was from 1967, so it's way out of date.

It really predates all of our exploration we're doing at the moment. I love the fact that there's an Outer Space Treaty before Space 1999 was even on the telly. In terms of the mineral wealth, because it sounds like a lot of trouble to go to, to do some mining. So what are we talking about out there? You know, as you said, it's very difficult to get out there.

Well, it's interesting. NASA last year launched a mission called psyche which is going to an asteroid called psyche they didn't think much about it but it's the largest metal rich asteroid we know about in the asteroid belt and i think the estimate is that if you could take all the metal out and somehow get it back to Earth, it's, what is it, $100 trillion or something? Ridiculously silly number. It's more than the BBC licence fee.

Oh, yet again, the undercover telegraph agent pipes up with his agenda. For all the serious notes, I mean, it is science fiction mining an asteroid, so you're talking about metal on an asteroid. The initial plans for using the resources in the asteroid belt go back to what we talked about previously, which is water. Because when you take water, you can make rocket fuel out of it. And the idea is that if you're going to explore and exploit the solar system,

one of the problems is taking the fuel with you. If you can create your own fuel for your engines out in the asteroid belt, then things do become a lot cheaper. So it is initially this idea, before we get into bringing back all the lithium perhaps and the rare earth elements that we might need for you know the future technologies well you said the word there that's perhaps a bigger question you said the word exploit is it right that we as what we know to be the only beings in the universe have the right to go and exploit or change the balance of it? I don't know. What do you think, John? Welcome to the moral maze.

No, it's just that we've not been that great at looking after where we live. Are we making life better? We go into space so that we have more stuff. Because we don't need more stuff i think in fact one of the things i would bring out is a rule that says no one's allowed to invent anything for the next five years whilst we all learn how to use the stuff i mean but that is what i was thinking all the way through,

is that bit where people in Yorkshire, Nottingham and Derbyshire and other places going, yeah, we had all the mines closed in the 1980s because they weren't financially viable, so now they're mining in the solar system. I just want to ask, we've run out of time, but I just want to ask very briefly about the HERA mission because you've got a lot of badges that all say HERA.

So what is that mission? And perhaps just a very brief summary of the future missions. So the HERA mission is the follow-up to the DART mission because the DART mission moved this small asteroid moon but in the process destroyed itself. So all our views of what actually happened there came from our Earth-bound telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope and so on back then.

And we really want to know how did that asteroid move, what happened to that asteroid. So if we have to use this technology in the future, then we'll have a better idea of what's going to happen. So here is the follow-up, and it will launch in October this year. It's an ESA mission. And rather than going directly there at high velocity like the DART mission did it's going to take just over two years to rendezvous with the binary asteroid and it's going to spend at least six months there

flying alongside measuring exactly what what happened to that moon even I mean basically what shape is it now all that simulations imply that what the moon will see when we get there isn't quite the moon we saw from dart because we gave it a pretty big wallop and while it's there by the way it will release two little cube sats there'll be three spacecraft there it will arrive at the system in january27. We're going to have six months of amazing images finished by both here and at least one of the CubeSats landing on those asteroids themselves. So it's going to be great fun.

And then beyond that, we've got a whole bunch of other missions, of course. We have a Japanese mission, the Hayabusa 2 mission, which has already returned a small sample of a near-Earth asteroid to Earth, and it's en route to another two near-Earth asteroids. OSIRIS-REx, ah, this is brilliant, OSIRIS-REx is now called OSIRIS-APEX because in 2004, astronomers discovered an asteroid called Apophis, which is named after the god of chaos, asteroid called Apophis, which is named after the god of chaos, because we know that this fairly sizable asteroid, it's over 250 meters across, is going to regularly approach our planet,

and the next approach will be on Friday the 13th of April 2029, when it's going to be so close that you can go outside in a clear dark sky in England and watch it fly past the Earth with your eyes as a faint star. And OSIUS APEX will be pretty much there at that time. And a couple of days later, we'll rendezvous with the asteroid to find out exactly what that close approach to the earth did to apophis the earth's gravity will change the orbit of apophis dramatically we also think it's going to change its spin the way way it's spinning as well and it may even move stuff around the surface so this is just an amazing mission and there's a whole bunch of other stuff because what we we've understood from all the asteroid missions we've done up to now, again, is that every time we go there,

we find something new, something unexpected that we didn't expect. And we think that's going to continue for many years to come. I love that test, the fact that it's Friday the 13th. That's almost a way of whittling down the team, isn't it? Ooh, not Friday the 13th, that would be unlucky. You're out of the science group sorry yeah there's just so many exciting things coming up as well so as well as all the missions that alan was talking about my favorite upcoming mission is um the japanese mission called mmx which is going to visit the moon of mars called phobos which might be an

asteroid or it might not be we don. We don't know what it is. So that's going to be really exciting. It's going to bring a bit of that back to Earth in a few years' time. I always felt, I'm sure like other people did, that asteroids were an accidental bit of rubbish in space. You know, they were just in the way, on the way to all the planets.

And I just think now that they are themselves a whole world or a whole world that i or a whole system that i knew not about a whole science that i think is exciting well that's again that's exactly what we hope is that you look at things and you go wow that's that each thing has such an intriguing life and extreme intriguing existence anyway we asked the audience as well uh a question and we want to, if Earth needed to be saved from an asteroid, who would be in your crack team to save

civilisation? I've got here my wife. She's always right, so no one would dare argue, and her glares are powerful enough to change an asteroid's trajectory. Thank you, Danny. Who would we want supporting in charge of saving the Earth? Anyone except the dinosaurs.

Bad track record. Freddie Flint's off a few beers and a bat. Ian McKellen, as we would want the asteroids to pass! Weren't you just playing Ian McKellen's husband? I was playing Ian McKellen's husband, yes. He was Mother Goose, I was playing Ian McKellen's husband, yes. He was Mother Goose. I was Daddy Goose. That sounds worse when you say it out loud.

But that's effectively what happened. That was your thing? Yeah. It wasn't a play, he just kept on calling me Daddy. Oh, I don't like this one. Brian, because I would love to see him in a little spandex suit. Tell you what, if you go on to OnlyFans,

it's quite expensive, but you'll find him there. Right, I've got Dwayne Johnson. As there isn't a celebrity named after its natural nemesis paper, The Rock would at least guarantee a draw? God, that's a long gag, isn't it? Rishi Sunak, he knows all about missing targets. As far as my mum, she writes a good letter of complaint, but I don't see that would help, would it? Again, very Radio 4.

I will write a very strongly worded letter to this asteroid. BBC. More Brian Cox's. Brian Cox because he could smile sweetly at it and it would coyly avoid hitting him. Professor Brian Cox all naked and stuff. All tight trunks moving about and that.

Well, that's all we have time for. Professor Brian, I'm ashamed of you. There we are. Thank you. Thank you very much to our panel. Professor Alan Simmons, Professor Sarah Russell and Honorary Gallifreyan John Bishop. Over the last few series, some of you might have noticed that as the series go by, there seems to be an increase

in murderous intent in the subject matter including in fact how to do the perfect murder quite recently so now in fact we're going to continue with that next week what we're going to do is we're going to learn about poison and how to do it which

I'm really sure I'm not sure we should do that or not it's going to be carefully handled it will be very, very carefully handled. So we are going to leave you to think about next week's episode of Poison while you're enjoying the warm milk that your partner brings to you every evening. Tastes of almonds. I don't know why. Thank you, darling. Good night. APPLAUSE APPLAUSE Turned out nice again.

Hello, Russell Cain here. I used to love British history, be proud of it. Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor. That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

Do not catch up on bbc sounds by searching evil genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed but if like me you quite enjoy it have a little search listen to evil genius with me russell kane go to bbc sounds and have your world destroyed in our new podcast nature answers rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. you