All Hands on Planetary Defense!

So back in August, we released an episode titled It's Coming Right for Us, and that was about the dangers of space objects colliding with Earth, like asteroids and meteors and comets and that kind of stuff. And so we large pianos, very large ip really just the majority of items that you can find in the ACME catalog. Wiley coyote would get um. But we explored the potential options of what we might do to deal with an oncoming space object. We were specifically looking into things like the

scenarios of deep impact and armageddon. Would that the answers there makes sense, and specifically with armageddon, the answer is heck, no, don't blow it up. It makes it worse. Do you was Do you remember? Was this the episode where I talked about the old movie The Day the Sky Exploded? It may very well have been. I honestly did not go back and listen to the episodes. So, uh so I want to say, yes, listeners can let us know

if we're wrong. But we wanted to talk a little bit more about this today because I recently actually looked into an organization that is dedicated to discovering and ultimately deflect doing space objects that are on a collision course with Earth. I had not heard of them before, which is odd. Or if I had, I don't remember it, which is odd. You've heard of everything, well, I mean, which is odd because we specifically researched this topic, and

our research tends to be fairly exhaustive. Sure, it was also a couple of years ago, though, and you know, maybe maybe they hadn't had something big come out in a couple of years or something like that. But yes, so part of our Hey, scary stuff could fall on us, right, So to refresh you about why is it scary that stuff could fall on us? Uh? Collisions happen, right, big stuff from space has collided with Earth in the past. And it doesn't even have to be really big stuff.

It can be relatively small stuff, right, because it could be moving wicked fast. This is a result of relativity. Yeah, well, it's basic physics, even if we don't even have to get into full relativity to understand that. Uh, that forces

mass times acceleration. Right, So if you're if you're moving at a really high velocity, which is not acceleration obviously, but if you're moving in a really high velocity and you have a decent amount of mass, you're going to you're going to give a lot of force when you hit something. I guess that's correct. It's just regular physics. I was thinking about the proposed space weapons that would have just small, regular mass objects moving at relativistic speeds

to create like nuclear explosion, right impacts. Yeah, just to shoot a peanut real hard and yeah at times. Yeah, that's that's kind of like what we were talking about just a second ago, but on steroids. So let's talk about some of the collisions. There was one that happened around sixty five point five million years ago, sixty six

million years ago, who's counting really. Uh, that created a pretty big crater on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mako, and that's believed to be a major contributor to the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. Yeah, you'll often hear about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and uh, the space object that collided there with the Earth whatever was probably does seem to have been a major factor contributing to the mass extinction of that time period, but it

probably wasn't the only one either, Right. That's why I say contributing factor as opposed to this killed the dinosaurs, because as it turns out, there were a lot of different things that play that said, the cards were stacked against the dinosaurs. I think the last time I read about this issue, there was the belief that there was a lot of volcanism and volcanism volcanic volcanic activity, climate change around the same time. Sure, but you know, a

multi megaton event doesn't really help. By megaton, I mean mega tons of energy, right, Yeah, Yeah, that's that's that's not an assistant. Yeah, that didn't That didn't alleviate the volcanic activity. So to bring it up to a more modern era, you know, let's let's let's skip ahead. You know, sixty five and a half million years or so. Who's yeah,

who's counting up to nineteen o eight. That's when we had an event happened that we can actually look at as an example of a relatively small space object colliding with Earth. I'm talking about the Tunguska event. Now, unless you're one of the people who believes this was actually Nicola Tesla testing a secret super weapon, it wasn't. The Tunguska event was a was a space rock. It was a bowl eyed event from space that was not actually

that big. No, it measured around a hundred twenty feet wide or thirty six point six meters, although there I've read other measurements that had it as big as forty five ms, which you know, that's that's significant, but it's still still not huge compared to the Earth, right, the Earth is enormous. Something that's just just you know, thirty

six or thirty seven ms wide, that's nothing. Ten difference of ten ms would make a really big difference when you consider how fast this thing was going super fast, and it hit Uh in Siberia. Uh Uh a relatively remote patch where there weren't any people living in that immediate area, which is good because if they had been,

they wouldn't be for much longer. Uh. The the blast stripped the trees of all of their limbs and bark at ground zero, So the trees remain standing directly above where the space rock essentially broke apart when it blasted over. That's why I meant sorry, directly below. I have problems with prepositions because because they believe it exploded in the atmosphere, yes, exactly right, they believe it explodes in the atmosphere above this region. So the trees directly below the explosion turned

into turned into toothpicks. The trees around them. Actually that that's not fair. That makes it sound like they splintered into toothpicks. They were stripped, they were the trees around them were all flattened. They all laid down in a radial pattern. So actually it's like they all fell backwards in a circle, stretching out quite a bit. And like like eighty million trees, million trees over eight hundred square

miles or seven square kilometers. It's that's an enormous amount of space for something that again was relatively small, and there were some historical accounts from people who were somewhat nearby at the time. Oh yeah, there was a story about a guy who was essentially out on his front porch when this thing happened and the blast when it moved through. Uh. He reported that he felt a sensation as if all of his skin had caught on fire. Yeah, he was not, He was not. He was not relatively close.

He was pretty far away. Um. And so we were lucky that it happened in such a remote area. There were no known deaths as a result of this that that have ever been reported from what I can tell, So we were lucky. If it had happened over a populated area, that story would obviously be very different. And clearly a larger or more massive i should say, space object would cause even more devastation should collide with Earth. And there here's the thing. There are a lot of

them out there in the Solar system, right. There are a lot of of of space objects that are the size of the Tunguska Rock or bigger. And that was the big concern. That was the thing we were talking about in our previous episode, is that we need to be able to find them, to track them, and if necessary to somehow stop them from colliding with Earth, whether that be a method of destroying them, which I think we all agreed eventually probably is the least likely approach

because you're more likely to create a shotgun up. Blowing it up is probably not a good option, But usually it's how do you move it out of the way. The smarter option is to deflect its trajectory right that way you're you're pretty sure it's not going to hit you, and and also you know, the further out you can do it, the less you have to move the space

object right. So if the space object is if you're detected that this thing is going to collide with the Earth, but it won't be for another forty years, and you can start your plan right now. You can go ahead and launch a spacecraft to get there in a certain amount of time and deflect it in some manner. And we talked about a lot of those in the last episode.

We'll we'll concentrate on a specific approach the gravity tractor in this one um and you don't have to pull it very far, so you don't have to use as much energy in the actual towing event. It still takes a lot of energy to get there, but you don't have to do as much when you're actually towing the object out of the way. You just have to get it off by like a degree and you're good. So now it's time to talk about the Little Prince. And this is why I chose that particular lyric for the

because he's the littlest Prince. Um, so we're the little Prince is uh, have you read The Little Prince Joe? Actually you haven't. Have you read Oh my gosh, guys beautiful. You have to go and you have to read it and then you have to cry. That kinda is part of the deal. Um. That's a very sad, sweet story. And generally speaking, I'm gonna just give a big overview.

This story is told from the point of view of a pilot who has crashed in the Sahara Desert and he comes across a little boy who says that he's from an asteroid. He lives on an asteroid, and he's had these various adventures going to different uh asteroids within the Solar System and encountering different people before coming to Earth. And and through his adventures you you learn about very common follies and flaws, things like being so self absorbed

that you never notice anything outside of yourself. Essentially, it was a kind of commentary on the sort of traps a fall into, but children tend to be free of because they have their childhood innocence. And it's almost like a warning tale in many ways. Um In fact, I would argue it's as relevant for adults as it is for kids. So the pilot kind of guesses that the Little Prince's asteroid is one that has specifically been identified

and has been named B six one two. Now, the reason why I give you that whole lead up is that now there is a private nonprofit organization called the B six one to Foundation, and it is dedicated to creating a real solution for possible Earth collisions with space rocks or or space objects, comets, asteroids, that kind of thing. And and here the thing that they're warning against is giant things slamming into Earth at incredible speed. Yeah, and

they're specifically saying, you know, we can't ignore this. We can't fall into the trap that the adults fall in in the novella The Little Prince. We cannot be those But we have to open our eyes because otherwise, by the time we realize there's a problem, it'll be too late to do anything about it. So we've got to be proactive. And they they hope to avoid catastrophe by adopting new ways to detect and deflect space objects on collision trajectory. And they got started back in two thousand two.

Now that was a year after NASA had held its first workshop at the NASA Johnson Space Center dedicated to the concept of asteroid deflection. So two thousand one, NASA says, you know, we really have to talk about this. And a year later, UH, former astronauts, some astrophysicists, and some other people all got together and created this organization B six one two Foundation, And they get their money for their projects through philanthropy. It's nonprofits, so they depend upon donations.

They actually say one of the most important UH things that they're doing is they're set up a new means of funding space work like that they're doing this through philanthropy, that they're doing this through UH privatized space to to

use the the rockets from companies like SpaceX. They said, you know, we're doing something that that hasn't been done before, UH in the space industry, and we're setting a precedent, and that could be just as important in several ways to the work that we're planning on doing with detecting and perhaps deflecting space rocks. So in two thousand and five, the Foundation published a paper about creating a gravity tractor, and we talked about this a bit in our previous episode.

So let's give a quick overview. Okay, I think this is one of the most interesting proposals on on how to deflect body and coming for Earth, and and it relies on the fact that this is something people often forget about. All objects with mass exert a pull on one another. So it's not us that the Earth pulls you toward it. You also pull the Earth toward you, just not by enough to matter. Yeah, not not by very much. And gravity is a relatively weak force. Yes,

it's the weakest of the the four forces. That's why we tend to look at things like astrophysics when we want to talk about it. But but, but this actually comes through in astrophysics and astronomy a lot. Like one of the ways we can look for stars very far away that have planets orbiting around them is to look and see if the planets orbiting the stars are actually making the stars wobble a little bit, because as much as the stars pull on the planets, the planets also

pull on the star just a little bit. Yeah. So here on Earth, obviously we don't notice that we happen to be exerting this gravitational pull on the objects around us. The Earth's gravity pretty much, uh, it drowns all that out, right, So, uh, for instance, on the table that's in front of us here in the studio, we have a little box of tiss shoes. I don't feel a pull toward that box of tissues. That tissue, that box of tissues, if it could feel, would not feel a pull towards me. The

Earth has pretty much got that downpad. But in space, you can have two bodies to two bodies of mass having this gravitational effect on one another. And of course distance is important, right. The greater the distance, the less effect they will have on each other. So you want to have things to be close to one another in order to affect them through gravity. Yeah, Jupiter has a stronger gravitational pull than Earth does. But we're attracted to Earth,

not Jupiter because it's closer. Yeah. So if uh so, when you think about this. You think gravity tractor, it makes sense. You you create some form of spacecraft that has a great deal of mass to it, or it can get mass in some creative way once it's out in space, because obviously the more mass something has, the more effort we must make to get it out into space in the first place. Share, But we launched like a like a cottam r a ball and just let it roll up a few things into its life, then

yes it can. Yeah. Or if it were to steal part of the incoming object, yes, yeah, which NASA has a plan about that and I'll talk about that towards the end. Or maybe we just launch an enormous magnet and just hope it grabs some of that space junk that's orbiting Earth right now, or maybe someone else's communication satellites,

not ours, but maybe someone else's now. But seriously, seriously to have enough mass so that you move the gravity tractor close to the near Earth object or INDEO, and then uh, I guess the idea is that the gravity tractor goes into orbit around this object. Yeah, and then that the gravity that it exerts, the gravitational pull it exerts on this object is enough to move it out of that trajectory that it was in and thus move it into a safe zone where it will not end

up colliding with Earth. So it's kind of like if somebody shot a bullet at you, and you could go into bullet time, like in the matrix, and shoot out a little mag knit to follow the bullet along and just throw it off course so that eventually misses you by the time it gets to where you are. Yeah, and again, the further away the shooter is from you, the less you need to move that bullet for that

to happen. Right, Um, same thing here, Like the further away the the object is, the less you need to do, the less work you need to do in order to to get it into a safe trajectory. Uh. And it's it's a pretty clever idea. It's not something that we've really put into practice, but it's something that that there's no reason why it shouldn't work. I mean, obviously you'd have to come up with a clever way to make sure that anything you used to move the space rock

didn't have another force pushing against it. So, for example, you wouldn't want to have thrusters on this spacecraft shooting in the same direction that the the rock is in, because then you have not just the gravitational force acting upon the two objects, but you have the thrust sting force that could act upon the space rock, and then

you're not gonna get the effect that you wanted. Uh. I've seen some interesting things where people actually talked about using spacecraft using solar sales, and so they would actually use a solar sale to help pull the spacecraft along and tow behind it the space rock. Oh yeah, that's sort of similar to one idea I remember reading about

in the past. I don't know if it's still on the table, but it would be to essentially put a large reflective surface on the sunword facing side of a moving object that would allow the solar wind, over a long period of time to blow it off course. Yeah. Yeah, there are a couple of other proposals that are similar

to that in various ways. Right. So, anyway, the gravity tractor is an important part of the strategy that B six one two has come up with, But just as important, or perhaps even you could argue more important, is coming up with a way to identify and track more of these large rocks and other types of space objects that are in the Inner Solar System because we are working

on it, but we're not very far along. Yeah. So, according to Ed lu who is a former astronaut and he's the CEO of B six one two, there are around half a million asteroids in the Inner Solar System that are larger than the space rock that hit Tunguska. And we've identified a map about one per cent of all of them. Well good, yeah, Well that's that's sure. That means we need to do like a whole lot

of homework to get that other. So that's where that's what brings us to their Sentinel project H. On June twelve, the Foundation announced it would fund the development, construction, and deployment of a new infrared space telescope called Sentinel, and Sentinel will actually orbit the Sun. It won't orbit Earth. It will be put in its own orbit around the Sun pretty much in the same orbital path as Venus.

So they're gonna shoot it out into space once it's done, uh, and it will get a little gravity assist slingshot from Venus to put it into its final orbit around the Sun, and then it will position itself so that it's rear end is always facing the sun, and that its telescope side is always facing out. It's not blinded by the sun, not blinded by not blinded by the light, wrapped up

like a deuce, another runner in the night. So yes, exactly, So it's pointing out into space, and the idea being that it could actually map out the entire night sky in this way uh multiple times, because you need to do it just to identify what stuff out there are space rocks, but you also need to do it multiple times in order to figure out where are those going, what are their trajectories, where are they moving in comparison

to everything else. So what is the idea about why will this be better at looking for small near Earth objects than whatever kind of telescopes we currently have looking for them. Well, we don't have the problem of atmospheric UH distortion. Obviously, when you have a telescope orbiting the Earth, there are going to be times where it cannot look

out outward into the inner Solar system. It's going to be looking towards the center of the Solar system, which means there's going to be downtime, right Like, there will be times that you would not be able to effectively get information either because the Earth is in the way, the Moon is in the way, or the Sun is

in the way. Having it on this other orbital path further into the Solar system gives the telescope kind of a wide angle view of what's going on in our solar system, and it can detect teeny tiny objects within its field, like a single pixel might represent a space object. But because it's using this infrared telescope technology, it has to do is pick up that reflection to figure out, well that's one UM. So they're actually partnering this. This is really happening. This isn't just a plan, this is

actually going forward. There's a company Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado. They're designing and building the actual telescope, and they're using the same team of experts that worked on stuff like the Kepler space telescope. So the projected date of completion is sometime around or eighteen, and they expect to use a space X Falcon nine rocket to launch the telescope into space, so again relying on private space industry to

get there. Um Now, every twenty six days, the sentinel will complete four pairs of observations of the night sky, and by kind of making a flipbook almost of these different pictures, researchers can see where these objects, you know, what are their trajectories, what are their orbits? Are there any that could potentially become into a collision course with Earth? And according to the folks over at the Foundation, they'll be able to project pathways as far out as a

hundred years. So that's that's great because if you can really again I mean, we keep stressing it. If you detected early, it gives you way more options on how you deal with it and you don't have to use as much uh energy to actually move it out of

the way in order to get safe again. Um, you know, I guess my fear, though maybe this is just being cynical, is that if we did know enough ahead of time, we would be locked into arguments about who's going to pay for the gravity tractor and nobody would I would think that you would get I would like to think that that would not happen. If it does happen, I would like to think I would have an opportunity to

go to Mars. Let's let's just kickstart that. Come on, we can we can put on Let's put on indie go go that way, we don't make our goal, we still get to keep some of the money. Um so, so that we can go to Mars right exactly, like what We'll just set the goal insanely high and that way, even if we just get halfway there, we're good. Uh So, this this telescope is gonna send data back through NASA's Deep Space network to get back here to Earth. So

that's kind of cool too. And they're gonna limit that amount of data obviously, Like if they just kept sending full pictures of the entire night sky over and over, that's a lot of information. It would be real pretty, but yeah, not not useful necessarily. And and this is depart that right, Yeah. Yeah, it's so much a lot of computer power and energy wasted there. And this is

a part that I thought was really cool. The computer is going to know, is it's going to be able to identify moving objects by by seeing where they have moved from one photo to another, and only send back the photos of the ones that are moving, Like if nothing in the frame is moving, then the satellite just

tosses it out. It makes me think of the old days of film cameras where you would go and get your film developed, and you'd sit there, you would actually open up your your pictures at the place where they were developed and go through them to see like, oh, I'm not we need to keep this one like it's only got it's only got a strand of hair in it. You can't even tell who belongs to blurry blurry blurry

from print blurry. Yeah. So this would be the same sort of thing, except essentially saying, look at this sector that was photographed at this time, are there any space rocks essentially out there? No, don't bother sending that back then, it's not gonna do any good. So I thought that was a very clever way of trying to increase the efficiency of the system. And uh, this should really give us a good idea of any potential threats that we face. So that would then prompt us into the discussion of

all right, what do we do about? Do we do the gravity tractor approach, which I'm seeing more and more um support for in actual groups that are planning on doing these things. I see alternatives to the gravity tractor more from like think tanks that don't directly actually do still yeah, they think really hard, but other than that,

they don't really do anything really hard about nuclear weapons. Yeah, right, right, and Bruce and Bruce willis going up there and and and Aerosmith and all the sudden, Okay, well we clone Bruce Willis. This is the first step. No, no, okay. So so right now we've got about one percent of the sky covered, right, what are they hoping to get up to with this plan? So they're hoping to boost that up and map out nine percent of the near Earth objects that measure at least a hundred forty in

size are greater uh, and a quote large fraction. In other parts of their their literature, they say fifty percent of asteroids that are bigger than the one that struck Tunguska um. And this is where I said there was some differentiation between the the figure I've seen in some reports about the Tugnuska event and B six one two. They say that means around forty five, which is larger

than what I had seen elsewhere, which thirty six points six. Uh. This will actually happen over the course of six and a half years. I've I've heard that there's a possibility the telescope could continue to work for another three and a half years for a full ten year lifespan, but six and a half is what they have planned. Um. And so the other thing is that we might be able to use this data for stuff besides just deflecting incoming dangerous space objects. We might be able to use

it to identify potential good candidates for asteroid mining. We've talked about that in previous episodes. Two. So that could be really cool. Now that's not the primary focus of B six one two. That would just be a happy coincidence or a happy byproduct of this process. Uh. And B six one two is not the only one, you know, not the only organization out there thinking about this. Obviously,

NASA has been thinking about two. They were the ones who held the workshop back in two thousand one that kind of prompted the creation of B six one two in the first place. Yeah, and I think we talked a little bit about their organization in that episode, the Near Earth Observation Program. Yeah, so that's specifically dedicated to looking at near Earth objects, as the name would imply.

And Uh, they initiated something called the Asteroid Grand Challenge, which, and this is a quote from NASA, will use multidisciplinary collaborations in a variety of partnerships with other government agencies, international partners, industry, academia, and citizens scientists to direct, track, characterize, and create mitigation strategies for potentially hazardous asteroids. That sounds like a really boring way to say planetary defense. Yeah,

and it's actually under their planetary defense. Uh like that, that's the u r L is the planetary defense u r L. Uh. And the challenge also has an actual contest that there. It's called a challenge for a reason. There's a contest involved. So NASA partnered with a crowdsource studio called Tongle to create this. And there are twenty

thousand dollars worth of prizes. I don't know how they break down, Like, I don't know if there's a first price, second prize or anything like that, but there's twenty dollars worth of prizes. And Uh. In order to get your hands on that, filthy luker, what you need to do is create a really awesome video that can quote engage and excite the public about getting involved in NASA's mission to find and characterize asteroids. We can do that, I know, Joe,

we can do that. It's like we have a whole studio set up, literally a studio fifteen feet from where we're sitting, where we can do that. Maybe we should try to get in on that. I was, That's what I'm saying. Uh So, NASA is also working on an Asteroid redirect Mission or arm a r M, in which a robot will deflect an asteroid from's trajectory and place it in a stable orbit around the Moon. I think

we've talked about this before. Yeah, and this was going back to what you had mentioned earlier, Joe, the idea of stealing something from the target object in order to create greater mass and thus affected more. This is what the robot would do. It would end up piloting to some near Earth object, capturing a multi ton boulder from said object, thus increasing the space craft or the robot, I guess the robots mass, and then using that mass as a gravity tractor to tow it over into a

lunar orbit. And then the reason we wanted in a lunar orbit is eventually NASA would want to send astronauts up there to explore it, take samples, bring it back to Earth. The samples, not the asteroid that would remain in lunar orbit. Yeah, that would have that would evade the purpose of making things not hit. Like, hey, guys, look look what following me home? Can we keep it? Uh? No, man, No, that would be kind of cool if the moon had a moon. Yeah, yeah, for the moon, and we could

watch it. We could watch it transit the Moon at night, and then like just a you know, a few millennia later, the moon in vinced pink it again. So at any rate, um uh. The idea being that we'd send astronauts up there somewhere in the twenty thirties. I mean, this is a very aggressive plan NASA has, and it's part of, of course, their long term plan to get humans to Mars.

The idea being that the technologies and processes we would have to develop in order to make this happen in order to be able to capture an asteroid and to move it into an orbit, and to visit it and and essentially do a light mining project and bring stuff back, all of that would require us to develop technologies that we could then use for a trip to Mars. So almost everything we hear about NASA doing these days ends up at least in some way contributing to a future Martian,

you know, exploration mission. Yeah, it would also require us to develop all the other technologies that you find in total recall. Yeah, we have to have all of those. We have to have the have to have the robotic cabs that actually have a robot sitting in the driver's seat. Yeah, the chit chats. Yeah, because why would you ever want to have a driver less car that actually allows you to sit in any seat in the vehicle. You have

to have one seat occupied by a needless machine. I think the fake talking lady head that Arnold Schwarzenegger wears over his real head says two weeks. Yeah, that's pretty good one and then just splits apart. Or what about uh sinus cavity probes? Yeah, lots of lots of years, actually know, just about two weeks. Well. The interesting thing again is that NASA is hoping to do this sort of mission. Like in the twenty twenties, they hope to

use a gravity tractor to capture an asteroid. In the twenty thirties, they hope to send astronauts to that asteroid. So it's a pretty aggressive schedule. I'm I am maybe skepticals the wrong word. I'm not entirely certain that they're going to be able to make at based upon where we are today, But there's it could happen. It just will require a fairly aggressive investment in space exploration for that to work out, I think. But it would be

really cool. And of course if NASA is able to demonstrate that it can move an asteroid in that manner, then that is a big win when it comes to, you know, figuring out how to deflect incoming space objects. So really cool. Glad we were able to look into this. Again, I'm glad I was able to educate you about The Little Prince. Make sure you go and read that because

it is amazing. Very sad that the American release of the film version has been delayed makes me want to take a quick trip up to Canada to see it. But it is coming out. So there's also a film version of The Little Prints coming out, So if you can't stand reading, go watch the movie. All right, That

wraps this up. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of forward thinking, maybe you've always wanted to know how X will work in the future, you let us know and we will research it and tell you. But in order to do that, you've gotta senest the message first. Our email is f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. At Twitter, we are f W Thinking Facebook.

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