In the Name of Osiris

completely necessary. The basic gist here is, okay, Osiris is a mythological figure who continues to resonate with people around the world, and even his name has this kind of regal myss to many ob us. Just to say the name allowed Osiris, you know, it kind of summons a certain amount of mystery and I don't know, strangeness and power into the room with you. And scientists are far

from immune to such charms. So we have various things in the scientific and technological world that are named after him. In some cases we're talking about highly tortured acronyms. Other times there seems to be, you know, even less connection. So we're not going to touch on everything in the scientific and technological world that is named after Osiris. There are some things we're not going to get into, like there is an exoplanet that is nicknamed Osirius, not officially

named Osiris. But we are going to talk about two things in particular. You know, it's an opportunity to chat about some very deserving science in the name of Osiris, as you know, as well as some scientific tidbits that we might not otherwise have discussed.

b NNU. The spacecraft spent roughly two years after that orbiting Binu, mapping its surface, doing analysis of the asteroid from orbit, and trying to select an ideal landing zone, which proved a bit more difficult than had originally been anticipated. In October of twenty twenty, o Cyrus REX managed to touch down on the surface of Binu and collect a sample of its regolith. The regolith is the rocky outer

soil covering the object. But it was not like a full landing where it sat down and chilled for a while. It was a touch and go sampling operation, so it touched down, it sort of poked the asteroid with a mechanism called its sampling arms, had kind of a leg or a limb that came out below it that poked down into the asteroids regolith, did a blast of nitrogen gas to try to stir up some of this. The soil captured a bunch of it and then blasted right

back off it kind of like a mosquito. Didn't land for as long as a mosquito, though, it was more like if a mosquito just had to kind of like jab you and then retreat. Gotcha, like if a mosquito would fly down poke you, hit your blood vessels under the skin with a blast of nitrogen gas, cause a little sort of explosion of blood, and then just suck up a bunch of that as it is bouncing back off of your skin. But anyway, the sampling was successful.

It got a significant amount of the material from Binu, and then it lifted off and returned to Earth, which and so the spacecraft didn't fully return to Earth, but it had a capsule that was for the sample return which touchdown on Earth. I think it landed in Utah in September twenty twenty three, and the asteroid soil sample

was intact and it was ready to be studied. So that is something we now have in the possession of Earth scientists who have already gotten to work analyzing it and doing science on the basis of it.

then also things people might not even think of. For example, when the spacecraft and the probe were conducting their operations on the asteroid surface. That's not something that like a human pilot can operate in real time with a joystick. Because it's so far away, there's a significant travel time for information back and forth between mission control here on

Earth and the probe. So essentially, these maneuvers had to be pre programmed so that the probe could carry them out on its own, because there wouldn't be enough real time exchange of information for like a human pilot to see what's happening in the moment and adjust. You have to like make sure you've programmed it correctly in advance and it can do what it needs to do without

you being able to intervene. But anyway, after the successful conclusion of the Osiris Rex mission, the spacecraft was given a new mission and a new name to rendezvous with and study the asteroid nine nine nine four two Apophice, and, in keeping with its new role, the new name Osiris APEX. So, as you previewed a minute ago, rob O Cyrus Rex

is an acronym. It's one of these kind of I always wonder how these things exactly come together when, like you know, you select all the things and they're supposed to stand for what it actually does, but then it makes a word that already exists, and you're like, that didn't happen by accident. Who organizes the acronym for formation process? I don't know.

has sometimes been called a time capsule. Asteroid Binu was selected because it is thought to be a pristine four point five million year old, carbon rich asteroid that has been preserved in essentially the same condition since the Solar System was formed. So by looking at what it's made of we can learn more about the early days of the Solar system and learn about the initial distribution of things of various minerals and organic compounds and things like that.

It'll help teach us more about how the Solar system was formed and give us points of comparison between it and other objects in the Solar System that have been changed more over time. And so the spectral interpretation part this refers to the use of spectral analysis and astronomy looking at patterns of light colors reflected off of an

object to determine its composition. The respectral analysis of Binu, of course, and there is spectral analysis of asteroids even from just from telescopic observatories to try to determine their composition, So it would help illuminate those questions as well. There is a resource identification in the name that's understanding the chemical and geological makeup of a carbon rich asteroid. The security in the name is an interesting thing. Might think, wait,

what is this referra to security? Well, that refers to security for the whole of Earth, because it turns out, of all the asteroids we know about today, Binu is one of the most potentially dangerous to our planet Binu passes near to Earth about once every six years, and scientists have calculated that in the year twenty one eighty two, its path will bring it close enough that there is about a one in twenty seven hundred chance of a

collision on that pass. So you can get some relief from the relentless like asteroid bound for Earth headlines in that when it comes to the larger known space objects, even the most troubling ones won't get close to us for a long time, and even when they do, based on what we know today, the chances of a direct hit are like one in several thousand at worst. Now, how bad would it be if Binu did hit Earth. It would be not as bad as some impacts in

Earth's history, but it would be quite bad. Benu is about half a kilometer wide with a mass of about sixty seven million metric tons, so it would probably not be large enough to cause worldwide calamity. It wouldn't be like the you know, the object to sonociated with the death of the non avian dinosaurs. It would not be like the KPg extinction object, but it would It would be bad. It would be extremely locally destructive, depending on

where and how it hit. So part of the mission was also focused on studying the forces acting on the trajectory of asteroids so we can better predict their course over time, because probably the single thing we need to best understand in order to defend Earth from dangerous near Earth objects is a very accurate prediction system for the

future movements of space objects. Right now, we can predict with pretty good accuracy, but over time that accuracy degrades right so the farther out into the future you're looking, the harder it is to predict how close something is going to be. And specifically, the Osiris REX mission was looking at the influence of something the Yarkovsky effect, and

to do a short summary of that. When an asteroid is flying through space and rotating, this is specifically for a rotating object, its surface goes through patterns of heating and cooling depending on which side is facing the sun. So as one side of the asteroid faces the sun, it gets star baked and it heats up, and then as the asteroid rotates, the hot side turns away from the Sun and cools, and that cooling means the asteroid

is radiating infrared photons into space. This radiation actually provides its own small amount of thrust, so as it's radiating that heat off into space, there's a bit of a push created there, and the effect is fairly small, but for relatively small objects and affecting the path over large periods of time, it can make a big difference. This does affect the asteroid's path through space, which makes it harder to predict the orbit of a rotating asteroid farther

into the future. And that's something that we need to be able to do if we want to identify threatening near Earth objects and protect Earth by potentially pushing them off course.

the first such mission worldwide. Actually, the first successful asteroid sample return was carried out by the Japanese space Agent See That was the Hyabusa probe, which got a sample of small dust grains from an asteroid called twenty five one forty three Itokawa and returned to the material to

Earth in twenty ten. Though Osiris Rex is not just a duplicate of that mission because it targeted a different type of asteroid, and also Binu was able to get a lot more just mass of material returned to Earth for us to work on. Now here's something about the naming of this asteroid that is kind of backwards of which is kind of the opposite of what you might expect.

The asteroid Binu got its name by association with the Osiris REX mission, so it was originally called nineteen ninety nine RQ thirty six, but in advance of the mission in twenty thirteen, the Planetary Society held a competition to name the asteroid, and a kid from North Carolina who is nine years old at the time named Mike Pusio came up with the idea of naming it Binu, which was the name of a pre existing deity from Egyptian mythology,

an animal formed god, often depicted as a long legged bird, though there's some dispute over which natural bird, if any, it's supposed to correspond to. I'll talk about that a bit more in a minute, but Puzio apparently picked the name for the asteroid because of the Osiris rex probes resemblance to a long legged bird and rob if you look, I attached an image of the spacecraft here for you to have a gander at. I can see this here, So the solar panel flaps are very much like wings.

world and with the creator Sun God. And for what I'm about to discuss my main sources Geraldine Pinch's Handbook of Egyptian Mythology. So, according to Pinch, in some Egyptian myths, Binu is said to be the oldest creature living. During the creation of the world, when a hill of dry land was first raised out of the darkness, out of the waters of chaos, the Binu bird landed on this earth, so it was the first living animal, and its cry

was the first sound. The moment of its marked the first moment of time, and the cry of the Binu bird will also sound again at the end of the world to mark the time when all order will again descend into chaos. The Binu bird seems to have been related to, or possibly the inspiration for, the Greek myth

of the phoenix. In the Egyptian context, there was a Binu bird that was believed to dwell in Heliopolis, and kings would pray to the bird for the renewal of strength after they had been in power for thirty years and here, I just want to read a section from Pinch on the connection between the Binu bird and Osiris as well as another major god from the pantheon. Quote, both Ray and Osiris could be identified with the Binu bird, an expression of the secret knowledge that these two gods

were one. As a manifestation of Osiris, the Binu bird led the spirits of the dead through the dangers of the underworld. Some spells in the Book of the Dead aim to assist the dead to transform themselves into Binu birds so that they can travel freely between worlds.

the feather of Mott. But there there are also you know, these these trials you must go through, like facing facing, dangers throughout the landscape of the dead, and the Binu bird here apparently apparently could be a guide in that process. But you could also, if you knew the right spells, just turn into a Binu bird, which seems even better.

Now coming back to whether this bird has a counterpart in nature, early texts describing the Binu bird seem to be talking about a yellow wagtail, which is a small bird that eats insects and tends to seek out wet, open countries such as marshland. However, Pinch notes that in later art the binu bird is depicted somewhat differently as a huge heron, and this is why you'll see pictures of a heron often if you google binu. This is

I think more New Kingdom art. And I found a photo of some of this art for you to look at here, rob In the outline here Binu is a heron that would have been taller than a human with its neck outstretched, so a very big heron and extant

herons can get quite large. The still living Goliath heron or Ardia goliath can reach a height of about five feet or roughly one hundred and fifty centimeters, but Apparently there was an extinct giant heron that grew even larger, known today as the Binu heron or Arda binuids, bones of which have been found from the Arabian Peninsula dating

back to the third millennium BCE. So this is a giant heron that would have been alive during human history here and so this isn't known, but it has been speculated that this bird could have inspired the iconography of Binu and thus also perhaps the story of the Phoenix. Fascinating now, how much larger was this like a twenty foot tall heron? No, it is bigger than any living heron, but not by a huge amount. I think it would have been roughly maybe six feet tall.

you didn't have to worry about that. It was a touch and go operation, so you would descend, you would poke the surface with the sampling arm, issue a blast of nitrogen gas, scoop up a bunch of what was stirred up, and then blast off and retreat immediately. But despite this, once we actually reached the asteroid, it proved a lot trickier of an object to touch down on than was initially expected because it had been thought that the surface of Binu would be relatively smooth, or at

least have large smooth patches. I think the asteroid that had been targeted by the Japanese Hyabusa probe had more kind of beachy areas, you know, with like smooth, fine grained areas where you know you could select a good landing zone. But for some reason, Binu was when we got there, more of a sort of a hell of boulders. It was a very rocky bouldery surface, more uneven than expected, so the team had to very carefully map out the surface to select an ideal landing spot, and there were

not many. They ended up selecting a place that was known as the Nightingale Crater. But then there was another surprise waiting when they actually went to initiate the touchdown and sample retrieval moment. So the craft was descending and it poked the asteroid, and then the sampling arm sank. It sank into the surface. I've seen this described as like poking into a swamp. Now, of course, it's not

actually that there was liquid water on the surface of Binu. Instead, it's just that the soil covering its surface was a lower density than expected, so the sampling arm just kind of plunged in. I want to read a quote here from a space dot com article by Teresa Pultova talking about this moment.

to expectations, the surface behaved almost like a swamp. Within a few seconds, the spacecraft sank nineteen inches or fifty centimeters deep into Binu as the sample collection had sucked in the sample, and the spacecraft's backaway thrusters fired, a huge wall of debris rose from the crater, engulfing the ascending spacecraft and rob I've attached some pictures for you to look at here, because there's sort of like an animation you can look up of this of the spacecraft's camera.

It had a camera facing directly down along the axis of the sampling arm, so you're looking down as it's descending towards the surface, and you can just see when it touches suddenly it goes in and then there's this explosion and there's just stuff all over the place, and then it zooms back out and you can see like before and after images of the crater where it touched down, where like major rocks and boulders are moved all over

the place. It just seems like this is you know, it reminds you that asteroids, especially smaller asteroids like this, are not necessarily not necessarily solid objects. That it might be better to think of something like Binu not as like a solid hunk of rock in space, but like a big pile of rubble that's loosely bound together by gravity. Wow.

course to talk about bees, perfect and in general. You know, this is a fine area of connection for an Egyptian god, because the ancient Egyptians were particularly connected with the honeybee. As biologist, author and former guests on the show Jen Kritsky points out in his excellent twenty fifteen book The Tiers of Ray. The honey bee was a pervasive cultural motif in ancient Egypt, in large part because of their perceived connection to the sun god Ray or Raw, whose

very tears were said to be honeybees. And on top of this, honey and other bee products like wax were prized and used for a variety of medicinal, culinary, very religious, and economic purposes. So again, that's that's that's the god ray or Raw. And you know, as we already alluded to in this episode, there are connections between Ray and Raw and of Cyrus. But you may be wondering, okay,

are there any specific bee connections to Osiris? So I have Kritsky's book on the shelf here, so I picked it up and I consulted it once more to see what he had to say specifically about Osiris. So I'm going to run through just a few examples here. The book includes an image from the Tomb of Usarat depicting the offering of honeycomb to Osiris. So this is Theban Tomb t. T. Fifty six in the Theban Necropolis near

Luxor New Kingdom period. I believe he also has an example He mentions the Tomb of Minmos, which includes the passage Osiris bee keeper of Aman, bearer of incense, minmost justified, possessor of honor before the Great God, And this is from the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasty, I believe indirectly. The Salt eight twenty five Papyrus includes a spell that involves using bees wax figures to quote kill the name of

Seth in this case used against Seth. But such figurines made out of wax, which rarely survived, were seemingly burnt in spells against mundane enemies as well, So you could use them against great cosmic entities like Seth, but you could also use them just to guess against your actual real world enemies. Okay, and Kritzky also includes some other mentions to support the idea that honey or honeycomb, in particular, these were often used in temple rituals concerning gods, including

the God of Cyrus. So are we going to talk about honey bees now? No, We're in fact going to talk about a genus of bee found only in Central and South America, so completely removed from ancient Egyptian culture, but still named after Osiris. So the genus Osiris is classified under the Osserini tribe, which in turn is classified under the family Apidae, which itself contains well over five thousand species of bees. So I looked at a few

different bee manuals on this. Ultimately we're dealing with some bees here that are not as well researched, and we'll get into some of the reasons for that. But as Charles Duncan Mitchner, this guy was one of the leading experts on bees who of nineteen eighteen through twenty fifteen. He describes them in the Bees of the World, Volume

one from two thousand as colecto parasites. They seem to have likely evolved independently of no benedet kleptoparasitic bees, and this is based on various features that they have that are also found in non parasitic bees, which are absent in other examples of klepto paris bees. He points out that Osiris bees have relatively thin, but smooth and shiny skins, you know, kind of like smooth, shiny exoskeletons, and no

protective spines. But they do have an enormous sting and this will we'll come back to some of the reasons for this as we proceed here, but he writes that quote, parasites commonly have stronger stings than their non parasitic relatives. There are exceptions to that rule, but by and large you'll find that they put far more evolutionary energy is put into these kind of like offensive slash defensive weapons.

and it's interesting. As a former avian endocrinologist, she seems especially well positioned to compare cuckoo birds to cuckoo bees. She points out that cuckoo bees are actually thought of more generally as a social parasites as well, because they generally have to infiltrate or in some cases anyway we'll get into the details here. In many cases we're talking about bees that have to infiltrate an entire use social hive structure or nest structure in order to deposit their eggs.

So they can't simply sneak in, dump their egg and run and be like he he, now you have to raise my young. There's a lot more involved here.

bees is different from the world of birds. So she points out that in some species of bumble bee, we see and we're talking about non parasitic bumblebees here, we do see examples of nest usurpation, in which one queen busts into the nest of another queen of her same species, kills that queen and takes over the brood. So this doesn't have to happen. It doesn't always happen, It only

occurs under certain ecological conditions. You could probably, you know, compare this broadly to things like cannibalism, where you know, you have species that are not obligate cannibals by any stretch, but if conditions are right, they will engage in that behavior.

can't produce their own workers. They lack pollen baskets on their legs. This prevents them from feeding their own offspring, and they also can't produce enough wax to build their own nests. So without those adaptations, you know, that kind of frees you up from like an evolutionary energy standpoint, where do they focus that extra energy? Will they focus it into the blunt offensive power needed to conquer another brood?

So we're talking busting in, overpowering other workers. If workers are present, killing the rival queen, and then taking over the nest, And what do you need to carry this out? Well, in many cases you need heavier armor to protect yourself, more powerful mandibles, and key to what we just said earlier,

an enhanced stinger. But she stresses that target selection is also key here because if they go after the if a cuckoo bumblebee goes after a nest that's too large, the workers are just going to overpower her and kill her in self defense. And if the nest is too small, while she may conquer it, but then there won't have there won't be enough of a work force to serve her need.

So it's it's kind of a delicate balance. Interesting, but ultimately, the battle and the regicide here is only the first phase because Afterwards, the conqueror has to be able to quickly de escalate things and convince the colony that she's the rightful queen and that work can continue mostly as before. And I guess you can. You know, you can easily anthromorphize here and compare this to you know, examples from like military history, like, Okay, you're going to conquer a kingdom,

but now what are you going to rule it? And what do you have to do in order to pull that off?

have much of a scent on their own. They're kind of like scent neutral, you know, stealth scent, I guess, and they just simply acquire the scent of the nest they've invaded via contact with workers and various nest materials.

And I feel like we might have touched on this before regarding parasites in general, but she points out that one of the reasons that brood parasites parasite bees are understudied in general is that we easily fall into making a kind of moral judgment about parasites, and so you often see people who study bees tending to gravitate towards non parasitic species, even thinking of them as quote unquote true bees, you know, sort of siding with the complex

sort of you know, use social civilization builders, and you don't want to side with the invaders, the thieves and the tyrants.

Osirius bees are not bumblebees. So a lot of what I just said is not going to actually apply to what we're talking about here. Uh so these are these bees are more wasp like in appearance. I included a picture of one individual for you to look at below here Joe, but anyone else out there, you can easily do a Google image search, and there various entomology profile

pages with images. Uh they're they're they're generally pale, sometimes almost yellow or green, And according to Sam Droge and Lawrence Packer in the book An up Close Look at Pollinators around the World, most of the time when an entomologist names something after a god from any mythology, they're basically just sort of showing off their knowledge of mythology, you know, just saying like, you probably shouldn't read too much into the invocation of any god, much less Osiris

in this case. But they do point out that the invocation of Osiris is perhaps kind of on point here given the colorization, because again, remember the green skin of Osiris, and with Osiris bees, the skin is also reportedly often kind of this pale green or pale yellowish green color. I don't know that that's particularly present in the image that I included here for you, Joe, but still I will value.

and smooth. So they're not just complete tanks. We might think of them a little differently, almost more like a sleek assassin with an oversized weapon. Okay, and indeed that's that's how Packer kind of describes them. It's kind of an egg assassin so or queen assassin. So they have the greatly oversized stinger that's curved, and even the abdomen harnessing the stinger is elongated, so it gives them extra reach.

So you can kind of think of like a swordsman using a rape year, you know, how they're able to lunge in and close the distance a lot more effectively. And he says that that quote there is evidence that the sting is used to kill the host egg, and in the book by Packer and Droje, they also point out that the adaptation could be primarily for dealing with the main nest. Document they also stress, quote, almost nothing

is known about the makeup of these nests parasites. But it's my understanding, based on the context of these descriptions and some details about the bees that they seem to target, that these are not large hives or nests that they're going after, but rather they're going after solitary ground nesting bees here, oh okay, and thus they don't apparently have to protect themselves from a whole bunch of workers. It's not this full blown battle tank invasion like we see

in some of these cuckoo bumblebees. Instead, it's like, get in there, do what you got to do, Stab an egg that's already there, kill the queen if she is already there and she messes with you. But that's the extent of it.

knowledge or you know, and is one that journeys. And certainly with Osiris Rex, this lines up with some of this. You know, goes to a place that we have not explored before, makes certain things possible in the future that

are even protective in nature. And I don't know with the Osiris bees, you know, it's a little more if we're to again anthropomorphized recklessly, kind of sinister, but these are bees that open away that venture somewhere else and make life possible in a way that it wasn't possible before there at least for this for their species.

some individual craters that are named after Osiris. But I feel like these were the most compelling examples to draw on for this episode. But if you disagree, if you have a particular favorite Osiris, or if you in your line of work or some line of work you're familiar with, there is another acronym involving or invoking of Cyrus or any other interesting Egyptian mythological figure, write in we would love to hear about it. Just a reminder that stuff

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