OSIRIS-REx: NASA's Journey to the Netherworld

But you really can't name a craft like this after the ancient Egyptian god of the afterlife and transition and not expect us to ruminate on it. A god torn to pieces and scattered across the cosmos by set, forced to descend into the underworld, but not before conceiving a miraculous child with isis ensuring the birth of Horace, God

of Kings, for ages to follow. Because what are asteroids but the scattered remnants of the building blocks that are created into planetary form and eventually planetary life as we know it. They're shards of the nether age in our Solar system, and in the case of the Venue asteroid a shard that has been witnessed to the Solar System's birth, and a shard that might even bring death or at least phoenix like rebirth to life on Earth. Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert

Lamb and my name is Christian Sager. We have a special episode for you today where we are going to be talking about the NASA Osyrius REX mission. For the first part of the episode, Robert and I are going to present to you the information about this mission. Uh and in particular asteroid Baynu, which is traveling to and then the latter half, we were lucky enough to get

Dr Amy Simon to do an interview with us. She's a senior scientist at NASA on planetary atmospheres and she's working on the Osiris REX mission, and she gave us some really good answers to some complex questions. Yeah, and you know, we in the intro here we hit a little bit on the the Egyptian mythology tie and both words, you know, one is the god of the of transition and the underworld, and the other is kind of the menu is the name of kind of an Egyptian phoenix creature.

So that the question that instantly enters everyone's mind. I think when you encounter acronyms like this is uh, is it really as cool as Osiris rex sounds because it sounds amazing. Cyrus Rex sounds like what the next dinosaur in Jurassic World too will be called? Yeah, and I think, but I think the answer is yes. This is a really fascinating mission. I think it actually holds up rather well to the mythic expectations are presented by the name. And that's why we're discussing it here on the show.

So let's start off by getting into Beanu. What is this thing? You may have heard about it recently, because in the last two to three days before we're recording this, there has been a flurry on the internet, especially on science sites, of oh, is this asteroid going to hit Earth in like a century or two, right, and then the the counter headlines that are like, no, stupid, this asteroid is not definitely gonna hit Earth. Yeah. Um. And it's interesting because in those headlines you see our fear

rising up about the threat of near Earth objects. And on one hand, I feel like people should be more fearful, but people should I mean more to the point people should be more aware of the long term risk posed by near earth objects, like it should be a talking point for for all political candidates and not just transhumanist candidates. Interesting. Yeah, well especially at don't if you remember, but earlier this year there was a meteoroid caught on film, like on camera.

Somebody whipped out their smartphone and caught one crashing into Earth and it killed a person. And it was wow, like just seeing something like that that was just so real, really jaw dropping. Uh. And this is I mean, that was tiny compared to Benu Benu is uh. Let me see here a thousand, six hundred and fifty ft wide or five meters. But according to the people at NASA, we don't need to worry because that is well below

their calculations for what would cause like a mass extinction event. Yeah, this isn't gonna be to the twenty till the twenty second century, so there's plenty of time for us to not worry about it. And it's gonna be a one chants that it'll impact the Earth. But but more to the point, it's just the general idea I think of, like being aware of near earth objects in the threat they posed learning more about those objects so that we we we can potentially intercede and protect ourselves. I think

that is a very important issue for for humans in general. Yeah. And when we talked to Dr Amy Simon later in this episode, you know, she makes it clear this isn't why they chose this particular asteroid, but yes, planetary defense is a part of their mission. It is something that the people that has to think about. So what do we know about this asteroid? Well, near Earth asteroid is a is a weird term, but it's It was formally

called it had a very generic name r Q thirty six. Uh. And, as Amy tells us later on, they renamed it Banu after a contest with students coming up with names. Yeah, and uh. And I think there's one one in large part because it ties into the Egyptian themes President Osiris. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh. And what's important about it is it's carbon rich. Uh. And because of that, it may contain clues to the origins of life in the universe and especially here on Earth.

It's thought to be the remnant of the building blocks that formed planets, so it might contain natural resources like water, organics, or metals. Uh, and I realized as we were talking to Amy, because she she reminded us that it's so black, it's blacker than like black ink here on Earth. It only reflects three percent of the light that comes at it. So this is really I mean, if it's made of metal, it is the blackest of metals. It is the most metal thing in space. Like imagine wearing all black on

a really hot day. You're getting a sense of the of the situation that's going here and the resulting Yarkovsky effect that that gradually pushes it, and this gradually changes the the orbit of this asteroid over time, pushes it causes them to migrate until it encounters the gravitational residents of Saturn, and the regular tugging effective effect here eventually pushes Banu into the inner Solar System, where the experience is close encounters with Venus and Earth, encounters that then

pull apart the rubble kind of reshape it, turn it inside out. Because it's worth mentioning here that it's dark, yes, but it's also just kind of a loose collection of boulders and rock and dust, And there's actually a theory. I don't know if you ran across this one and the Nathi materials that a billion years ago, the venue was part of a larger proto planet and he got shattered by a space collision with another asteroid. And this is just kind of the rough remnants of that. Yeah.

The theory that I read was that it was thought to have been the material of a nebula and that was disrupted by an exploding star. Yeah, well that was the original. Yeah. Basically, if you go back far enough, about four point five billion years, you just have a stellar nursery of hydrogen, helium, and dust and this is

the birthplace of our son. The surrounding solar system. A supernova of a nearby star stirs all of this into action, spinning off the cretion disc that births the star and uh yeah, and so everything else is in this mix as well. And this uh, this asteroid Ben who was essentially you know, a call back to these earlier Yeah, and the idea is essentially right like that. It's just bits of dust that were like super flash heated together into this molten rock that like you you refer to

it's sort of like a rubble pile. They think it's not like one big rock. It's just like a bunch of stuff fused together. Uh, and it's being propelled by the Rakovsky effect that you mentioned earlier. Now, okay, just real quick, some numbers on the whole, whether it's going to hit us thing or not. NASA does officially classify it as quote potentially dangerous, but there's only a point zero three seven percent chance that it will strike Earth

according to their calculation. So, like, if you think about this in terms of say Batman's rogue gallery, this is not the Joker um, but this is also maybe not what's the Vincent Price character Egghead? Yeah, it's not Egghead. It would be somewhere you tell me you're the comics, a real rare Batman villain like that. But the threat threat, uh, one that I would immediately go to would be a character named Anarchy. And the anarchy is spelled with the K.

It's a teenager. He's just running around Gotham causing chaotic anarchy. Yeah, so that's pretty low on Batman's road gallery. That's not one of his priorities. He lets Robin handle that, right. But if that, but if that particular villain is just going to be close enough for study, then it might be a way to additionally learn how you handle villains

and what how villains are put together? Right? Yeah, and so according to Scientific American, if Benu did hit Earth, even if we did get within that very very tiny window of probability, yes, it would devastate a local area, but it's not gonna wipe out civilization. It's something we would know is coming. We would be able to evacuate people. Is to do something like on a large level, uh,

that would possibly cause mass extinction. The asteroid has to be at least point six miles wide or out one kilometer, So Bannu is nowhere near that. Um, don't worry about it, no matter what headlines you see this week. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we will dive into the mission itself. Osiris Rex. Okay, so we're back now, Osiris Rex. What is this all about? What's the goal? Let's start there. It's a spacecraft, but

let's start with why they're building this spacecraft. What's the whole point of it? Right? Uh? They want to take this spacecraft to Banu and bring back at least two point one ounces or around four pounds of sample soil and rock from Banu to bring back to Earth. And it's the first mission to ever try this with an asteroid, right, and I want to stress it in the name itself. That's the REX Regular Explore and that's all about documenting the regular the layer of loose outer material at the

sampling site. Uh and you know, scaling down from there. So you might be asking yourself, well, why do these scientists just want to get this little tiny piece of soil and rock bring it back here? What good is that going to do us? Right? Well, the answer is they think it will help us investigate how planets formed and how life began because of you know that origin story that we gave you earlier about Benu, and it's uh history going so far back, you know, there may

be traces there. Yeah, there was a period of time where the asteroid, these asteroids are just like pushed back into the inner sellular system and they're just crashing into everything, crashing into Earth. And this could have been a way that some of these vital materials that would lead to a life on Earth might have gotten here. Yeah, And so this mission, it's the mission is there's so many

people contributing to there's NASA, there's several universities involved. Lockheed Martin built some of the materials that are on the spacecraft, but it's managed out of NASA's Godard's Space Flight Center, which is up in Green Maryland for us here in America. Uh. In fact, the how Stuff Works team visited there, I want to say, like six months ago and shot a bunch of videos just talking to different scientists there about

the missions that they were performing. Uh. The thing is too about this is like they can look at Banu with a telescope and they have lots of interpretations about what its composition is. Uh, but they want to be able to prove that. So part of sending the spacecraft there is also to confirm or maybe deny some of their interpretations and observations from a telescope. Uh. So they're gonna be doing things like measuring the effect of sunlight

on the orbit of the asteroid. And we've mentioned this before. Let me clarify this is the Yarkovsky effect. What it is is when the asteroid absorbs sunlight then re emits that sunlight as heat and it gets a slight push. And Amy talks with us about that later. But can do all sorts of things that change the trajectory of the asteroid. So I think we've hit on all of

the key points in the name of the craft. We have the origins the sea of the spectral interpretation, resource identification, security and that actually refer that actually deals with the measure of the measuring the effect of the sunlight on the orbit and the Acosmy effect. And then the regular explore. Now regulthe was a term I wasn't familiar with. It means the layer of loose outer material that's on the asteroid that they're going to sample, basically, right, That's that's

why it's a regular if explorer. Here's the real quick, down and dirty stats on the spacecraft. Spacecraft of os Iris REX. Uh. It's twenty point to five feet long, eight feet wide, and ten point three three ft tall, so it's no small thing. Uh. It weighs a thousand, nine forty pounds, but that's without fuel. When you put fuel into this thing, it weighs four thousand, six hundred and fifty pounds. They're also going to have two solar panels on it to generate wattage to power the thing

as well as the fuel that's in there. And in addition, it has this y it array of communication systems so that it can relay back to Earth both its scientific findings and what they refer to as its health status. So basically you know whether it's malfunctioning or not. Uh. So they perform a lot of detailed tests on these system to make sure that they survived the journey. That's something we talked to Amy about later. But everything from vibrational testing to heat and cold uh and then um

loud loud noises. They literally blast these things with air horns. Yeah, they've really put it through hell, because that's that's kind of what leaving the planet it amounts to. And the reason why it has to have so many communication systems on board is that it's going to be communicating not just with NASA, but with three different facilities on Earth,

one in Goldstone, California, one in Spain, and one in Canberra, Australia. Uh. They each have huge two and thirty foot diameter dishes for communication, so they can talk to things like this up to the size of a pizza box. Now, uh osiris Rex is much bigger than that, obviously given the stats I just gave you. But you know, the communication systems on board might not be all right, So what

kind of payload are we we're talking about here. They've built a lot of different little I'm gonna just call him gizmos and widgets to put on board the spacecraft for its mission. And the first one that the one that said they seem the most proud of. There's a lot of material on Nassa's side about This is called oviars UH and it is the Osiris REX Visible and infrared spectrometer UH. So basically, this is going to look at the asteroids spectral signature and detect whether there's organics

or other mineral materials there. It measures visible and near infrared light that's reflected and emitted from BEANU and it's key. It is key to their search for organics. This is because minerals and other materials have unique what they refer to as fingerprints within these spectrums, so they'll hopefully be able to see these things even before they actually touched down for that brief second with their arm. UH. It only operates. This is OVIRS an auto cyrus rex at

ten watts. It's less power than your standard household light bulb, and they've built it with no moving parts to reduce the risk of malfunctions. So this is like a pretty pared down invention for them to measure these things and to avoid it getting overheated by all the light and thermal radiation that's going to be bombarding them while they're out there. The whole thing has been analyzed to scatter light around it and make it resistant to corrosion as well.

Now I have to admit, when it comes to space missions, UM, I always returned to like the eight year old me and UH and assembling Lego kits, And maybe part of that is also also that I'm now assembling Lego kits with with my son. But I get excited about little robot arms, h any kind of grabb or any type type of you know, UM, fine manipulation device on a land or a spacecraft. And there is a really cool one here with a very fun name. It's called togasm

or tagasm or tag asm. Tag as definitely an ASTHM in there, the touch and go sample acquisition mechanism. So we kind of joke with Amy later on when we talked to her about all these acronyms that NASA comes up with, and she was a good sport about it, and explained why. But yet, So the arm it has a sample return capsule that's attached to it to protect the sample that with both a heat shield and parachutes

upon reentry. And that's important because we we talk about um planetary contamination as a possibility with amy, So they really want to seal this thing up tight. The arm reaches out, grabs it, seals it within this capsule, and then keeps it safe all the way back to its journey to Earth through our our atmosphere. And then they're gonna put it into a very high security laboratory here

on Earth because the sample retrieval aspects of this. And we get into this little bit in the interview whether here it's just amazing here this is it's quite a feat to to send this device reach out into the void with your technology, pinch off a little bit of rock and bring it back. Yeah. Yeah, I mean we've

never done it before. It sounds it sounds easy when you think about like sci fi type stuff, right, like like just take your average summer blockbuster movie, Like if you saw something like this happen in it, you'd go, sure, I happen all the time. You can do that. But no, we haven't done it yet before, Yeah, not not in the the exact way that this one is carrying it out. So they have another really high tech acronym device on

board this ship. It's called oh cams uh, and this is the camera suite of three cameras that are going to allow them to globally image and map Banu. There's also a laser altimeter on board that they'll use to measure the distance between the craft and Banu as it gets closer. Uh. Now, the point of these tools is to help them map the asteroid and recon for possible sampling sites as they get closer. This is so detailed that they can spot individual pebbles on its surface. Now,

remember Banu we referred to it before. It's just like a pile of rubble in space, right. It's not smooth. It's a lumpy, irregular shape. So it's going to need this kind of data before they approach it. They also have a thermal emission spectrometer that just provides them, you know,

standard temperature information. And then this is cool. M I. T And Harvard students and some faculty got together and put together an X ray imaging spectrometer that will observe the X ray spectrum around Benu as well, So there's some involvement there. And you know what, I'm gonna add this here. I was gonna save it from the end of the episode, but you mentioned, uh, you know the fun part about playing with legos and kind of building

your own thing. So one of the project scientists on the Osiris REX mission, his name is Jason Dwarkin, and there's a video game called Cerbal Space Program. I hadn't heard about it before this, but it's basically like a simulator for building devices that you would launch into space and see how they react. Right. He presented to the fans of the video game in their forum. He said, hey, I got a challenge for you. Can you build a replica of Osiris Rex and successfully return an asteroid sample

to Earth? And he himself tried to do it over and over again and he didn't have very good results. Uh. The game essentially simulates what it's like running a space agency on like a a sort of like alternate version of Earth. Uh. And he found that within the game he couldn't get the spacecraft or launch using the realistic matches, uh sorry, masses that they're using in real time here on Earth. But still he said, hey, I want to

see you guys do it. And there is a big response and lots of people have been attempting this in this video game. So this is a very fact based, science based video game on games. That's what it sounded like. Yeah, so you wouldn't be able to pull off what I instantly think about, and this kind of unreal reality would be to actually put the ghost of Wu tang Rapper d ak O Cyrus. He would power it the stead of the Yarkovsky effect. It's the big baby Jesus effect.

That would be pretty cool. Uh yeah, yeah, So, I mean they're they've they've got so many collaborators on this thing. They've got m I T, the multiple universities that contributed to the research, NASA, Lockeed Martin, other companies. It's we We asked her about this later, but I can't imagine being the project manager on this thing, just trying to keep everybody in uh communication and and and keep this on track. Yeah. Indeed, now we've already touched a little

bit on the itinerary. It's gonna launch September eight, two thousand and sixteen. It's seven oh five pm eastern daylight time. It will be a position on the nose of an Atlas five rocket for launch, and it's going to orbit the Sun for a year, using Earth's gravitational field to

help assess its journey to being. The only thing that I like immediately think of when I hear something like that is the old thing they do in Star Trek whenever they travel back in time, and they like it them around the Sun and somehow that works and then they go back. Yeah, this one will not be going back in time though, it's traveling through spacetime as everything is. So you want to get technical about it. Yes, Uh, it's not going to reach Banu though until and it's

going to approach in August of that year. It's got rocket thrusters that will help slow it down over the course of that year, and then it will briefly touch it, like very briefly to retrieve that sample. So it's just gonna come up very slowly, touch it, grab a sample of that arm, and then move away. And it's the arm is built to release nitrogen gas that will stir up the rocks so that the surface sample will be easier to grab. And it has about three attempts worth

of nitrogen on it. But obviously they're hopening, you know, just right on the first try it we'll get it all right. So that's then when did when do we get it back? One is when it's going to have a window for departure and then it's going to return to Earth in three uh And as we talk about with Amy, the sample will come back. It will be taken to the Utah Test and Training Range where it will be studied, and then after it's vigorously studied, probably for a couple of years, it will then be moved

to NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. So get ready, I mean, uh, mark your calendars because that might be when it comes back. And then we'll do another episode. Yeah, exactly, we'll talk about how everything panned out. Yeah, it's assuming I'm still alive. I don't know. Three feels like a long ways away. I know, you start looking at That's one of the fascinating things about these missions, right, is their their long form missions. Yeah, and I guess it's

always been the case. Really, I mean look back to to to any of the the large scale mega projects in space. You know, some of the earlier ones definitely had a more accelerated time frame in many respects, but still things like like the Voider and Pioneer missions, those were those were in for the long haul. Yeah, absolutely, um, and I would imagine that if you're on these teams too, you have to think in longitudinal terms like that too.

Is even in terms of staffing, right, like like some of the staff members may be older now and may not be expecting to be on the team when it comes back. They may be retired by them. So that's what we've got for you on Osiris. Those are the general facts. That's the plan, the mission, the itinerary, all the stuff that's on board it. Now we're going to talk to Dr Amy Simon and she's going to fill us in on the war complicated scientific matters behind the mission.

What is it about Benner that makes the team think that it may contain clues to the origins of life? So when we were proposing the Osiros rets mission, you know, we had a choice of hundreds of thousands of asteroids to pick from, and the reason that menu stuck out in the first place is, for one thing, it's a very very dark asteroid. It's extremely black. It only reflects about three of the sunlight that that hits it UM.

So you know, if you look around your room at black things, so the blackest paint at your ink to owner um, that's probably still about five six percent reflectants,

so it's even blacker than that. And the reason that color is so important is that things that are black tend to have a lot of carbon on them, and most of the building blocks of life, I mean no acids um involves hydrocarbons, and so we want to find something that has a lot of carbon on it because that's our best chance of looking for those building blocks, and so that's why it was particularly interesting this asteroid UM. It was also nice because this asteroid is an Earth

crossing asteroid. It's a near Earth asteroid, so it's easier to get to than some of the ones farther out in the Solar system UM. And you know, it's just an interesting object because it does cross the Earth's path and so this is the type of thing we think back in the formation of the planet and Earth that might have helped put those hydrocarbons and things that we

needed for life here. So that's why we want to study this particular asteroid Okay, so, so to clarify, you mean asteroids like this potentially impacted with Earth bringing materials like this here. That's right. We we certainly know that at various points in the Solar System history and the formation of the planets, that all these bodies were floating around and a lot of them would have hit the

surfaces of the planets as they were forming. Um. And we think commets brought water, for example, but we think that asteroids in particular, because those are the primitive leftover pieces from forming the Solar System, will tell us about

those things that hint very early on. Okay, uh So, one of the things that I read about in the fact sheets and the research that NASA has put up online about this mission was that you're hoping that this will affect the future of space exploration as well, because you may rely on the materials that are found on

asteroids like this. Can you explain that a little bit further? Sure, So, as we want to go farther out in the Solar System, particularly with people, we run into the problem that you can't bring everything with you that you need because humans require a lot of resources water for example. UM. So, what we want to do is study these objects that are on the way to more distant places and see

what's on their surfaces. So, for example, if there was a big cache of water ice, that's something that a mission could go pick up and bring its water along the way instead of having to carry everything from launch all the way out. Got it, Okay? Like to look for those resources, okay, And so I'm imagining that you would either have previously identified these asteroids as water sources through telescopic means or maybe with the spectrometer like likes

on Osiris Rex. Well, ideally we would have mapped out a whole bunch of near Earth asteroids so that we know those were great stopping points essentially you know, gas stations on the way. Um. But the reality is we won't be able to send a mission to every possible asteroids. So what we can also do is look at the

class of asteroid. So from Earth based observations, we've been able to put asteroids in different categories, and so if we go to one and realize this category tends to have a lot of water, that's probably a good stopping point. So this is a kind of an odd ball question, But I was going through all the literature about this mission and all the devices that are part of its payload, and I have to ask, why is it that NASA

loves acronyms so much. Is there a specific kind of you know, work operating procedure that makes them useful for your classification systems? So that's that's kind of a funny question. Um. There's no official policy that says everything has to be an acronym. UM, But I was thinking about this, and I think there's two different categories of why this happens. And one is of course that we like catching names, you know, and and early missions Apollo Gemini, those had

obvious names. But you know, as scientists and engineers, we tend to be pretty practical when we name things, and so that the names get very complicated very quickly. And so that's sort of the practical reason for doing an acronym is that we can take something that you know, would take forever to spill out and say every time we say it, condense it down into an acronym, and then just use that as a word going forward. So

that's kind of what you're seeing. And then if it happens to be catchy at the same time, even better too. For one so whose job is it to do that? Is it like somebody's sitting down and has come up with the long name and they just make it into an acronym or they try to find like like for instance, so cyrus obviously has some symbolic meaning to it. Is there like a I don't know, like some kind of public relations team that works together with you on that.

Um No. A lot of times early on the names like O cyrus, you know, the science team comes up with it or the principal investigator does. But sometimes we do have naming contests. Um Benu, for example, was actually part of a contest where students got to write in what they thought it should be named and why, and you know they could have chosen an acronym in this case, they pick something along the same. Uh. You know mythology

is a cyrus That worked out very well. But there's no, like I said, no official policy and you know we have fun. It cool. Yeah, that sounds great. Now, there are a lot of outside partners involved in this mission, university's companies, students, and many of NASA's own separate units. How do you manage the project between so many entities? Yeah, that can be pretty complicated. Um, the reason, you know,

there's so many entities. In the first places, this is a rather big mission and there are so many parts to it, so anyone group probably couldn't handle the whole thing by themselves, so you bring in the experts for each different area. Uh. The entire mission gets managed by NASA Goddard and so our folks are in charge of

making sure everything keeps running. And then on the science and the mission is really managed by University of Arizona, so they're in charge of making sure that we're going to do all the right science and that all the instruments are going to meet their requirements. So it's it's even a little bit of a distributed management actually, just

to keep it all running and all the parts going smoothly. Uh. So getting back to you were talking about how heavily carbon based venu is, can you talk us through how it is that you interpret what the asteroids composition is just based on telescopic observations and then when Osirius rex get that gets there, how will the spectrometer observations either confirm or refute the interpretations you've made from telescopes. So with telescope observations even though it is an earth crossing asteroid,

it doesn't get that close to us. So when we observe it from a ground based telescope, we don't see the surface in detail, and so we'll get say, for example, spectrum or imaging in different colors, and we can get some sense of what's probably on the surface. Again that this object is very black, it probably has carbon, but

what we can't see is a very fine composition. So if there is that little pocket of hydrocarbons or water or some other mineral that we're interested in, we can't see that from the ground based observations because we're not really resolving the surface. We just don't have that kind

of spatial resolution. So when we get there with our spectrometers, we're going to map out the entire surface, and so for example, if there's small craters, or there's little pockets of of soil and regulars that are really rich in some mineral, we'll see that when we can't see that from the earth based observation. So it's kind of taking that really distant view and zooming in now and now we're gonna look at it very up close and try to find those little pockets of of interesting material. Okay,

so I'm particularly interested in the testing. I watched a video that I think you you might have been featured in actually talking about UM the spaceship, sorry, the spacecraft and how it's going to survive its journey and the vibration tests you've put it through. But through other research we've done here at how stuff works, I know about like creating really loud air horns to test space machinery. So what other stuff have you done to torture this

thing and make sure that it can survive its journey. Yes, we we torture these spacecraft and the instruments pretty hard, um in part because you know, they have to survive the launch, and once they're out there, we can't go back and fix them. And so what we do is, UM, this is a case where we have these crazy test procedures written up where we're going to test everything to the limits we think is going to see in space, and then a little bit beyond that. And so one

of the first things we do is vibration testing. And in that case, what we do is basically we're gonna shake the instrument or the spacecraft as hard as we expect to see it launch because that's typically your your biggest vibration sources, that that huge launch vehicle. So we'll shake it really hard to make sure nothing falls off, nothing breaks, everything is still working. So that's that's one of the critical tests that we do. Another one we

do is is basically electromagnetic interference. So we want to make sure that none of the different instruments or spacecraft systems are going to interfere with each other, and so we'll basically blast it with different uh types of electromagnetic radiation and make sure nothing breaks. And so that's probably when you don't hear is much about make sure they electronics don't get affected by each other. Essentially, um we

do as the thermal testing. That one is actually quite interesting, thermal vacuum testing, and so you know, we take things to very extremely cold temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero. And most people would probably believe that about space, that it gets that that cold, but what they don't probably consider is that we also take it to you know, four hundred degrees above zero, because things also get very hot in space, and that's because you're directly exposed to

the sun with no atmosphere in between. So we don't tend to think about those temperatures here on Earth, but that atmosphere protects you from cold and hot and so we take it, you know, ridiculously cold temperatures and extremely hot temperatures and we make sure again nothing breaks. We have you know, special epoxies and seals and things like that on different parts of the spacecraft and instruments, so you want to make sure that those things aren't going

to be affected by the temperature. So you know, we do this in stages. You'll do one of these tests UM for example, uh, this thermal tests, and then you'll take it's a vibration, and then you'll take it back to the thermal tests. So we do it a couple of different ways to make sure none of these things have affected any part of the spacecraft. Okay, wow, so that's yeah, that's like years of work, I would assume, doing all of that testing and making sure that it

can survive all those scenarios. It is and when you know, this testing is fairly complicated. To get to those cold temperatures, we use liquid nitrogen and in some cases liquid helium even UM, and that sort of test is is fairly complicated and expensive. So it's not something that you just do during normal work hours. You have to do this testing seven because when you're in the chamber and running those things, you don't want to stop the test. So so not only is it long, it's also you know,

very long hours. We have people working over night ships to do this testing. Okay, yeah that I remember reading about one of the air horns that the European Space Agency has and that could just like absolutely annihilate a human being if you were exposed to it. So we have warning like fall over the place during testing. Yeah, all right, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back with Dr Amy A. Simon. Hey, everybody, you know the feeling you get when you can get

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stamps dot com, enter stuff and start mailing things. So the planetary defense angle of the mission has received a lot of attention recently due to frankly hysterical reports in the media about to ben whose a slim chance of hitting our then I believe the century. How big of a factor is that in this mission? And can you explain to our audience why it is a ultimately a slim chance? Right? So you know, it was not a

deciding factor in which asteroid we went to um. It is an Earth crossing asteroid and it turns out it does have currently about a one um of impacting. But what people need to understand is how we come up with that number. And so when an asteroids first discovered, we have one point of data where it was in the sky, and to actually make it a discovery, we

need a second point. So we follow it up. Um, we take those two points or three points however a few we have, and we actually run it through a model assuming all the gravity we know about from the planets in the Sun, and we run it forward and we basically see when it would cross the Earth orbit at the same time the Earth is nearby, and we put error bars on that, and that's how we come

up with a number. And basically what happens is going forward, people take more and more observation, and so every once in a while, I see about an asteroid that has a one and one chance, one and two chance of hitting us, and then we take some more observations and suddenly it's one in a million. And it's because these things don't move in a straight line, right, So so we need more observations to basically fill in that curve

and figure out where it's going to go. But there's one other factor that we don't know about, and that's how the asteroid is reacting to being pushed by sunlight effect, right, the Arkowski effect, which is actually kind of complicated where you have sunlight and in this case that the photons coming out the sun act as particles, so they exert a pressure. They're pushing on the asteroid in one direction,

but especially these very black asteroids, they heat up. Now they're also rotating, so as it turns and it's cooling off, it radiates to space. Well, now it's going to get pushed in a different direction. And so it's a very very very tiny effect, but it adds up over a century, and that's a tiny little tweak on that orbit that's

really hard to quantify. And so that's one of the goals of our mission is to actually measure that effect, be able to look at the incoming and outgoing radiation and figure out how much does that work, because that that's one big unknown and a lot of our models

of these asteroid trajectories. It was kind of fascinating to me Amy because you know, I spent time researching all about the mission, and then it wasn't until after I had read probably for like three hours about your mission that I googled asteroid Benu, and just every news story that came up was like, oh my god, this asteroid may hit Earth, and you know, and it just was so interesting to me that to see how the media had absolutely like blown this so out of proportion for

a good click baby headline. It does happen. But but again typically, and you know, we we scientists, reports the numbers, and what people do with those numbers is always you know, hard and hard to predict, I guess, but again, they tend to come out with with a very higher number, you know, one and three thousand chance, but if you looked at the uncertainty on that, it's huge, and as the uncertainty comes down on you know, it becomes that

one in a million probability. So you know, we're we're again just reporting numbers and people don't necesarily understand how we interpret that. But as we get more information, typically that chance goes way down. So one last question, and this is kind of a weird one, but I'm curious is the Cyrus rex team at all concerned about the hypothetical, sort of science fiction possibility of planetary contamination from the sample being brought back to Earth from Benu. That's actually

a very good question. Um. So when we have Mars missions, we worry about forward contamination. We don't want to bring Earth stuff to Mars and which would basically make it difficult for us to interpret anything we found on Mars in this case, because that surface has been exposed you know for um, you know, many millions, billions of years.

We're not too worried about Earth contamination, although we do have a requirement on our spacecraft to keep it very very clean because again we want to interpret anything we see or find there um. But on the other hand, coming back act, so that's you know, backwards contamination Earth is important on every sample return mission, and so this actually goes into a Level four biohazard lab. It'll be yet basically a sealed container and it won't be opened

until it's in a very special safe lab. Not because we're worried about space microbes or anything really, but mostly we don't want to contaminate our sample. Um. But we we do have requirements on how the sample is handled. And there's a whole Planetary Protection office that now, so that's dedicated to this topic and tells us what we must do to make sure that we don't have contamination

in either direction. Oh okay, wow. I thought that this was just maybe some kind of thing that I had cooked up in my own head that would be like a problem. But it seems like it's a very realistic thing that you have your best people working on. Oh. Absolutely, you know, And again I wasn't classified as a problem so much as we we do have people that that worry about such things and and have very strict protocols and procedures in place, just even to ensure the integrity

of the science. That's great now in terms of of missions that have essentially you reached out into space and brought back material samples. Just to give everyone a little little more scope, like how does that how does this fit in with the with the collection of samples, Like how how many different samples roughly have been brought back from asteroids or the moon, et cetera. So during the Apollo years we brought back quite a few moon rocks. So that's that's a pretty big cache of of samples

right there. But in that case, you know, we had astronauts who could pick them up and bring them back, so we could bring back um, I want to stay on the order of of rocks. I'm not sure the exact number, but in terms of actually doing this robotically, that's been a lot more of a challenge because you have to figure out how are you going to pick these things up. And so we have samples from the Stardust mission, which essentially used what's called aero jail to

catch dust screens that flew into the spacecraft. Um, it's very tiny, tiny amounts. Uh in Genesis also did something similar, and then the Japanese mission how Abusa, brought back some grains from an asteroid surface, but again it was kind

of just what they could capture without touching. Uh. This is the first mission that's actually going to try to touch the surface and pick up a pretty big sample, and so we can bring up we have a requirement for sixty grams, but we can pick up to two of soil and rocks at small rocks, and so you know that's our goal is to have a pretty big sample. This will be the first time we've done that robotically. All right, Amy, Well, thank you for joining us here

on Stuffed to Boil your Mind. We really enjoyed getting to pick your brain a bit about this. Uh, this just really fascinating mission. Well, thank you so much for having me on. All right, so there you have it, an introduction to this fascinating mission o Cyrus Rex. We've got to discuss the craft, the destination and we got

to talk to an expert about it. And if you want more information about it, if you want to just really get into the nitty ready and just follow the Osiris Rex odyssey, you can head on over to Asteroid Mission dot org. Yeah, they have tons of materials on their NASA's public relations team is working over time to educate us the public about what they're doing with this mission. They have like stream of blog posts up to the

Dave videos and it's it's really cool. Uh And I, you know, honestly wish that we had had more time with it, but I took a good three or four hours with it to get us prep to talk to Amy. So if you have, you know, maybe some more ideas about Osiris Rex, or maybe maybe there's a mission that NASA is doing that you think we should cover, or there's something more space related that you'd like us to cover,

because we just did uh moons of Saturn. We've talked about Jupiter before I personally would love to take a look at Mars' moon Phobos. Oh yeah, there are more moons out there, so we have to go check those out as well. But if you've got suggestions like that, or you just want to reach out to us, you can do that on social media. We are on on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram, all those platforms. Pretty much our handle is blow the Mind. It might be a little bit different,

but you'll find us if you search for that. Uh, and you can always go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership where we have everything, every podcast, every video, every article that we work on on these things. Not to mention that those social media feeds have us sharing all the weird science stuff that

we come across throughout the week as well. Indeed, and if you want to get in touch with us the old fashioned way, if you want to hit us up with an email, you can find us at blow the Mind, at how stuff works dot com well more. Almost the path ands over their topics is a house stoff works dot com. The point four point four proper part