Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseNASA sent Osiris-Rex to scoop a cup of dirt from an asteroid ... using a pogo stick!
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Hey or hey, I have a robotics question for you.
All right, Daniel, for the last time, I'm not going to build you a robotic graduate student. That's just unethical.
All right, Well, I think my grad students are pretty happy, and I don't even have to program them to say that, but my actual question is what's your favorite way to land a robot on an extra terrestrial surface?
Ooh that's fun. Now personally I haven't done it myself, but let's see, we do have several options that we've done before. For example, we've slow descended on Mars with rockets, and we've also used parachutes and airbags to land.
That's simple but effective.
And you know, you gotta give props to the sky Craine. You know, like the vehicle that used rockets and crane to lower the rower on the Mars.
That one totally awesome. It's like science fiction. But have you guys thought about you know, something simpler, like, you know, a pogo stick.
Oh that's a great idea. I'll bounce it off of NASA. I am Moreham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD commics.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and my son has the neighborhood pogo stick record.
Oh nice, are you proud? What's his record? How many times to Kenny bounce? Or how high Kenny bounce?
No, it's a number of times you can bounce without falling off, and his number is somewhere in the thousand.
Wow.
I wouldn't say I'm proud as much as impressed, because it's not really about like physical endurance. It's mostly about mental endurance, like at some point you just get bored and step off.
So I don't know if you've gotten the Mamma, Daniel, but as a parent should always say you're proud.
I'm so proud of my son's medication to the pogo stick Championship.
I think you try to say you're shocked. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we think about things all around the universe, from in our neighborhood to the distant reaches of space. We talk about the origins of the universe. We talk about the end of the universe. We talk about what it's all made out of. We think that wonder belongs to everyone, and that includes your curiosity about what's going on in the universe, how it all works, and what it all means.
Yeah, we like to talk about the big things like the cosmos, and also the small things like the physics of pogo sticks or maybe landing on other surfaces.
And how pogo sticks can actually help us explore the universe and understand where everything came from.
Yep, pogo sticks are very versatile and they're kind of an engineering marvel if you think about it.
I haven't actually thought about it. What is the history of the invention of the pogo stick? You have that at your fingertips.
I don't have Wikipedia on me right now. Unfortunately, we'll wait for the endorsement and sponsorship from the Big pogo stick.
Are you saying it's not one of the fundamental machines that you learned about when you become an engineer. You have the lever, the pulley, the pogo stick.
I think you have to Actually, you mentioned my thesis. My thesis did feature a pogo stick.
For reals, There you go. It's everywhere in science. It's not just a child's toy.
Yeah, yeah, I know. You can get you a pH d from Stanford if you work hard enough at it. In fact, I think I had to buy a pogo stick. Oh my god, Daniel, you're bringing back so many memories. I had to buy a pogo stick for my actual doctoral thesis.
So did you get a toys rs To buy equipment for your PhD? From Stanford?
I think so, I think I did. I must have. Where else can you get a pogo stick?
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure there's no equipment at the LEDG that was purchased at a toy store. But you know, I'm not one hundred percent sure.
Yeah, it's a big place. You never know, Daniel, Yeah, exactly. But anyways, we are talking about technology today and engineering and specifically how to and a robot on another surface.
That's right, And we're talking about engineering and science working hand in hand solving incredible technical problems to help answer deep and fundamental questions about the nature of our solar system and the world we live in.
Yeah, because it's pretty fun to look at the universe through telescopes, but it's even more fun when you get to go out there and bring back samples.
Yeah, it's so tactile. They could to have like rocks from Mars or rocks from the Moon actually in your lab where you can zap them with lasers or do all sorts of crazy stuff to them. It's much more fun than just looking through a telescope and wondering what is that thing? It's kind of shiny, and so there's a whole series of really crazy, amazing robotic missions planning to bring stuff back so we can study it here on Earth.
Yeah. Now, Daniel, we've landed robots in lots of places in the Solar System, and we've done big grown rock called the Moon, and we've landed robots and a big grown rock called Mars. And we've landed robots and the ice rock shooting through our Solar system Comet. But we're not done yet landing things on things in our Solar system.
We're not going to be done until we've landed a thing on every kind of thing that's right exactly. We are interested in understanding not just the planets of our Solar system, not just the comets, but the asteroids. The asteroids hold answers to questions that we think will help us understand how their solar systems formed. They're basically little time capsules, untouched since the formation of the planets and the Sun four and a half billion years ago.
So do they On the program, we'll be asking the question can we land a robot on an asteroid?
And the bonus question is and can we scoop up parts of that asteroid and bring them back to Earth?
Yeah? And I guess the answer, Daniel is yes and no because technically, did we land on an asteroid?
Or maybe yes and then no? I mean if the pogostike is like yes and no and yes and no and yes and no.
Right right, all right, now, this is an interesting question, and it's kind of timely, right because there is right now today a mission out in space trying to land on an asteroid and bring some of it back to Earth.
That's right. There is a space mission we sent up a few years ago and it's been orbiting an asteroid for a little while, and just yesterday, as we record this program, it descended to the surface.
Yeah, this mission is called OSIRIS REX. Now, Daniel, is this NASA or is this the European Space Agency who sent this up?
This is NASA. This is an American project, and it has a pretty awesome name, OSIRIS REX. Although you know, it's a pretty tortured acronym. What does it stand for? Osiris REX stands for Origins Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security Regolith Explorer.
Oh man, that sounds like a like a word salad, like a stream of consciousness acronym.
I know, but it's a pretty awesome name. It sounds a little bit, you know, like an Egyptian god or a superhero or something. So it's got some mystery.
You know how many meetings it took to get that acronym, I.
Don't know, But as usual, we were curious, is this something people are hearing about? Is this something only we are excited about, or is all of humanity at the edge of their seats waiting to hear back about this asteroid landing it?
As usual, Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people, can we land a probe on an asteroid? Think about it for a second. Have you heard the news about the robot landing on an asteroid this week? And if so, what would you answer. Here's what people had to say.
I think we can land a probe on an asteroid, and I think it's happened before. I can't remember the name of the probe on the mission without looking on the internet, but I remember something about it landing and unexpectedly bouncing, and it bounced like a mile high, which was a problem, but then it did eventually land and it was okay. I guess it's very difficult, but don't see why not if you have the right technology.
I think the short answer is yes, because we have done it. Japan had the Hausa if I remember, and also NASA has a probe in on route right now that will land on an asteroid in near future.
We did land the probe on a comet, so I would assume that.
If we could do that, we can land the probe on an asteroid.
HM might be difficult because I think they move pretty fast and are really small, but I definitely think that. You know, it might be a tough engineering challenge, but I think it's possible.
Yes, I believe we definitely can.
That's going to be tough, and you'd have to get the trajectories correct, but I think you definitely cared.
I have no idea. I don't I don't know what an asteroid is because I always mix all the different cuntroism of still are things that there are, and I think there was an a probe that collided with some stellar object. I don't remember if it was an asteroid.
All right, It's as people sound pretty confident in human engineers here. You're like, we've done it before, We've landed on a moving flying ice rock, Surely we can do it on a regular old asteroid.
And it's a pretty impressive feat. You know, the Solar System is huge in comparison to these objects. So you're gonna shoot a bullet out from Earth to this other tiny object and match its speed. It's really pretty impressive. On the other hand, yeah, we've done it before, so we're capable of these really amazing technological feats. And you know, I'm saying we here very broadly because of course I have no participation in this. I get no credit in it. I'm just sort of like in the audience, going, wow, humanity, we rock.
Well you're using the super royal we like all of humanity or do you mean like the subset of humanity that works for science? What do you think? What do you think you're using?
In your head, I'm definitely in the audience here. I'm not involved in this community at all. My jaw hits the floor just as much as your average seven year old space lover, and so I'm definitely just in the audience, cheering these folks on and being glad that they're doing it.
Well. All right, well let's get into it. Daniel. First of all, I guess why land on an asteroid? I mean, I can see Mars. That's pretty cool. The moon is right here, a comet, that's super cool. But why land on an asteroid? Isn't it just like a big rock in space.
It is a sort of a big rock in space. And one reason to land on an asteroid is that it's a bit of a time capsule. We think that the way the Solar System came together about four and a half billion years ago is that you had a huge cloud of gas and dust, these tiny little bits, and that maybe something shocked them, like a nearby supernova went off and started the process of gravity gathering everything together. And that took a few hundred thousand years or so, and you have the Sun form and planets start to form, and then the leftover bits turned into asteroids or comets or whatever is out there in the Kuiper Belt and the Ord Cloud. But these leftover bits had been basically been inert since then. It's not like the Earth where there's like flowing rocks under the ground and all sorts of chemistry is happening. It's basically just clumped together and froze, and it's been unchanged ever since then. And so if we have questions about, like, you know, what is the basic chemistry of the ingredients of the Solar system? Then these rocks can answer those questions.
I see. So it's like a snapshot of the rocks of the Solar System. Yeah, like every other rock is sort of exposed or changed or moved around, but these are sort of still there.
Yeah, it's like a time capsule. You know, if somebody buried something four and a half billion years ago and you got to dig it up now and you could see, like, how are rocks four and a half billion years ago different from rocks today? Is there a different fraction of stuff, you know? Is there different ratios of isotopes? But most interestingly, like is the chemistry? Are there amino acids?
There?
Are there the basic elements we need for life? What do they look like? Are they different from the kinds of amino acids we have here on Earth? Or are there no amino acids? And most of them were fabricated here on Earth. It's really basic questions about the foundations of life and chemistry that can be answered by looking at asteroids.
What wait, so an asteroid might have amino acids.
Absolutely, amino acids the basic elements that you need for like DNA and for life are not just here on Earth. We found them in outer space. But the question is like how common are they? And there's lots of different amino acids, you know, are there just the amino acids that we need for life that are everywhere, or the amino acids we need for life fairly rare? You know. Another question is like here on Earth we only use left handed amino acids. That's like one particular configuration. Every amino acid comes in two varieties, the left handed in the right handed. They're just mirror images of each other. And here on Earth we only use the left handed ones. But we think that left and rights should have been made in equal numbers by like you know, non biological chemical processes, but we don't really know. Maybe we'll look at these asteroids and find only left handed amino acids, which is weird, Or maybe we'll find left and right, or maybe mostly right, and Earth is weird to mostly have left you know, it's fascinating.
The Solar system at some point might say, what I am left handed?
Yeah, well, you know, the universe particle physics is left handed in a weird way that we've talked about before. The weak force likes left handed particles and ignores right handed particles. So there's this weird connection there where particle physics the universe at a low level is left handed, and then life is also at a much bigger scale left handed. And some people have suggested there might even be a connection, you know, like cosmic rays from space could have caused these things to become left handed amino acids or something. That's a whole area of speculation. It could also just be a coincidence. But we have basic questions about, you know, the left versus right handed nature these amino acids, and one way to answer them is to say, well, what was around a long long time ago, and that can be answered by asteroids.
Cool, I guess the question is, you know, these rocks are floating out into space. So even if we get a sample and figure out what it's made out of, isn't it sort of like a random sample? How do we know where this asteroid has been, or where it came from, or what part of the solar sys you know what I mean, Like it's floating around in space.
Yeah, you're right, and there could have been collisions and all sorts of stuff. So what you'd like to do is sample a lot of asteroids to get a big broad distribution. You can't do that, and so you pick one, and you try to pick one that you think has had sort of a smaller amount of geological activity. And there's a variety of different kinds of asteroids if we can study them, And this one was picked because it has a really dark surface, and so we think that it's mostly just carbon and these are unlikely they have had a lot of geological activity, so they're called carbonaceous asteroids. And there's a few different kinds, and so we picked this one for that reason that we think it's a better time capsule. But there's actually another fun reason that we picked this particular asteroid. O.
Wait, but first, which asteroid did we pick? And how do we pick it?
Yeah, we picked one. It's called Benu b e Nnu, and we picked it because we thought, you know, it's about the right size. It's about sixteen hundred feet wide or so, so it's something we could land on to me and we could approach. Is big enough that has its own gravity.
That's like as big as the Empire State building something like that.
It's about as tall as the Empire State building, Yeah, exactly. But we picked this one also because there's a non zero chance that it's going to hit the Earth. What Yeah, they project this thing forward into the future in about the year twenty one seventy five. There's a reasonable chance this thing is going to hit the earth, like, not a big chance, but not a zero chance. Right now, we calculate it to be about one in two thousand and seven hundred chance.
M, which is about as high as it goes around in the Solar system, right.
Yeah, And we can project the path of these guys pretty well in the next couple of hundred years. The more measurements you have of something, the easier it is to project where it's going to go, and the further future you want to project, the larger the uncertainties. But it's you know, if something's going to hit the Earth, it might be nice to know what is it made out of? You know, could we knew it, break it half or is it just basically a pile of rubble and nuking it would do nothing. So we figured this is a good one to study.
But what if landing on it sort of nudges it in our direction? Do they think about that I'm.
Sure they did, because you know, one of the ways you can affect the flight of an asteroid is to use a gravity tractor, which is just to send up a really small spaceship and go near the asteroid. And even the small gravitational effect of a spaceship will have a small impact on the trajectory of the asteroid, but hundreds of years later that could be enough of a difference, so you miss or hit the Earth.
H All right, so we're test driving our ability to get to asteroids, right, especially ones that are maybe hard to see or or hard to find in the blackness of space.
Yeah, exactly. And this one's cool because they tried to do it on the cheap a little bit. They didn't want to spend a huge amounts of money just like burn rocket fuel to get there, so they did a couple of cool tricks where they launched and then they spun around the Earth to use it as like a gravitational assist to get said the asteroid more quickly.
All right, let's get into how they are sending this probe and what they're planning to do to land on it. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we're talking about osiris REX, NASA's latest and current mission to land a robot on an an asteroid and bring back samples from it.
That's right. They want to scoop up extra terrestrial dirt and bring it back to Earth.
Does it count as extra terrestrial if it's an asteroid? I feel like you have to be from another planet to be extra terrestrial.
No, terrestrial just means from Earth. An extraterrestrial just means not from Earth. So everything that's not from Earth is extraterrestrial. You know, if we met aliens and they lived on a moon instead of on a planet, when you'd be like, sorry, you're not really aliens. You're not extraterrestrial.
Yeah, you'd have to downgrade them a little bit, you know, like, what are you going to call them?
Mooni's well, you know, I think some of the best places to find life in this olar system are on other moons, So you should work on your anti moon bigotry there or.
Hey, m all right, So Daniel, this is an ongoing mission and it launched a few years ago, and actually it just landed or just tried to land on an asteroid this week.
Yeah, that's right. They launched it in September twenty sixteen, and then it took a couple of years to get out there. I said earlier. They swung it around the Earth to save money on fuel and propulsion because NASA's trying to do these missions a little bit cheaper. This thing is about the size of an suv, so it's pretty big, but it's not massive like the Space Shuttle. And it caught up to the asteroid in December twenty eighteen, so after a two year flight.
Wow, and it's the size of an suv. That's huge. How do you even fit that inside of a rocket? Like, didn't they just launch a Tesla and that was a little convertible coop.
Yeah, they can fit that kind of thing on top of a rocket. You could look up the launch video on Google if you like. But the United Launch Alliance used one of their Atlas V rockets and it launched from Cape Canaveral. So this kind of thing you can totally fit on the top of a rocket. But I'm sure you know there are space constraints there.
Oh wow, So this is not a small mission. I mean, in suv that's way bigger than the Mars rover, isn't it.
I think it's about the same size. The latest Mars rovers are really pretty big. They're about suv size. But yeah, this is not a tiny little cube set. Now, this thing cost eight hundred million dollars. Wow, so this is going to be some expensive dust that we bring back.
So let's talk about the mission itself. So what's the plan for the mission that's just going to go there? And how is it going to get on the asteroid?
So we don't have great pictures of the asteroid before we go, So once it arrives, it all of a sudden has the best pictures of the surface of this asteroid that anybody's ever had. So we couldn't plan in advance where to land. So they spent like a year or so just orbiting the asteroid and taking pictures of it and trying to figure out like where to land because they have a very delicate procedure and they need a pretty flat spot and they want to gather a bunch of like really small particles. So they had to identify a location that was flat enough for this thing to land and also that was covered in like sand or bits that they could gather up. Because remember, this thing is far away at the moment that it does it's landing. It's like two hundred million miles from Earth, which means that you know, light takes minutes and minutes, like fifteen minutes to get there from here. So you can't drive this thing with a joystick. It has to be fairly automatic, which means you need to orbit it for a while and make a really careful plan about where to land.
Oh and it did all that, like it did a reconnaissance.
Pass, yeah, exactly.
Over the last year, just to get pictures of it.
Yeah, and so it sent back a bunch of pictures and then folks at NASA like narrowed it down to a few landing spots. But actually when they saw the pictures, they were really surprised by what they saw and actually a little bit disappointed. They were expecting that it was going to be covered like with a sandy beach, lots of really small little particles, but instead what they saw was like a big rocky plane with lots of like really big, like house sized boulders, which is a bit of a nightmare if you're landing a robot.
Oh, I see, there's no flat surface. It's all pretty rocky.
It's all pretty rocky. And they were hoping to gather up, you know, really small pieces. They're looking to collect bits of rock, you know, the size of a small coin. They're not going to grab a huge boulder and bring it back to Earth, although that would be pretty awesome. And so what they need is a pretty flat spot covered in small little bits of regolith. What they found, yeah, was like basically just a huge field of enormous boulders. So they struggled a little bit to find a place to land, but they did identify one really promising spot.
All right, cool, maybe they need a bigger SUV for the bring back all boulder.
Yeah, And so the procedure is that they identify this spot, and it did a couple of practice runs where it like lowers itself down to the surface a little bit, and it's got this arm. So the pogo stick aspect is that it's got this arm that's like eleven feet long that will stretch down and the sampling head is that the tip of that arm, and that's the only part that's actually going to touch the surface.
Oh really, it's more like a mosquito kind of.
Yeah, exactly, it's like a huge robot mosquito. It like very gradually lowers itself down to the surface and then the tip of it touches the surface. And it's like a pogo stick because it has a spring on it, so it touches the surface and it's only in contact with the surface for like five or ten seconds.
Wow, I guess as the spring the pogostick compresses, it's in contact for it takes five seconds to bounce.
It takes five seconds to bounce. Remember, the gravity here is really really low, and they made the spring very gentle, and this thing is moving very very slowly. But you don't want to have to have a whole separate propulsion system to lift yourself off the asteroid afterwards, and you only need a few seconds to grab it. But you know that means that like a four year mission, the crucial bits are like four or five seconds in the middle of that mission, right, It's sort of intense. Everything comes down to these few seconds of contact.
And it has to do it on its own. I mean it's a robot, you know, fifteen minutes away from in communication delay, so it has to do it all by itself.
Yeah, it has some smarts on board as it's lowering itself down to see like, oh, am I going to hit the wrong rock. It's got this round sampling head that has to hit a flat surface and then it's going to use nitrogen to blow stuff up from the surface which will get sucked up into the sampling head. But if that sampling head doesn't hit flat on then it could all be wasted. And so it has a bunch of AI and it as it's coming down, it like maps the surface and tries to figure out is this still a good spot? Should I bail? Should I back up? And as you say, it has to make that decision itself. It can't wait for its minders from Earth who are fifteen light minutes away.
Well, wait, it's not scooping up dirt or rocks. It's actually like blowing on it and then sucking it up from the air. Or how is it picking up the dust?
Yeah, it's like a reverse vacuum cleaner sort of. It's got this round head, and the roundhead sits on the surface, and then it's got these little canisters of nitrogen that blow stuff up from the surface that will then get filtered back into the head. And so this is the idea, this is what they think should happen. They can't actually watch it happen, so they can tell it to do its thing. It can say, okay, I touched the surface, I blew the nitrogen, but it's pretty hard to tell if they actually got anything.
But how does it getting the dust and then sucking in the dust into the probe.
It's got sort of like a dome, and then it blows the nitrogen from the bottom of the dome, and then the stuff comes up through filters and gets caught in this little trap.
Oh, it's like a little like a little cup.
Yeah, it's sort of like a little cup exactly.
And then they bring the cup back up into the vehicle and then store it or what.
They bring the cup back up into the vehicle and then they try to figure out did we get anything, like, did we catch anything, and if so, then they store that in the vehicle, and then the vehicle will come back to Earth. It'll take a couple of years, and it'll drop it off in our atmosphere to land somewhere in the desert of Utah.
Wow.
Oh, I see, it's just hoping that dust will kind of fall on it, right, It's like you're holding out a spoon hoping that dust will some dust will land on it, and then you're bringing that back.
It's a tiny bit more sophisticated than that. Actually, there's a little dome over it so that all the stuff that gets blown up by the nitrogen gets funneled into this collection, which is probably why it's also hard for them to see what they've captured, because this dome that covers it. And they don't want a whole lot, you know, they're planning to get somewhere between like sixty grams and you know, maybe a kilogram. It's not a whole lot of stuff, you know, somewhere between like a candy bar and a really big burrito. Amount of stuff, But that would be enough to really do some careful studies of what's on the surface of the asteroid. But it's sort of crazy, you know. You pick one asteroid out of all the asteroids, and then you pick one spot on that asteroid, and this costs you like a billion dollars to get one spoonful of one asteroid. And what if it's like unusual? What if it's unrepresentative. What if that's just a weird spot on a weird asteroid and we're going to spend like a decade writing science papers about the origin of the Solar System. It's funny how science works sometimes, but it's all you can do.
And Daniel, are you saying that they shouldn't do it, or that if they're going to send one they should send one hundred instead.
I'm always in favor of sending one hundred robots anywhere. Yes, absolutely, No, I think it's interesting robots in your house. That's good. I got some work for them to do. Are those the robotic grad students? I could put them to work. No, But it's always a question, you know, if you can get a really difficult to gather expensive sample, is it representative? And you have to do a lot of you know, interesting statistics to say like what's the chance of this is really unusual or this is typical. But it's the kind of thing we've been doing forever in science is generalizing from small experiences. Like most of our planetary science is based on looking at our Earth or our solar system. It's the only example we have of a planet with life or of a solar system we can study in detail. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It just means it's you have to wonder if we have sample bias, if we have you know, if we're looking at an unusual example.
Yeah, it makes you wonder if we should have more robots. We should always have more more robotics jobs. Yeah, exactly. I imagine they're going to take video and a picture of when it happens, so they'll at least have you know, video footage of whether or not it kicked up thus and whether they could see somebody falling into the cup.
Well, they can't see that because it's inside the cup. What they can do afterwards is take a picture of the head and see, like, you know, does it have little bits on it? If so, then they think it probably went smoothly, and then they can do this really cool trick to see how much stuff is in the cup by spinning the spaceship around. What do you mean how fast you spin depends a little bit on how much stuff you're holding. For example, you know how figure skaters, as they move their arms in and out, it makes it easier or harder to spin fast or slow. So if you add a cup full of stuff, like a kilogram of stuff at the end of an eleven foot arm to the spaceship, it'll make it harder for that spaceship to spin. So what they did is they spun the spaceship a few times to sort of calibrate before it landed, and now they're going to spin it again a few times after it did its scoop up to see if it spins differently. And if it spins differently, they figure, Okay, there must be some stuff in the cup.
What but you can tell the difference, even if it's just a few grams, You can tell the difference. Yeah, isn't there a better way to measure that? Take a picture or use some like X rays or something.
This is the cool measure that they came up with and it's pretty sensitive. You know, out there there's no air resistance or anything, and so if you have pretty well calibrated accelerometers, you can tell the impact of having a few kilograms of stuff at the end of an eleven foot long arm. Right, that's a long lever arm for rotational stuff. I don't quite understand why they don't just have like some sort of direct sensor in the cup, you know, like as you say, like a picture of the inside of the sample container. That I don't understand, you know, like it seems also crazy and indirect. You spend a billion dollars and then you don't just like look inside the sample container.
Yeah, and because it's going to come all the way to Earth and then we're going to open this box and hope that some dust fell into this cup.
Basically, yes, well, they're going to try their hardest to figure out if there's dust in the cup first, and they have the these techniques, right, and if there isn't, then they can try again.
They can bounce back down like a postick.
Yeah, exactly. Pogo sticks are not disposable. They are multi use devices.
So it's going to try a few times until it gets.
It yeah, exactly. They have up to three times they can try to do this pogo stick extraction to gather some stuff before it has to come back.
All right, Well, they launched in twenty sixteen, and they got there in twenty eighteen, and just this week they actually got there and possibly landed on this asteroid. So let's get into whether or not the mission was successful. But first let's take another quick break.
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Now we have a level of privilege that our parents never had, So what do we do with it?
Right?
How do we utilize the opportunities that we have that they don't, right, and a lot of that is educating ourselves, educating ourselves on how to not make the same mistakes they did, how to not fall into those same traps, and then how to not you know, create the same difficult situations that many of us grew up And like I started the podcast earlier saying for me, in my family, one of the biggest points of contention was finances. And I know, as I'd gotten older, I made it a promise to myself to say, I don't want to relive that.
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All right, Daniel, we sent the robot to the Benu asteroid far out into the Solar System. Where in the Solar System is this asteroid? Is it right now in nearby or is it kind of like out there in one of the asteroid belts.
It's out there in the asteroid belt, and it's right now on the other side of the Sun from where we are. Oh wow, So Venus and Mercury are on the same side of the Sun as us right now, and so is Mars. But it's all the way on the other side of the Sun, which is why it's about two hundred million miles away right now, and it's like twice the distance to the Sun. So this thing is out there in deep space.
Wouldn't it make more sense to wait until it's closer.
Well, we launched it quite a while ago, and we launched it in a window, and it wouldn't take as long to get to one of these things. But you know, since then, things have been revolving around the Sun and so these distances grow. It's been out there for you know, almost two years.
All right, Well, just this week it had its first landing attempt, although Daniel, can you call it a landing attenth? Is this even a lander because it doesn't really land. It's more of a bouncer, isn't it.
It's sort of a bouncer. Well, how long do you have to have your foot on the surface of a planet before you could say you've landed on it? Like did Neil Armstrong put his foot down and then count to ten and then say, okay, I've stepped on the surface of the Moon. I think the first moment of contact, boom, you've landed.
Really, you don't believe in the five second rule for planetary conquest.
I wouldn't eat anything on that asteroid. But yeah, I think the first moment you touch it, you've landed on that asteroid.
All right, So even with a pogo stick, it counts. It counts a slow pogo stick, right, all right. So just this week, like yesterday for us here recording this now, on a Wednesday, they had their first landing attempt.
Yeah, it was October twentieth, twenty twenty, and they did it. They pressed the button. They thought they understood exactly where to go. They picked out this creator called Nightingale is about the size of like a small parking lot attached to you know, like a pair dresser or something, you know, enough for like five or six cars. So it's wide enough that they think there was enough room to head down.
Wait, wait, it's only like four parking spaces wide.
Yeah for an suv. Yeah exactly. This is a precision operation happening millions of miles away. But you know, it's not easy to find a better spot. This thing is covered in boulders. This particular crater is next to a huge boulder that the engineers were really worried about. It's like the size of a two story building, and the engineers on the project nicknamed it Mount Doom because they were really worried that it would bump into this boulder on its way down to the surface.
Plus it had the giant burning eye on top of it, so they're like, watch out for that eye.
Don't look directly into the eye.
All right. So it picked this small spot it was going to land in. It bound collect some samples. So what happened?
Yes, So they did it. They pressed the button. It was like two pm Eastern time on the twentieth, and it fired its thrusters and then it descended very slowly towards the surface, about half a mile mile down closer towards the surface, and it took about four hours and then it was hovering like four hundred feet above the surface. Did another survey and say, all right, does everything look as I expect? Are we clear? For go? Then as fire its thrust us again and moved down towards the surface. It cruise just past Mount Doom and it landed in Nightingale. It took some pictures, you know, of the sample head as it got closer and closer to the surface, and according to the robot everything went beautiful. It sent back a message that said sample collection is complete.
Wow, that's probably the best email they've ever received at the NASA mission.
I know we have to wait fifteen minutes. You know what's that like to spend you know, a decade building this thing and designing it, sending it up, waiting years for it to land, then knowing like the crucial moments, the crucial five seconds already happened, and you're waiting fifteen minutes just to get the news.
It's like recording a podcast a week in advance. I'm knowing like it. But have they published videos or have they published these photos? Like don't they have photos and videos of like the moment as the tip touches it and they can see the dust cloud.
They think it all went really well, and from the pictures they have, everything looks great. So they reported positive results. They haven't yet done like that spin maneuver, So it's gonna take them about a week to figure out if they actually got anything into the cup or not. All the indications suggest everything went well, but they can't actually tell what's in the cup without doing this spinning maneuver.
And so what happens if they didn't get any stuff.
If they didn't get any stuff, if the thing spins around the same speed as it did before they went down and did their pogo stick, then they're gonna find another spot. They have four candidate spots, and they chose Nightingale. They thought it was the best chance. But they have three other backup spots, and they're just gonna move it around and try again, and they're gonna wait until January twenty twenty one. They're gonna scope it out and program it and get it all set up, and they do a couple of rehearsals before they actually go down to the surface, so it takes them a couple of months. You know, they're really cautious about all this stuff. There's no rushing. So the next attempt will be in January. If this one didn't collect enough stuff.
But if it did collect enough, it's going to come back.
Then it's going to come back, and then it's scheduled to be back here on Earth in twenty twenty three. So this little container that might have like secrets of the origins of our solar system and fascinating answers to questions about chemistry might be flying through the solar system to take years to get to us, and it's like candy bar of science data. We'll be dropping into the Utah Desert in twenty twenty three.
But I guess maybe a question I have is if they have to go to another site to land and get samples, wouldn't that contaminate the first sample? Or do you not care for where exactly in the asteroid you got it.
No, you're definitely right, it's better to get it from just one site. On the other hand, you know, if you are going to sample just one asteroid, maybe there are advantages to having dust from two locations because then you're less likely to pick a weird spot. But it definitely sort of muddles the issue. You know, we talked about getting samples back from Mars. One of the real advantages of doing sampled returns that you know where the samples are coming from. You can choose them. You can say it was the bottom of a basin, or it is under a cliff or whatever, rather than just you know, the rocks that come here naturally from Mars from getting blasted off the surface. So you definitely want to know where it came from. This invaluable piece of science advice. But you know, if it doesn't work the first time, it's better to have something in your container than to have nothing.
Okay, So then what's the plan once it comes back to orbit and greet it and hold it carefully and then bring it back down. What's the plant.
No, it won't be nearly so gentle an arrival. Osiris Rex can't land on the surface of the Earth. It's too delicate. So it's just going to fly by and it's going to drop the capsule. It's just going to sort of jettison it and it's going to fall to Earth.
What Yeah, after all that a billion dollars, it's just gonna drop it on Earth.
Yeah, these things should be pretty robust. It's tightly held, it's not that heavy. It's got a heat shields so it can survive reentry, and then it has a small set of parachutes to slow it down. So they just sort of like gently land on the surface of the planet and it's targeted towards the big arid flat deserts of Utah where there aren't buildings or people to hit, and so that's what they expect. They'll just gently float down to the surface in Utah.
And there are a lot of dust though in the desert.
There is, but this thing should be pretty tightly sealed.
All right. Well that's pretty cool, So stay tuned. Maybe by the time you listen to this podcast, you can google Osiris rags and find out if they did, in fact get some samples from the asteroid.
Yeah, and I'm sure that the scientists are already planning their experiments and thinking about what to do. They have all sorts of ideas for how to study that regolith. You know, is it made of smaller bits or bigger bits? What's in there? What kind of amino acids are in there? They have all sorts of cool gizmos in their laboratory for figuring out, you know, is there any gas in there, is anything active in there? All sorts of stuff. So there's a whole bunch of scientists like literally licking their lips waiting for this candy bar from space to be delivered.
Oh and it should hopefully tell us a lot about our origins, right, I mean, it's in the acri, but she tell us a lot about how the Solar system formed and kind of our place in that history, right.
Yeah, And what's typical and what's not typical? And you know, then we'll have samples from Earth, of course, and we can compare them to samples from this asteroid, and if they're really different, that'll tell us that, you know, the Earth is unusual, or that all the geological activity on Earth and the biological activity has changed the mix of stuff that we started from. And most likely it'll just inspire more questions. I'm sure the stuff on the asteroid will be significantly different from this stuff we have here on Earth, and then we'll wonder is it the chemistry of Earth? And somebody will say that we better go sample another asteroid to figure out what's unusual and what's typical.
Wow, all right, Well, the next time you see a pogo stick, think about the fact that NASA uses them for their engineering to land in other extraterrestrial bodies.
Do you think there was probably a moment of inspiration on the NASA engineering team. They were like, I wonder what we could do to gently touch the surface of this asteroid. And then one of them went home and well.
I'm sure, I'm sure they had a I'm sure they had a brainstorming session. Somebody was like rollerblades, No skateboards. No, how about a pogo stick?
Wait a minute, you imagine they're having this brainstorming session like at a park and they're just like watching kids play. How about a kite? Actually, actually that might just work. Well, whatever they did, it seems to have worked. And so kudos to a cyrus Rex team for proposing this, for getting it built, for a successful launch, for an incredible journey to the asteroid, and then hopefully a successful pogo stick touchdown onto the surface of an extraterrestrial object.
Yeah, and I hope it comes back safely.
I hope that's a tasty candy bar of science.
All right, We hope you enjoyed learning about that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a p duction of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on passing the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safe. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too. Go Safely California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
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