Date: September 28, 2010
Title: Near Earth Objects — Not if, but When?
Podcaster: Roz Brown
Organization: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. – www.ballaerospace.com
Description: There are movies and games, books and blogs – all focused on zapping a near-Earth-object before it zaps us. Since the 1980s NEOs have become of increased interest due to greater awareness of the potential danger they pose to Earth. Because studies have shown that the United States is vulnerable to such threats, active mitigations are being researched and pursued. Ball Aerospace is one company concerned and recently submitted a white paper to NASA to pursue a viable mitigation. Roz Brown talks to Bob Arentz, Ball Aerospace Advanced Systems Manager for New Business.
Bio: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. supports critical missions of important national agencies such as the Department of Defense, NASA, NOAA and other U.S. government and commercial entities. The company develops and manufactures spacecraft, advanced instruments and sensors, components, data exploitation systems and RF solutions for strategic, tactical and scientific applications. Roz Brown is the Media Relations Manager for Ball Aerospace.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Steve Peterson and is dedicated to my wife Carol who has spent 45 years enjoying the world and the sky with me, and to my granddaughter, Chelsea. I hope we can continue to encourage her to enjoy math and the sciences and maybe one day, she’ll discover new things in astronomy.
Transcript:
Ball Aerospace: Everything Old is New Again
Near Earth Objects – Sept. 28, 2010
Roz Brown: There are movies and games, books and blogs – all focused on zapping a near-Earth-object before it zaps us. Since the 1980s NEOs have become of increased interest due to greater awareness of the potential danger they pose to Earth. Because studies have shown that the United States is vulnerable to such threats, active mitigations are being researched and pursued. Ball Aerospace is one company concerned and recently submitted a white paper to NASA to pursue a viable mitigation. Roz Brown talks to Bob Arentz, Ball Aerospace Advanced Systems Manager for New Business.
RB: I’m Roz Brown here today with Robert Arentz with Ball Aerospace here to talk about near-Earth-objects…and let’s talk about the most obvious question first, Robert. When we talk about the term, NEOs – what kind of objects are we talking about?
RA: We’re talking about pieces of the main asteroid belt, actually. There’s a planet that failed to form out behind Mars and in front of Jupiter when the solar system was created about four-and-a-half billion years ago, and an object that would be bigger than the moon and smaller than the Earth was starting to coalesce out there and for various reasons having to do with the gravitational interactions with the planet Jupiter, primarily, this planet started and was then disrupted and finally turned into a couple millions of pieces of rock some which are as big as the mountains around here west of Boulder and some of which are literally the size of an apple or a cantaloupe or something like that. The ones that we’re concerned about are sort-of the size of a modern building…maybe, 50- to 150-feet across would be the small end, up to maybe up a quarter-mile in diameter, something the size of Flagstaff Mountain here west of Boulder maybe a mile in diameter…so anything that comes within nine-million-miles of the Earth’s orbit is called a near-Earth-object or N-E-O or NEO. There’s no such thing as “a” NEO – they come in a variety of sizes and different compositional forms and so there’s a population or collection of objects that are called NEOs.
RB: So when you say, the ones that we’re concerned about…what does that mean?
RA: One overarching aspect of NEOs that has recently captured the public’s imagination and is now beginning to capture the attention of the funding agencies is the threat of an impact. Impacts are infrequent but they’re catastrophic and it’s the classic problem…if something only comes along every two, three, five hundred or a thousand years, isn’t it somebody else’s problem? A NEO impact is the only large-scale natural disaster, of this magnitude, about which human beings can do anything…you can actually, with enough warning, move a NEO impact off the Earth. So, if you’re an impact guy the word “interest” means an impact; if you’re a scientist, you’re just interested in the science and composition and the dynamic evolution and those sorts of things.
So, everybody knows impacts have happened. You and I are sitting here because a 10-mile diameter object hit the Yucatan Peninsula some sixty-five million years ago and “paid-in-full” the dinosaur business, and out of that came mammals and therefore us. So, it’s not a question of “if” there will be an impact it’s a question of “when” – but if a NEO was small, say, something that would sit inside a football stadium – since we’re doing this in Colorado let’s imagine that you have a rock that was a 100 yards across so it would fit inside a modern football stadium like INVESCO Field in Denver or Folsom Field here in Boulder…so it would sit in there sort-of like an egg in a cup sort of thing. You could go out there and hit it with a spacecraft like we did with Deep Impact when we (Ball Aerospace) hit Tempel 1 a few years ago. Then you could make a slightly heavier impacting spacecraft and you could fly two or three of them just for redundancy and back-up. But just the shear impact alone – you hit it – you nudge it – and if you nudge these things early enough, you only have to change their velocity by a few fractions of an inch a second – like an eighth of an inch a second velocity change if you do it early enough..you can move this impact off the Earth. So for small, medium, and large and simple impact, some rocketry thinking or something exotic like a space tug – all those are options.
RB: But like you’re saying, we have to be prepared – they have to be built in advance…even for a small one they have to be built in advance right?
RA: Look you can’t mitigate what you don’t know about..it’s a little like cancer- if you find out early – it’s never good but you can fix something if you know about it early enough. If you wait until its metastasized – it’s a full-blown nightmare – God help you and in a sense God help us. And now we get into this sort of an argument – if they only come along every couple of hundred years – that’s like fifty presidential cycles so why don’t we let a president a hundred years from now fix the problem. And my comment is, if you’re going to have to try to mitigate one you’re going to have to find out where it is..you have to track its orbit..you have to find out what it’s made of..you have to do some rendezvous missions to characterize it – is it fluffy, is it stony, is it metallic, is it spinning, does it have a moon? All of this is information you must know and it takes years to get that – a decade maybe. And then you’ve got to devise whatever your mitigation strategy is and then build the hardware to go do it and then you have to do it and then you have to launch all this stuff into outer space and then you have to do the “thing” itself – whatever “it” is – and then you have to measure and see if you’ve done it enough, and then if you haven’t you have to do “it” again or plan B or something.
And by the time you rack all that up – it’s fifty years of time and so if Tunguska like NEOs come by every two-hundred years and we’re a hundred years into it – we’ve got a hundred years left, and if you take half of that just to figure it out – statistical uncertainties will tell you it would be better to know now than later. As I said earlier, any of the space-faring nations have the technology to do this. So, for the first time in human history what started out as a sort-of a political question or a scientific question to me has become a moral imperative which is that – impacts will happen – it’s not if but when – everybody say it – it’s not if – but when. So, for the first time, as I said, in human history, mankind, humanity, has the technical means to find out – are we going to be hit or not? Are we safe? Yes or no.
President Obama has talked about sending astronauts to an asteroid…what do you think about that proposal?
I think it’s kind of cool…the thing about NEOs is that they represent a collection of objects that are left-over from the formation of the solar system, so they’re very primitive bodies..they’re very interesting…they come in a wide-variety of physical compositions…they have a lot of dynamic history locked up in their physical bodies a record of what they’ve been through and how they’ve gotten here…so I kind of like it….it’s a voyage of discovery to boldly go where people have never gone before..once they get there…we’ve all been to the Tetons or Yellowstone which is glorious and wonderful and lovely..this will be a dark gray rock with lots of holes and pits in it but it’s a cool object and it would be interesting to go.
Thanks Robert.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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