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Planetary Defenders
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00:00:10so this next set is finishing up we'll have some new data here pretty quick
00:00:16potentially hazardous asteroids can show up anywhere in the night sky at any time so we
00:00:22were up here for 12 to 13 hours sometimes making decisions about the objects we're seeing if they're
00:00:28real or if they're just noise in the background
00:00:39and so the odds of finding an asteroid are going to increase as we move toward the toward the east
00:01:09oh this might be something
00:01:11oh you guys look at that based off these four images this is a new brand new near-earth asteroid
00:01:19we got one no like i didn't think that was gonna happen we got like yeah no it's brand new
00:01:23i just
00:01:23got the notice back from uh from the minor planet center that they published it so there it is bam
00:01:28live this is actually a big rock dude right now it is absolutely a potentially hazardous object if you
00:01:34guys were going to be here for a discovery a pha is definitely what you want yeah this is a
00:01:39big rock
00:01:39yeah it is nominally about 230 meters in diameter which is quite large and it's minimum orbit intersection
00:01:50distance with earth which means how close it comes to the earth's path and the earth's orbit
00:01:56is between us and the moon it's only about 150 000 kilometers away which is a significant pha
00:02:04a pha like this only comes up a couple times per year so these are the ones we want
00:02:12yeah yeah that's a nice one
00:02:18so
00:02:19so
00:02:22so
00:02:30so
00:03:32Jane and Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy was shown to be broken up into a bunch of pieces.
00:03:37They traced back the orbit. This thing had gone by Jupiter and got disrupted.
00:03:41And then they tracked the orbit forward and found out these are going to hit Jupiter.
00:03:45And that got everyone excited.
00:03:47It's really the first time that these impacts have been observed.
00:03:50Impacts were very important in the formation of everything.
00:03:54We could observe an impact on another planet.
00:03:56Scientists still don't know what they're going to see tonight, but they do know that they've come to the best
00:04:02place in the world to see it.
00:04:04The whole world community, scientific community, was preparing to observe these events.
00:04:09Any telescopes that could observe the impacts did.
00:04:12Many, many ground-based telescopes.
00:04:13The Hubble Space Telescope.
00:04:15All of the images from Hubble that went on the web or suddenly got everyone's attention.
00:04:19Which was a real key to many of the scientific results.
00:04:22Also Galileo.
00:04:24Which was on the way to Jupiter at the time.
00:04:26The NASA Infrared Telescope Facility had a campaign dedicated to observing Shoemaker-Levy.
00:04:33This observing run for the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts, that was my first observing run ever.
00:04:38We're starting tonight with the nearing-forred spectrometer.
00:04:41God, that's gorgeous.
00:04:42We were seeing something pop up on the screen.
00:04:45It was really shouting.
00:04:47Literally dancing about it.
00:04:49And we saw this bright thing just light up.
00:04:52And it was like, yes, we did it.
00:04:54We were all like kids in a candy store, I guess.
00:04:56A lot of the energy we saw wasn't just the impact itself, but it was the splashback.
00:05:01And when those pieces plowed into the atmosphere, they brought up big plumes of material that
00:05:07rained back down on the upper part of the atmosphere.
00:05:09So we were able to measure changes in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter.
00:05:12It taught us a great deal about how impacts take place.
00:05:17Scientists say if a fragment the same size hit Earth, it would leave a crater the size of Rhode Island.
00:05:24It was one of those wake-up calls that not only are impacts, something that happened in the past,
00:05:30but they're happening now in our solar system.
00:05:33And here it is, this awakening.
00:05:35It kind of precipitated this NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
00:05:41To make sure to find the asteroids that come close to Earth and the comets that come close to Earth,
00:05:46get them cataloged, figure out where they've been and where they're going to be in the future,
00:05:50just so we understand, are we at risk of being impacted on the Earth?
00:05:54So that's a big component of what NASA does now.
00:05:57It has planetary defense to find potential impacts for the Earth and protecting it.
00:06:19Let's go back to Senator Cruz's question.
00:06:22What would an asteroid that is a kilometer in diameter, what would it do if it hit the Earth?
00:06:29That is likely to end human civilization.
00:06:38The impacts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994, that showed us that, you know what,
00:06:45impacts are still happening in the solar system today.
00:06:49That really spurred some interest on the part of Congress.
00:06:52NASA was tasked by Congress in 1998 to catalog 90% of all the large near-Earth objects,
00:07:00so those that are one kilometer or more in size.
00:07:05Those objects are big enough to cause what we would call truly global devastation,
00:07:09meaning that they could cause global extinction events.
00:07:11The good news is that we found more than about 95% of them.
00:07:14The catalog includes almost 900 asteroids one kilometer or larger in size.
00:07:21That said, none of these known large NEOs pose any threat of impact to the Earth within the next 100
00:07:28years.
00:07:31And then eventually in 2005, that direction from Congress to NASA was set
00:07:37to find the population of asteroids that are 140 meters and larger in size
00:07:42that could do regional damage should it impact Earth.
00:07:46A city killer.
00:07:48Now the picture's not so rosy.
00:07:49We know of about 40% of those objects today.
00:07:52Today, we do not have a complete inventory of all the possible impactors.
00:07:59And that is something that NASA and the worldwide planetary defense community
00:08:04has been endeavoring to do.
00:08:05Well, here at NASA, what I lead is the Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
00:08:09We are helping to coordinate efforts not only in the United States
00:08:14and across U.S. agencies, but also around the world.
00:08:19Finding asteroids, tracking them, calculating their orbits,
00:08:23figuring out where they're going to be in the future,
00:08:25studying their physical properties,
00:08:27and then you get that information you might need
00:08:30in the event an impact threat is discovered.
00:08:33We have discovered more than 30,000 near-Earth objects so far.
00:08:37And we are discovering, you know, hundreds, you know, every year.
00:08:41But we haven't found them all, so that's really the big question.
00:08:44There's almost certainly a decent-sized asteroid out there
00:08:48that is going to pose an impact threat to the planet.
00:08:51We're just trying to find it right now.
00:09:03So the way we approach finding near-Earth objects
00:09:06is basically just to make a short movie of the night sky
00:09:09that consists of four frames.
00:09:11And then our software will pick out objects
00:09:14that are moving inside of the four frames,
00:09:17and we have to identify if they are real
00:09:18or if they are false detections.
00:09:22I first started hunting asteroids in my backyard,
00:09:25and I just had the hope of maybe discovering one.
00:09:29And when that happened, it was a very special moment in my life.
00:09:32My interest in astronomy started at a fairly young age.
00:09:35I remember as a kid seeing comet Hel-Bopp in the sky from southern Utah.
00:09:39It was really a spectacular sight as a child,
00:09:41and just trying to wrap my mind around what I was looking at was difficult.
00:09:47This is one area of science where discoveries are still happening on a nightly basis,
00:09:51and it's really a neat feeling to step into that
00:09:55where you can be sitting at a telescope at night
00:09:57and discover a new minor planet that's in orbit around the sun
00:10:01that nobody has ever seen before.
00:10:03It's a special thing,
00:10:04and I think that's what draws a lot of people into this business.
00:10:12The first order of planetary defense is finding the asteroids,
00:10:16and so one aspect of the program is funding institutions with telescopes
00:10:20that can image wide swaths of the sky
00:10:23to be able to look at the starry background
00:10:27and look for objects moving with respect to the stars
00:10:30to see if there's something there that we haven't seen before.
00:10:32This is the whole sky.
00:10:33That's a whole sky camera.
00:10:34So you can see this is a live video feed from the end of the telescope,
00:10:37and you can make out the Milky Way right here,
00:10:39and this is the size of the images we're taking right now.
00:10:43And then we subtract the known objects and the stars from those images,
00:10:46and then we look for moving targets.
00:10:48The object is moving because it's closer to the Earth than the background star.
00:10:52I can tell this first one is a star.
00:10:53You can see that that object stays there.
00:10:56So if I load up a catalog image, which is a very old image,
00:10:59you can see that first hit is actually a star.
00:11:01That one's actually a star.
00:11:02Those moving targets are going to be asteroids that are in orbit around the sun.
00:11:06So that's a known asteroid.
00:11:07It comes up green, and it has the designation above it.
00:11:10And oftentimes they're new.
00:11:11We've never seen them before.
00:11:13So what we have here is a near-Earth asteroid that is likely brand new.
00:11:16And I can already tell that it's not coming up in any of the known databases.
00:11:20And then what you have to do is go and identify whether it's a known asteroid or a new asteroid.
00:11:25So that's the next step.
00:11:26When the asteroid is first discovered, we submit the information almost immediately
00:11:30to the Minor Planet Center at Harvard.
00:11:32And we are going to send this data off in real time here.
00:11:36The temporary designation we're going to assign to it,
00:11:38the date and the time, and the location on the sky that it was located.
00:11:42And then it's approximate visual magnitude.
00:11:45I'm going to report it as a brand new near-Earth object candidate.
00:11:50It's important to turn that information around quickly.
00:11:54The different survey telescopes quickly feed those position measurements
00:11:57to the Minor Planet Center, which is the internationally recognized repository
00:12:01for position measurements of small bodies throughout the solar system.
00:12:09Minor Planet Center is, I like to think, the link between the astronomy community
00:12:13and everything that comes after that in planetary defense.
00:12:17My name is Federica Spoto, and I'm the project scientist of the Minor Planet Center.
00:12:21So part of the role of the Minor Planet Center is to actually distinguish
00:12:26what is known and what is not known.
00:12:29We keep all the observations and all the orbits of the object.
00:12:32So we don't see the image, we just see the spines,
00:12:35and those represent the different positions of the object moving.
00:12:38And so it tells you very accurately the time of the epoch of the observations,
00:12:41and then the position.
00:12:42So once we have the position and the time, we can get the orbit.
00:12:45So all the data comes in from everyone, gets consolidated there,
00:12:49so we have a common catalog that we are working from.
00:12:53An archive of everything that is known
00:12:55and everything that is not known.
00:12:58The cool thing about the Minor Planet Center is that everything we do is public.
00:13:02So as soon as we receive the observations, the observations goes out.
00:13:05That information can all be rolled up there and available
00:13:08for other observatories to see them
00:13:12and then go get additional observations
00:13:14so that there is enough information to get in orbit.
00:13:17And anyone can then access that data to track these objects down
00:13:21and help us determine if they are going to be an impact risk in the future.
00:13:24Once we find an asteroid and we've got an orbit for it,
00:13:27the next logical question is, is it going to hit the Earth?
00:13:32Fortunately, there's a group here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
00:13:34called the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, or CNEOs for short,
00:13:38that is tasked with doing exactly this.
00:13:44They assess the hazard potential of this newly discovered near-Earth object.
00:13:48And they do orbit determination to see both short-term
00:13:52and way out into the future, 100 years into the future.
00:13:55Could any of those pose an impact threat?
00:13:57My name is Ryan Park, and I'm the supervisor
00:13:59of the Solar System Dynamics Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
00:14:03And I'm also serving as the project manager
00:14:05for the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.
00:14:07So to date, we maintain about a little over 1.3 million objects,
00:14:12most of them being asteroids.
00:14:13We predict the motion of all known asteroids,
00:14:16and we process the entire data set from the Minor Planet Center
00:14:19to predict and reconstruct the orbit of the asteroids
00:14:22so that we can perform statistical assessment
00:14:25of the potential Earth's impact.
00:14:27So what we do is we process the astrometry collected
00:14:31by ground-based observers,
00:14:33and we feed those through what we call the orbit termination process
00:14:36to get the orbit of the asteroid as a function of time.
00:14:40So we can propagate backwards, forwards,
00:14:42and figure out where the asteroid is in real time.
00:14:46So this basically catalogs all the potentially hazardous asteroids
00:14:49that might come close to the Earth,
00:14:51and we document the probability of potential Earth's impact.
00:14:55And if it were to hit the Earth with certain probability,
00:14:58when is it going to be and where is it going to be?
00:15:00And we do this for the next 100 years
00:15:02and assess whether it's going to be hitting the Earth,
00:15:05and if so, with what probability.
00:15:07And that information gets shared with the CNews website
00:15:10as well as with the entire world.
00:15:14This data gets disseminated immediately
00:15:16to many different organizations,
00:15:18and NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies
00:15:21runs watchdogs that are constantly ingesting this data
00:15:26and calculating the odds of an impact in the near future.
00:15:30And if they find that this object has any probability
00:15:33of hitting the Earth in the near future,
00:15:35we will get an alert on our systems
00:15:37within about 10 or 15 minutes.
00:15:38And then when people start receiving
00:15:41this type of, like, warning,
00:15:43then there's a huge community of astronomers
00:15:45that start observing it.
00:15:46From all around the globe.
00:15:48As the Earth rotates and nighttime falls
00:15:50across Asia or Europe.
00:15:53And so we start getting observations
00:15:54from all over the world at every time,
00:15:56and we start processing them really quickly.
00:15:59It's a very smooth-running machine.
00:16:05It transcends boundaries of countries.
00:16:09Asteroids don't care about international boundaries.
00:16:11It doesn't matter where the asteroid impacts.
00:16:14It affects, you know, the entire humanity.
00:16:16In fact, anything alive on the Earth.
00:16:18It transcends basically anything
00:16:20except what makes us human
00:16:22and what it means to help discover
00:16:25and protect the planet
00:16:26from a hazardous asteroid that might be incoming.
00:16:29Yeah, I'm really proud of it, I would say.
00:16:32That's, like, yeah.
00:16:33I'm proud, and I'm proud that I'm working on something
00:16:35that is actually very useful for the community.
00:16:38Like, we are part of Planetary Defense,
00:16:39but also, like, we do everything
00:16:42so that we can help the community.
00:16:45It was a great honor
00:16:48to have an asteroid named after me.
00:16:50So there's Ryan Park Asteroid.
00:16:53I mean, this was a huge deal for me.
00:16:55I mean, this basically led me to believe
00:16:57that I'm making some contribution to the field.
00:17:01We didn't even know asteroids existed 200 years ago,
00:17:04and it's only been in the last few decades
00:17:07that we even had the technology
00:17:08to be able to detect these things.
00:17:11So, yeah, I might be referred to
00:17:15as the father of Planetary Defense.
00:17:18I created the term, perhaps,
00:17:20but it is only because I, you know,
00:17:23stand on the shoulders
00:17:24of those asteroid hunters before me
00:17:27that we are now able to protect the world
00:17:30from asteroid impact.
00:17:35So this object has already been ingested
00:17:38by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies
00:17:41Scout Watchdog.
00:17:42Right off the bat, it tells us
00:17:43that the probability this is a near-Earth object
00:17:46is already 100%,
00:17:48and the probability it is
00:17:49a potentially hazardous asteroid is 67%.
00:17:52There is no real impact rating or probability,
00:17:56so it's not currently a threat,
00:17:58but long-term, after the arc is extended
00:18:01and we have a better idea
00:18:02of the orbit of this object,
00:18:04this might be a brand-new, unknown,
00:18:06potentially hazardous asteroid.
00:18:19So finding asteroids,
00:18:20that's probably the most important part
00:18:22of Planetary Defense
00:18:23or the fundamental part
00:18:25of Planetary Defense,
00:18:26but it doesn't help to see an asteroid
00:18:29if you don't have enough information
00:18:30to know where it's going to be in the future.
00:18:32You can't do anything about them
00:18:33unless you find them
00:18:34and know where they're going.
00:18:37That means the race is on to try to figure out
00:18:39how can we get more data?
00:18:41Can we get more exposures of it
00:18:42so that we can figure out
00:18:43which way it's actually going?
00:18:45And then eventually,
00:18:46get a really good orbit for it
00:18:47so that we can predict far into the future
00:18:49where it's going to go,
00:18:50especially with respect to the Earth.
00:18:52So then there are telescopes
00:18:53that go zero in
00:18:54on those initial observations
00:18:56by the surveys,
00:18:57and they get even more measurements
00:18:59of those positions.
00:19:01My name is Cassandra Lejoli.
00:19:03Space Watch is
00:19:04we're a follow-up survey, essentially.
00:19:06So the telescope behind me
00:19:07is a 0.9-meter telescope
00:19:09that we use to follow up near-Earth objects.
00:19:11When they're first discovered,
00:19:13they have very short orbital arcs.
00:19:16So they have very imprecise orbits.
00:19:18And so if we follow them up,
00:19:20we get a better orbit to determine
00:19:22if there's a higher chance of them
00:19:24hitting the Earth or not.
00:19:26So these are the type of images
00:19:28that we get back from the telescope.
00:19:30And so you can see that our asteroid
00:19:32is essentially a dot that's moving.
00:19:35And then the stars look like long lines
00:19:37because of how we track on the asteroid
00:19:41and not on the stars.
00:19:43When an asteroid is first discovered,
00:19:45the Minor Planet Center is able to calculate
00:19:48kind of a location around the sky
00:19:50where it should be.
00:19:51So we already have an idea
00:19:53of how the asteroid's going to be moving.
00:19:55So we take that assumed motion
00:19:58and move with it.
00:20:01So my typical day or night, I guess,
00:20:05we typically observe for four to six nights straight.
00:20:09And we come up to the mountain
00:20:11and we have dorms up here.
00:20:12So we stay up here the whole time we're observing.
00:20:17And what happens is that we'll open the two telescopes.
00:20:20We then have on our computers
00:20:22kind of a list of all the objects we can see
00:20:24that needs follow up right away.
00:20:26There's a few objects we can choose here.
00:20:28I like to go for virtual impactors
00:20:30because they're top of our list.
00:20:32They have a probability of hitting us.
00:20:34We'll pick the best targets for the night.
00:20:36Some of them come in as we're observing overnight
00:20:38if they're newly discovered
00:20:40and they need follow up then.
00:20:41So let's say I want to go for this object.
00:20:44What I would do is I would accept it in my queue
00:20:46and then I would accept the value
00:20:48and send it for recovery.
00:20:49What that would do
00:20:50is that would move the telescope.
00:20:53So we get three images of it to see it move
00:20:55and to see what speeds and move.
00:20:58And then we measure its location on the sky.
00:21:01That is the measurement we report back
00:21:03to the minor planet center.
00:21:05Well, that's an asteroid right here.
00:21:09It's really cool when you're looking
00:21:11like at an image from the sky
00:21:13and you see a moving dot.
00:21:15Like every time I find that moving asteroid
00:21:18I'm excited by it because it means you found it.
00:21:21Like you found a thing in space that is moving.
00:21:25Like it's right there on my image.
00:21:27I can see it.
00:21:29So right there is our object
00:21:30and it's moving right there.
00:21:32So the first image is in the star.
00:21:33So we can't measure that.
00:21:36But then the second and third image are right there.
00:21:38So we can actually measure those.
00:21:40And that new measurement
00:21:41then helps better predict the orbit fit
00:21:44and thus better predict where it would be in the sky.
00:21:47Next time someone needs to observe it to follow it up.
00:21:50The most important thing is always get more data
00:21:52because the more data you get,
00:21:54the better you are at finding the orbit
00:21:56and know where the object is.
00:21:57And if you take another image a little bit further,
00:21:59you can then put another data point
00:22:01and then you can keep tracing that orbit around.
00:22:04As you collect more observations,
00:22:06the orbit of the asteroid in question
00:22:08will get better and better.
00:22:10I really like that I'm protecting the planet.
00:22:13And yes, I'm not the one that's like
00:22:15with a cape pushing the asteroid away.
00:22:17That's not what I do.
00:22:18In some ways, like my little contribution
00:22:20might help not just myself,
00:22:23but someone in the future.
00:22:25And I think it's very important to do that.
00:22:34So last night while surveying in an area of the sky
00:22:37where we don't typically find a lot of objects,
00:22:40I discovered an object that had to be fairly large
00:22:42to be visible for where it was in the sky.
00:22:44So here is the asteroid that Catalina Sky Survey
00:22:47discovered a few days ago.
00:22:50And we can also tell that it's a pretty big object.
00:22:53The asteroid has to be observed for many weeks
00:22:56and months into the future so we can extend that data arc.
00:22:59So the orbit of that potentially hazardous asteroid
00:23:02is known into the future.
00:23:04So the discovery arc of the asteroid
00:23:06consists of just four points of data over 20 minutes.
00:23:10And that is a really small snapshot
00:23:12of the entire orbit of the asteroid.
00:23:14And it was able to be followed up all around the globe
00:23:17so that we didn't lose that asteroid.
00:23:19And you can see that it's been followed up
00:23:20by several different telescopes right here.
00:23:22So the arc length means it's been observed
00:23:24for more than a day.
00:23:25So that is where it comes the closest
00:23:28to intersecting the Earth's orbit.
00:23:30And telescopes around the world will continue
00:23:33taking observations of this object
00:23:34to keep seeing if it has a potential
00:23:37of hitting the Earth or not.
00:23:48Well, at the current rate of detection of near-Earth asteroids,
00:23:52it's going to take us about another 30 years
00:23:55before we have this catalog that we've been tasked
00:23:59by Congress to do.
00:24:00We've only discovered less than 40% of the 90%
00:24:04of the object we need to discover.
00:24:05Finding the asteroids isn't something
00:24:07that can just happen overnight
00:24:08because telescopes can only see so far away
00:24:13or they can only see so faint
00:24:15into what they might be looking for out there.
00:24:17Ground-based telescopes are kind of limited
00:24:19to looking at night away from the sun.
00:24:22And we have to wait for the solar system
00:24:24to bring asteroids around.
00:24:26The Earth is traveling around the sun.
00:24:28The asteroids are traveling around the sun.
00:24:30And so it isn't possible to see
00:24:32the entire solar system at the same time.
00:24:35It's hard to find asteroids because
00:24:37relative to the size of the Earth
00:24:39and the distances within the inner solar system,
00:24:41they don't get bright enough to spot
00:24:43until they get closer to the planet.
00:24:45One of the tricky things with searching
00:24:47for near-Earth objects is that some of them
00:24:49are extremely dark.
00:24:50They're darker than lumps of coal.
00:24:53And that means that when we look for them
00:24:55using the sunlight that reflects off their surfaces,
00:24:57they're actually hard to spot because they're dim and faint.
00:25:00There are asteroids out there that are very darkly colored
00:25:03and don't reflect a lot of light from the sun.
00:25:06And so they're difficult for the telescopes on the ground
00:25:09to discover that are looking at the light
00:25:12that we can see with our eyes.
00:25:14So how do you overcome this?
00:25:16We have to go into space.
00:25:17We have to use different wavelengths and reflected light.
00:25:20All the telescopes on the Earth that are currently
00:25:23finding near-Earth asteroids are discovering
00:25:25in the visible wavelength.
00:25:27They are primarily looking at light reflected
00:25:29by the asteroid from the sun.
00:25:31The sunlight hits the asteroid, reflects,
00:25:33just like everything in the solar system.
00:25:35One way we can kind of get around this is
00:25:37instead of looking at the sunlight reflecting off their surfaces,
00:25:40we can use the heat that they emit to search for them.
00:25:43If we have a heat-seeking telescope working at infrared wavelengths,
00:25:47even the dark objects just pop right out.
00:25:49They stick out very brightly because they've got a lot of heat
00:25:52that they re-radiate and we can see that energy.
00:25:55Once you go into space, you're away from the heat of the Earth,
00:25:58you can start looking in the infrared wavelengths.
00:26:01Because in the infrared wavelengths,
00:26:04asteroids have more energy being given out
00:26:06because a lot of them are darker,
00:26:08so they absorb that radiation in the daytime
00:26:10and in the nighttime they re-radiate.
00:26:13So they're very bright.
00:26:14You don't need that big a telescope in space
00:26:16to detect the asteroids that you would from the Earth
00:26:20using visible light.
00:26:21And Near-Earth Object Surveyor is one such telescope.
00:26:24The Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission,
00:26:26or NEO Surveyor for short, NEO Surveyor,
00:26:28is a space telescope that we're building
00:26:30that's designed to detect, track and characterize
00:26:33asteroids and comets that have the potential
00:26:36to get close to the Earth.
00:26:37But it'll also be positioned in such a way
00:26:39that it can survey closer to the sun
00:26:42than the telescopes on the ground.
00:26:44Because of this nice, tall sunshade,
00:26:46we can actually point relatively close to the sun,
00:26:48and that lets us look far across the solar system
00:26:51so that we can spot the asteroids when they're far away from us.
00:26:54So that, working in concert with the telescopes on the ground,
00:26:57is going to really accelerate those objects getting into the catalog.
00:27:02With NEO Surveyor, we should be able to see
00:27:04something like a few hundred thousand new Near-Earth Objects
00:27:08over the course of its survey.
00:27:10We expect the numbers will increase by somewhere between a factor of 5 to 10
00:27:15in the next decade.
00:27:16They're going to give us lots of data,
00:27:18and they're going to require from us to have different tools ready
00:27:21to handle the data in the best way we can.
00:27:23This increased rate of detection and the number of observations
00:27:26that will be coming into the Minor Planet Center
00:27:29does require the Minor Planet Center to be able to process things
00:27:33at a more rapid rate.
00:27:35And we're ready for it.
00:27:36And hopefully, that's going to tell us a lot
00:27:38about the largest objects in the populations,
00:27:41the ones that are really, truly large,
00:27:42that have the potential for a large amount of ground damage
00:27:45if they were to impact the Earth.
00:27:54This is still kind of a golden age of discovery for asteroids.
00:27:58One day in the future, we will have found all of these objects,
00:28:01and this period of asteroid discovery will come to a close for the most part.
00:28:05At least the rocks that could pose a significant threat to the Earth
00:28:08will eventually all be cataloged, characterized,
00:28:11and either dealt with or removed from the risk lists.
00:28:14Any piece that you can do to help, you should do it.
00:28:18And I think that's really important.
00:28:19You don't have to be a planetary scientist to go into planetary defense.
00:28:24It's just an amazing thing to take science and apply it in such a way
00:28:30that it affects people's everyday lives.
00:28:33Well, for me, it's very personally satisfying to be involved in an effort like this.
00:28:39I found my role in life, so to speak.
00:28:41So for me, it is very personal because I have a chance.
00:28:46I'm fortunate enough to contribute, you know, using science to protect the humanity,
00:28:50you know, to protect the planet for that matter, you know, and everything that is on it.
00:28:54Because we only have one Earth.
00:29:09The explosion of a meteor over Russia last month injured 1,500 people.
00:29:14The recent meteorite that hit the Russian murals with the force of an atomic bomb
00:29:18was a stark wake-up call regarding threats from space.
00:29:22When the asteroid passed through the Earth's atmosphere,
00:29:25it did so at a really high speed, something like 40,000 miles an hour.
00:29:29It had explosive energy about 25 times the bomb used in Hiroshima or about 470 kilotons of TNT.
00:29:37It did cause a massive shockwave that shattered windows all over the city.
00:29:48This much smaller meteorite was not observed prior to its entry into the atmosphere.
00:29:53The Chelyabinsk impact came from the direction of the sun.
00:29:56It was on a very difficult trajectory for us to be able to see from ground-based telescopes.
00:30:02Scientists testified about how these objects are tracked and how those risks can be minimized.
00:30:07As we were reminded a couple of weeks ago, the Earth is sometimes hit by asteroids.
00:30:12Impacts have happened, and they will happen in the future.
00:30:16That asteroid was only about 18 meters across. That would fit inside this room, roughly.
00:30:19This asteroid never made a big impact crater on the ground.
00:30:22That's because it wasn't big enough originally to make it to the ground fully intact.
00:30:27So the impacts of air bursts are different from an impact that is physically going to touch the ground.
00:30:33The asteroid slammed through the Earth's atmosphere.
00:30:35It was like hitting a brick wall, and it just pulverized it into a million little pieces like this one
00:30:39here.
00:30:40Even just from that 20-meter asteroid disintegrating in Earth's atmosphere, the shockwave from that, that did damage.
00:30:48The inside of the asteroid is stony. It looks like an ordinary rock.
00:30:52We need to know more about these objects that could impact us.
00:30:58How big is it? What's it made out of? How does it spin?
00:31:00How much potential for damage it might pose on the ground?
00:31:03The Earth has been bombarded by asteroids in its history, and it will be hit by asteroids again.
00:31:08The questions that we're trying to answer in planetary defense are when, where, and which rock is going to do
00:31:14it.
00:31:35So what we have here is a diversity of meteorites, where they range from stony meteorites like the ones you
00:31:42see here,
00:31:43a great example of that is Chelyabinsk, which fell in Russia in 2013.
00:31:49We want to understand the threat that is coming towards us.
00:31:53Part of understanding the threat is understanding the capabilities.
00:31:57Oftentimes, the physical makeup of an object tells us about its capability, its impact potential.
00:32:02What can it do on the Earth?
00:32:04So studying the composition tells us whether it's an iron, whether it's stones, or stony iron, or carbonaceous.
00:32:12A weak object, which has a low density, is not going to make it into the atmosphere and intact onto
00:32:18the Earth.
00:32:18Okay? So you would have an airburst, for example.
00:32:21Whereas if you have a really dense object, like this iron meteorite, it will punch right through the atmosphere, even
00:32:26if it's a small object.
00:32:27And then it will create a crater like the meteor crater we see in Arizona.
00:32:33So what do these meteorites tell us, right? Why do we need to characterize these objects?
00:32:37So by understanding the composition, we can figure out what is the mitigation mechanism we're going to use.
00:32:43Because the tools we would use vary vastly depending upon what they're made of.
00:32:53To understand what asteroids are, you have to go back to kind of the beginning of our solar system.
00:32:58Asteroids are rocky bodies that are kind of leftover fragments from when our solar system first formed a long time
00:33:04ago, more than 4 billion years ago.
00:33:06Major planets formed. When the first solids condensed out of the solar nebula, these solids slowly coalesced, you know, came
00:33:12together eventually to form what you call as planetesimals.
00:33:15These are objects that are, you know, a few tens to a few hundred kilometers across.
00:33:19And you had, you know, internal heat, you know, that led to what you call as differentiation.
00:33:24They'll have a core, a mantle and a crust. So these iron meteorites we see here represents the cores of
00:33:31those planetesimals.
00:33:33So we believe that there were more than a hundred planetesimals that differentiated between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
00:33:40But most of these planetesimals were destroyed catastrophically due to impacts over the next few hundred million years.
00:33:48And what we see now in the asteroid belt are remnants of those catastrophic destructions.
00:33:53Most of the material that made up our solar system kind of got swept up into the sun and to
00:33:58the individual planets, but not all of it.
00:34:00You know, it's kind of like shattering a plate on the floor. You know, you have a few big pieces,
00:34:04but lots and lots of small pieces.
00:34:07So asteroids are kind of those leftovers of the formation of the solar system.
00:34:11A lot of them keep their distance very nicely in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
00:34:18But some of them over time, because of being tweaked by the gravitational pull of Jupiter and whatnot, have made
00:34:25their way into the inner solar system.
00:34:27And so some of these leftovers from the formation of the solar system can get a little too close for
00:34:34comfort to Earth.
00:34:35That's how we end up with near-Earth asteroids.
00:34:37We'd really like to understand the distribution of these objects, their compositions, and kind of where they come from.
00:34:42So that's what we're trying to find out.
00:34:44How do they leak into the inner part of the solar system and get into this region near the Earth's
00:34:48orbit?
00:35:01You don't want to just know that the asteroid is there. You want to know, how large is it? What
00:35:05is it made of?
00:35:06So there are telescopes that then go out and study particular characteristics of asteroids to the extent they can from
00:35:13the ground.
00:35:14So we want to find out what is the composition of the object, how fast it's spinning, whether it's one
00:35:21object or two objects.
00:35:22And of course, we want to know, you know, the mass of the object. And for that, we need to
00:35:27have an accurate idea on its size. That's where radar comes into play.
00:35:35Yeah, that's cool to finally see it.
00:35:41This is the biggest one in this complex. It's 70 meters in diameter. All the other ones are 34.
00:35:50This is the most powerful planetary radar on Earth.
00:35:58So here we are at the Goldstone Solar System Radar in the middle of the Mojave Desert, about a few
00:36:04hours' drive from Pasadena at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
00:36:08This is where I connect remotely to observe near-Earth asteroids.
00:36:13I'm Shantanu Naidu. I'm an asteroid radar researcher here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
00:36:23That's amazing.
00:36:26Whenever an asteroid comes close to Earth, we use this radar to observe it, which can tell us about the
00:36:32shape of the asteroid.
00:36:33It can show details on the surface of the asteroid, such as ridges, concavities, craters.
00:36:38We can also measure the precise distance to the asteroid.
00:36:42And then from all of that, you get really fantastic science, and then you get that information you might need
00:36:49in the event an impact threat is discovered.
00:36:52So radar is an active form of observing an asteroid in the sense that we generate our own electromagnetic waves.
00:36:58We use really high-power transmitters to transmit electromagnetic waves in the direction of the asteroid.
00:37:04The asteroid reflects these waves. They get distorted during this process, and they come back towards Earth.
00:37:12So you have signals from space coming in reflecting of the primary dish, reflecting onto the secondary dish, and then
00:37:21they reflect onto the instruments.
00:37:22We can compare the distorted received waveform with what we sent, and using this comparison, we are able to generate
00:37:31highly detailed images or maps of the asteroid.
00:37:37So one example I can show you is 2024 MK, which was a recent target that we observed.
00:37:44We were able to obtain these very high-resolution images where each pixel is under two meters in resolution.
00:37:50If I zoom in here, you can see all these intricate details on the surface of the asteroid.
00:37:57You can see these radar dark regions. You can see it's a very irregular shape.
00:38:03There's a lot of things that look like ridges.
00:38:06So we can track these features, and we can measure the spin rate of this asteroid.
00:38:22So there's a control room in the pedestal. This is where the telescope operators sit.
00:38:28We send them the orbits of the asteroid. We send them the observing plan.
00:38:33We send them the configurations we want to observe the asteroids with.
00:38:36So this is where the telescope operators sit, and this is where they control all the equipment from.
00:38:42And that's where the data gets collected in the computer behind.
00:38:46And that's what we connect to to download the processed images at JPL.
00:38:56This seems like a nice setup, so I'll send it to the telescope operators.
00:39:02When we start observing an asteroid, we need a very accurate orbit.
00:39:06So we can point accurately at the target. We get a spectra, update the orbit.
00:39:12We get a coarse-revolution image. We update the orbit again.
00:39:16And so we transmit for a fixed amount of time, which is the round-trip light time to the asteroid.
00:39:24And as soon as that time elapses, that is when we start receiving the echo,
00:39:28we switch from the transmitter to the receiver.
00:39:30It takes a few seconds to travel a few million miles back into space and reflect off the asteroid.
00:39:39So we transmit for an entire round-trip time.
00:39:43And then as soon as the echoes start reaching back to the telescope, that's when we switch to the receiver.
00:39:49And then we record the whole transmitted wave, so for one round-trip time.
00:39:54And that constitutes one image.
00:39:57And once we get a good orbit, we can start getting these higher-resolution images.
00:40:08It's always exciting because it's the first time anyone is looking at the features on the surface of this asteroid.
00:40:16Most of the asteroids that we observe, we've not seen them before.
00:40:20And so whatever you see with radar is a surprise.
00:40:23And a lot of the times it's discovering something new.
00:40:26It is very cool to know that at least for a few minutes or maybe even a few days,
00:40:31you're the only person in the world who knows this thing.
00:40:36And it's very exciting. It's a very exciting feeling.
00:40:39There's a sense of responsibility knowing that I'm part of such an important team.
00:40:45And we are all tackling such an important problem of asteroid threat assessment and mitigation.
00:40:54Let's say we discovered something and we only had a small window to observe it and quickly turn around information
00:41:01about its properties.
00:41:03What if we find an asteroid that's going to impact the Earth next week?
00:41:07Then all of a sudden an opportunity came up that nature gave us.
00:41:11An asteroid designated 2023 DZ2 was discovered.
00:41:16So this object was discovered by a team in the Canary Islands in Europe.
00:41:21When it was discovered, the observations were directly sent to the Minor Planet Center and then we published everything.
00:41:26The role of the Minor Planet Center is to distinguish what is known and what is not known.
00:41:32We define them as a complete new object.
00:41:35And so in the following couple of hours, a lot of observers from all over the world started observing it.
00:41:40And then it was like a really large impact probability, which means it could impact the Earth.
00:41:44Over a period of a few days, it had a high impact potential three years from the discovery date.
00:41:51And originally it had a decently high probability of hitting Earth at its first discovery.
00:41:58And then it was followed up and the probability went up.
00:42:02And then the simple probability stayed high even if people were sending more and more observations,
00:42:06which means that the path on which the asteroid was was really towards the Earth.
00:42:112023 DZ2 was a significant asteroid.
00:42:14That kind of close approach to the Earth of a rock that size might only happen a handful of times
00:42:18per century.
00:42:20And then eventually it turned out that it was coming really close, but it wasn't hitting the Earth.
00:42:24Other observations had been made to take 2023 DZ2 off the risk list, so that was a good thing.
00:42:30Suddenly, the probability of hitting Earth goes down.
00:42:33And that's because the more points you gather, the better refined your orbit can become.
00:42:38At NASA, we thought this would be a good opportunity to launch an observing campaign
00:42:44in coordination with the International Asteroid Warning Network
00:42:47to try to get the worldwide community together to gather observations about physical properties of an asteroid
00:42:54and turn that around quickly.
00:42:56So we essentially had a very short five-day campaign where we had to reduce the impact risk
00:43:03by observing the object and collecting more positions along its orbit, understand its rotation period,
00:43:10understand its composition, try and observe it with radar to get some physical information like the size and volume,
00:43:16and try and input all this information in an impact hazard model to see what would be the impact on
00:43:23the ground.
00:43:23So we were able to pull all of this stuff off within a matter of five days.
00:43:27We took this real-world opportunity to exercise the whole system and campaign that would be done if a potential
00:43:36impactor was found.
00:43:38In case we were ever faced with a situation where we needed to do that,
00:43:43to measure the properties of an asteroid during a short window in a coordinated fashion with the worldwide community.
00:43:50So we used the Goldstone radar to observe it, and we managed to obtain images with the resolutions of under
00:43:56four meters on this asteroid,
00:43:58which showed that it was an irregular body. It was spinning extremely rapidly.
00:44:05Based on the visible extents in the radar images, we could tell that the asteroid was somewhere about 30 to
00:44:1240 meters,
00:44:13so a bit smaller than what we could estimate using just the visible.
00:44:18It was an important target to practice working together, to exercise the systems in order to refine the orbit and
00:44:27improve the characterization of the asteroid.
00:44:32So my students and I, we observed this object using telescopes, one on campus.
00:44:36We also used the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, which is on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
00:44:41It is one of the few telescopes in the world that is capable of telling what asteroids are made of.
00:44:46So we try and do geology with the telescope. We're trying to do prospecting.
00:44:50You know, trying to understand what minerals are there on these asteroids.
00:44:53And using those mineral signatures, kind of the spectral fingerprints, to identify what fingerprint matches with those meteorites that we
00:45:02have in the lab.
00:45:03So that's what we were trying to do with DZ-2.
00:45:06This is the 2023 DZ-2.
00:45:09This is the motion, this is the object that's moving there is DZ-2, correct?
00:45:14Yeah, so you can see it moving through the star field.
00:45:15Star field, and that's the spectrum, the visible spectrum right next to it, the first order visible spectrum.
00:45:21Yeah, so in the end, what we assessed about DZ-2 was that it was much brighter than we expected.
00:45:28Because when an asteroid is discovered, we don't know how bright or dark it is.
00:45:31So that sets a range in size, okay?
00:45:34You can slowly narrow down the size depending on more characterization information.
00:45:39So if you have radar, that gives you a very accurate, you know, diameter, you know, pretty close to the
00:45:44final thing.
00:45:45If you have thermal infrared measurements, you can constrain the observations.
00:45:48So you can constrain the diameter for that.
00:45:50But you also have composition. Composition tells you something about how bright the object is.
00:45:55So that gives you an additional piece of information.
00:45:57So no one technique gives you the ultimate answer.
00:46:01But complementary sets of information from different telescopes, different techniques, kind of let us converge to one answer.
00:46:08In the case of DZ-2, what we've done is with the IRTF, we spectrally characterized.
00:46:13We looked at the light reflected of DZ-2 in different wavelengths.
00:46:18And in the infrared, in the wavelengths we cannot see but rattlesnakes can see, you know, kind of like heat
00:46:23seeking stuff.
00:46:24What we see is a unique spectral signature for a specific mineral that is only found in this particular type
00:46:31of meteorite called oborites.
00:46:32And we have a few of those in our collection, you know, both that fell on the Earth, fell in
00:46:37Antarctica.
00:46:37So here's an example of it. This is an oborite. It's essentially white, okay?
00:46:42It's reflecting 60 to 70 percent of the light.
00:46:44What we do is that take this meteorite, crush them into a powder, and put them in a lab spectrometer
00:46:50to get the spectrum of this meteorite.
00:46:54In other words, how is light interacting with it at different wavelengths?
00:46:58So what we do here is that we take a sample and then we crush it and we have it,
00:47:02you know, being observed by the spectrometer that we have it here.
00:47:06Instead of the sun, we have a light source that is reflecting, you know, off the sample.
00:47:11And we're collecting visible near-infrared spectra off that sample that we have.
00:47:16Spectrum is nothing but light split into many wavelengths.
00:47:19And using that spectrum, we compare the same thing we get from the NASA Infrared Telescope.
00:47:24And we can try and match, you know, the spectrum of the meteorite in the lab versus the telescopic spectrum,
00:47:31you know, off the near-Earth object itself.
00:47:33And by taking this spectrum and comparing it to the one that's coming off the telescope off the near-Earth
00:47:39asteroid,
00:47:39we should be able to compare and tell what the near-Earth asteroid is made of.
00:47:42Because it was so bright, you don't need the object to be that big.
00:47:46So it ended up being smaller than what we expected of the size range.
00:47:49And because if it's smaller, you know, hopefully we pray that the atmosphere takes care of it and we won't
00:47:55have much impact on the ground.
00:47:56So that's what ended up happening is that we managed to nail the composition of the object very well using
00:48:02the NASA Infrared Telescope facility.
00:48:04So 2023 DZ2 was a really interesting example of planetary defense working on an international scale.
00:48:15So it's really a resounding success in multiple organizations across the planet coming together.
00:48:21And the fact that we were able to discover it, characterize it, determine it was a risk, and then remove
00:48:26that risk all before it passed close to the planet was a pretty amazing feat.
00:48:30Let's say we do find something that poses an impact threat to Earth. What next?
00:48:36The day is coming when Earth will get impacted.
00:48:39The time source went extinct because they didn't have a space program. We do have one.
00:48:43We can. So why stop there?
00:48:58Ten. Nine. Nine.
00:49:00Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
00:49:10And liftoff of the Falcon 9 at dark on NASA's first planetary defense test to intentionally crash into an asteroid.
00:49:25We're embarking on a new era of humankind.
00:49:31We're doing this mission to prove that we can deflect an asteroid.
00:49:37Even if we do everything right, our sensors work well, our spacecraft is doing well, even then we might still
00:49:44miss.
00:49:56Four, three, two, one.
00:50:04For the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body.
00:50:15NASA confirms that DART successfully changed the targeted asteroid's trajectory.
00:50:25Now this is a watershed moment for planetary defense and a watershed moment for humanity.
00:50:55As was demonstrated with the DART mission, if an asteroid were ever discovered, that could pose an impact threat to
00:51:01Earth.
00:51:02And we do have the capability to deflect an asteroid in space and to change its orbit.
00:51:10You know, once we've found an object and determined that it could be an impact threat to the Earth, what
00:51:16do we do to mitigate it?
00:51:20Eventually, we have to be ready to nudge an asteroid off its course.
00:51:25NASA's recently demonstrated a particular type of mitigation technique that we call kinetic impact.
00:51:30In case there was an asteroid coming towards Earth and you're there, you can actually stop it.
00:51:35I mean, that's kind of fantastic.
00:51:37Our double asteroid redirection test, DART, was a demonstration of using the kinetic impactor technique.
00:51:44The idea is pretty simple. You basically just take a spacecraft and you run it into an asteroid and bump
00:51:49it out of the way.
00:51:50What? You think science fiction, but this is real.
00:51:53Never in my life would I have thought I would take a couple hundred million dollar spacecraft and crash it
00:51:59into an asteroid.
00:52:01Its main goal was to go to an asteroid with its moon to hit the moon and see how much
00:52:07it changed the orbit of the moon.
00:52:09The moonlit Dimorphos, which orbits the asteroid Didymos in order to change Dimorphos' orbit and show that we can deflect
00:52:16incoming asteroids if we need to.
00:52:18DART will only be changing the period of the orbit of Dimorphos by a tiny amount and really that's all
00:52:25that's needed in the event that an asteroid is discovered well ahead of time before it might impact Earth.
00:52:32And space, just a little bit, is just enough to make an asteroid actually miss us. So behind me you
00:52:38see the spacecraft.
00:52:39It's really cool to see it coming together in real life.
00:52:42It is fantastic to see it in real life.
00:52:45To see it turn from ideas into real pieces that are gonna go into space.
00:52:50The solar arrays will actually roll out to 28 feet in length.
00:52:54Once the solar arrays are deployed it's going to be the size of a school bus.
00:52:58As the solar array opens out it's going to swing out in this direction.
00:53:04To me the most important thing and the most exciting things is all the technical challenges.
00:53:10My job is primarily to make sure all the systems on the spacecraft work together.
00:53:14On top you see the next C thruster. Over here is our star tracker and then over here is our
00:53:20high gain antenna.
00:53:22My job is to make sure we launch. My job is to make sure we're able to receive data back.
00:53:26My job is to make sure we hit.
00:53:27There's Draco on the bottom of the spacecraft.
00:53:30As well of course is integration and tests.
00:53:36The asteroid's only two football fields in size.
00:53:39We're flying at over six kilometers a second.
00:53:42Thirty days out we see one pixel on our field of view.
00:53:45You can see Didymos and Dimorphos as one point of light.
00:53:48About four hours out our spacecraft becomes autonomous.
00:53:51And then that's where everything gets really exciting.
00:53:54You actually are seeing impact.
00:53:59The algorithm has to identify and hit the target in the field of view of the camera.
00:54:05And so you could just imagine if it was a human being joy sticking this.
00:54:09Because we don't know for sure what the asteroids look like, our simulation gives us the capability to use different
00:54:16asteroid shapes and asteroid objects to see that our smart nav algorithm performs against all these unknowns.
00:54:24Astronomers are going to measure how much DART changed Dimorphos' orbit using ground-based telescopes all over the world.
00:54:31These curves show the brightness change due to Dimorphos moving in front of and behind Didymos.
00:54:37We can tell how quickly Dimorphos is moving around Didymos.
00:54:40We make these measurements before DART arrives.
00:54:43And then this is the same technique that we'll use after the impact to determine how much we've changed the
00:54:47orbit by.
00:54:56This is Lowell Observatory.
00:54:58Lowell is one of many observatories around the world that will be observing the DART impact, NASA's first-ever planetary
00:55:04defense test mission,
00:55:05to see how much a spacecraft impact can deflect an asteroid in its orbit.
00:55:09This is where Pluto was discovered, and we are still doing research in all areas of astronomy today.
00:55:15So let's go check it out.
00:55:21This is the Pluto Telescope, the telescope that was used to discover Pluto almost a hundred years ago.
00:55:27So here we are at the Clarke Telescope. This is where Percival Lowell sat to observe Mars.
00:55:33Let's head on over to the Lowell Discovery Telescope about an hour south of Flagstaff,
00:55:37which is where we are going to be collecting data for the DART mission.
00:55:40The reason we're all the way out here in the middle of this forest is that we have really dark
00:55:44sky.
00:55:54And this is the Lowell Discovery Telescope. This is what a 4.3-meter telescope looks like.
00:55:59This is what we will be using to study Didymos and Dimorphos in the days and weeks after DART impact.
00:56:05The DART spacecraft will be hitting an asteroid called Dimorphos, special because it's a binary asteroid,
00:56:11which means a satellite around a larger asteroid called Didymos, and DART will actually be hitting Dimorphos.
00:56:17And what we will be measuring is how much DART changes the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos.
00:56:23So this is an important test for planetary defense mitigation strategies in case we ever have to do this for
00:56:30real.
00:56:30The Lowell Discovery Telescope is one of many telescopes around the world which will be used to study Didymos and
00:56:36Dimorphos.
00:56:36It's really a global coordinated effort.
00:56:39And what we're looking at here is a large 4.3-meter primary mirror that's in the middle of the
00:56:43telescope tube here.
00:56:44Up at the top is a secondary mirror.
00:56:46The secondary mirror up top there is what is focusing the light down onto the instruments
00:56:50and allows us to take images with the camera that's located down at the bottom.
00:56:54This is maybe one of my favorite hidden rooms at the telescope.
00:56:58We're like standing inside the telescope.
00:57:01Underneath the telescope, 100 tons above your head.
00:57:03Held up by this and this, which is cool.
00:57:07It's sort of, as you can see, the highest peak around here.
00:57:10Just over 8,000 feet.
00:57:12And come up here for sunset.
00:57:13Oh, yeah.
00:57:14Sunsetting right there, it's just perfect.
00:57:17For DART, we're going to be collecting images of the night sky.
00:57:20And typically an observer would be here in front of one of these consoles,
00:57:23controlling the instrument and taking images like these as they're coming in off the telescope.
00:57:27DART is really a sort of before and after experiment.
00:57:29We need to understand the system before the spacecraft intentionally impacts
00:57:33and then we have to understand what the outcome of that impact event is.
00:57:37As we watch from the Earth, Dimorphos will pass in front of Didymos and behind Didymos.
00:57:42What we will be doing with those images is measuring the brightness of Didymos in those images
00:57:47and looking at how that brightness changes.
00:57:49And those dips in brightness allow us to measure when these eclipses happen
00:57:53and measure the orbit period of Dimorphos.
00:57:56And so you have essentially a fixed star field here.
00:57:58All the white dots are stars of different brightness.
00:58:01And moving through this field is Didymos and Dimorphos,
00:58:03which again we can't distinguish them as discrete points of light,
00:58:07but we have that small object moving through the field of view.
00:58:11So after impact, we will then be able to go back and start observing intensely
00:58:16looking for those mutual events, those eclipse events,
00:58:19of Dimorphos passing in front of and behind Didymos.
00:58:23And on each one of these frames, we're measuring the brightness
00:58:25to assess whether or not it's undergoing one of these events
00:58:29where Dimorphos is passing in front of or behind.
00:58:32This is such a cool experiment. It's such a singular experiment.
00:58:35Using the ground-based telescopes like this one and others around the world
00:58:39to watch the systems and see how it's affected by this impact event.
00:58:43Because that's really what's going to give us the answer to
00:58:46what did DART do at the time of impact.
00:58:49And that will be exciting to see how that evolves
00:58:52over the days and weeks following that impact.
00:59:01Good afternoon, everybody.
00:59:03Two weeks ago, we conducted humanity's first planetary defense test.
00:59:10The team has measured that the orbital period of Dimorphos has changed.
00:59:16Astronomers have been using telescopes on Earth
00:59:19to measure how much that time has changed.
00:59:23These telescopes have been observing this system nightly.
00:59:27And that's what you see going across here on this graph on the top.
00:59:30Just this nightly telescopic data, night after night after night.
00:59:34And it resulted in moving an asteroid
00:59:36and actually changing its orbit by a few millimeters per second.
00:59:40Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but acting over a long period of time,
00:59:43it could be enough to help move something out of the way of the Earth,
00:59:47should we ever need to do so.
00:59:49It was expected to be a huge success
00:59:51if it only slowed the orbit by about 10 minutes.
00:59:55But it actually slowed it by 32 minutes.
01:00:00The whole world has been watching this.
01:00:03Wow. I mean, what an exciting day for the DART team.
01:00:09In case you're keeping score, humanity one, asteroids zero.
01:00:14Go DART!
01:00:15The dinosaurs are made completely extinct by an asteroid impact so many years ago.
01:00:20Here we are. We can actually do something about it.
01:00:24I think this is just wonderful.
01:00:28There are times, you know, in a year or in a decade when you're in awe of humanity.
01:00:33You know what I mean?
01:00:34Despite everything that happens in the world on a day-to-day basis in a new cycle,
01:00:38there are times when, you know, human beings kind of come together to do great things.
01:00:42And I think, for me personally, DART was one of those moments
01:00:45where you're just in absolute awe of humanity.
01:00:47You know, here we are taking a spacecraft and flying it, you know,
01:00:51hundreds of millions of, you know, kilometers away
01:00:53and hitting an object with that precision.
01:00:56And it all happens in a blink of an eye.
01:00:59You know what I mean?
01:01:00It was not a long mission, you know.
01:01:02And I think I'm very, very proud of my colleagues who managed to pull that off.
01:01:06It demonstrates how far we've come as a species in the last few centuries even.
01:01:11From the first rockets launched into outer space,
01:01:14the first asteroids being discovered,
01:01:16to the ability to realize what threat asteroids pose to the planet.
01:01:21And now the capability demonstrated to send a spacecraft
01:01:25to an asteroid that's in orbit around the sun
01:01:29and show that we have the capability, if we have enough lead time,
01:01:33to alter its orbit.
01:01:35That, to me, was just a fascinating moment in human history.
01:01:38Oh yeah, I did watch it.
01:01:41I was like, it was super cool.
01:01:44I did watch the DART mission.
01:01:46Yes, I have watched the DART impact.
01:01:47It was pretty amazing.
01:01:49The last video that they were showing live,
01:01:51and then you saw everything up until to the last moment,
01:01:54I thought that there was such a big achievement.
01:01:57It's something like people work on it for so long,
01:02:00and it proved that we can do it.
01:02:03The DART impact day was one of the most exciting days in my career.
01:02:08We watched the impact here at JPL.
01:02:11The impact was bigger than I had expected,
01:02:14but I was also excited because we had an observing run for observing Didymos
01:02:21just about 11 hours after impact.
01:02:24And it would be the first opportunity to see how much of an effect the impact had.
01:02:30Didymos was all I was thinking about the whole day.
01:02:34I couldn't sleep.
01:02:35The observing run started at about 3 a.m. that night,
01:02:39and we had our first echo of Didymos after impact.
01:02:43We weren't expecting to measure the deflection that night,
01:02:47but the echo was off from where it should have been if there was no DART impact.
01:02:53And I couldn't believe my eyes.
01:02:55I was like, either there's some problems in the measurement,
01:03:00or this is a real detection.
01:03:02Just 12 hours after impact.
01:03:05So this was the first Goldstone radar detection
01:03:08of the effect of the DART impact on the orbit of Dimorphos.
01:03:13The yellow circle,
01:03:14it circles the location where the echo from Dimorphos should have been
01:03:20had there been no DART impact.
01:03:23But then the red circles the echo of Dimorphos,
01:03:28which you can see is this white dot here.
01:03:30And you can see it's quite far away from where it should have been without the impact.
01:03:35And it just gave it a small nudge.
01:03:37But if you wanted to do this in the future potentially,
01:03:40it could potentially work, but you'd want to do it years in advance.
01:03:43Warning time is really key here in order to enable this sort of asteroid deflection
01:03:48to potentially be used in the future and is part of a much larger planetary defense strategy.
01:03:52The DART mission was the first kinetic impactor demonstration.
01:03:56It was a successful demonstration of that technique.
01:04:00There are also other possible techniques.
01:04:04If you do find one that is coming, definitely, there are several options.
01:04:08There are different types of mitigation,
01:04:10and they actually depend on when you discover that the object is going to impact.
01:04:14Well, one of the most important things we can do to ensure that mitigation actually works is we need to
01:04:19provide time.
01:04:20Time is your best friend.
01:04:21I have time to build a spacecraft, go to space, analyze the object,
01:04:26try to understand what type of physical properties this object has.
01:04:29Send what we call the reconnaissance mission to fly by or rendezvous
01:04:33so that we have a better understanding of what the asteroid is, such as the size, the mass.
01:04:38Chemical composition, for example, it is a solid rock as it has boulders, something like that.
01:04:44And then you want to know its orbit in a very accurate way
01:04:47because you want to track it down and like go straight on it.
01:04:50The next step is to figure out a mission that could potentially deflect the asteroid.
01:04:55There are other techniques, though, that still remain to be tested for asteroid deflection.
01:05:03A gravity tractor, for instance, where you just have a spacecraft of some significant mass,
01:05:11a station keep with the asteroid in the right position,
01:05:14and the mutual attraction between the two objects will allow the spacecraft
01:05:19to slowly tug the asteroid off of the impacting trajectory.
01:05:23Another technique might be an ion beam deflector,
01:05:27where you've got a spacecraft that turns its ion engines onto the surface of the asteroid.
01:05:34Continuously bombarding the surface of the asteroid does create a pressure on its surface
01:05:40and therefore a force that changes the velocity of the asteroid.
01:05:47Of course, all the Hollywood movies like to use nuclear explosives.
01:05:52It's very dramatic and exciting.
01:05:55But we wouldn't blow the asteroid up like they do in the movies.
01:05:59You detonate the device that bombards the surface of the asteroid with heavy radiation.
01:06:08That causes the surface material to vaporize and jet off
01:06:14and creates an instantaneous rocket engine, so to speak, and shoves the asteroid.
01:06:20Really, the goal at NASA is to find the asteroids years or decades in advance
01:06:26that could pose an impact threat to Earth.
01:06:29And then you have the gift of time to address possibly not having that impact happen at all.
01:06:37NASA is just one piece in the puzzle.
01:06:39NASA has its role as the information gatherer from space
01:06:44and conveying that information to other agencies.
01:06:47Every piece of the puzzle must rise up to the occasion and perform seamlessly.
01:06:52To do that, we have to practice.
01:06:54NASA also participates in interagency exercises with many others across the U.S. government
01:07:02to step through a situation where an asteroid is discovered so many years ahead of time.
01:07:08Here is the type of information that is known about it.
01:07:11Here are the possibilities of what could happen next.
01:07:23Good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming.
01:07:25It's been a pleasure. This is our fifth exercise.
01:07:28Welcome to the fifth Interagency Planetary Defense Table Tap exercise.
01:07:32This exercise is incredibly important to bring together the world experts and decision makers.
01:07:38ESA Planetary Defense.
01:07:39National Space Council.
01:07:40FEMA.
01:07:41NASA Headquarters.
01:07:42U.S. Space Command.
01:07:43The Department of State.
01:07:44To better prepare us for what is an inevitable future asteroid impact.
01:07:49We know it will happen. We just don't know when it will happen.
01:07:53You know, really this exercise focuses on how we plan and coordinate our activities in response to a potential impact
01:08:01for it all to come together into a plan on how we save the world.
01:08:07And with that, I invite you all to open the blue envelope in your folder.
01:08:13And what you have in front of you is a notification from the International Asteroid Warning Network
01:08:18about this hypothetical scenario of a potential asteroid impact for the near-Earth asteroid 2023 TTX.
01:08:26At this point in the scenario, the impact probability of the asteroid is 72%,
01:08:31as calculated by NASA JPLC-NEOS and by the ESA-INEO Coordination Center.
01:08:37The impact date would be the 12th of July, 2038.
01:08:42The potential impact locations would span a corridor from the South Pacific across North America,
01:08:48the Atlantic, the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean coast of Africa, Egypt,
01:08:53to the coast of Saudi Arabia.
01:08:55Now, the size of the object based on observations from the ground,
01:08:59it's highly uncertain based on the brightness and the unknown surface reflectivity,
01:09:03the coloring of the asteroid.
01:09:05And so it's most likely estimated to be in the range of 100 to 320 meters
01:09:11based on what is known about asteroids, but potentially at the extreme range of 60 to 800 meters in diameter.
01:09:19All right, so the next critical factor to consider is, of course,
01:09:22how many people could be affected by these different damage sizes along the different impact locations.
01:09:27It's certainly regional to country scale based on that size range.
01:09:32For asteroids in this general size range, the primary hazard is going to be local blast and thermal ground damage.
01:09:39And the larger sizes could also cause tsunami.
01:09:43So overall, the average population risk is around 270,000 people among all the potential Earth-impacting cases.
01:09:50And then, of course, there's still that 28% chance that the asteroid could swing by Earth and miss us
01:09:56entirely.
01:09:57We have filled out the uncertainty in 2038 with a bunch of white dots.
01:10:02And we really don't know which of those white dots is the real asteroid.
01:10:06And so we just simulate virtual asteroids and we just run them all towards the Earth.
01:10:11The current situation is that we don't know where it will hit.
01:10:14We just know that it will hit along this line.
01:10:16For this exercise over the next two days, we're going to stay frozen in time right here, right now,
01:10:2114 years ahead of the asteroid impact and figure out what do we do with the information that we have
01:10:26now.
01:10:27Disaster preparedness planning, international space response, information sharing and public messaging.
01:10:33So the challenge now is to figure out how do we respond and prepare for an uncertain event like this
01:10:40where we're not sure what could happen but the potential consequences could be quite catastrophic.
01:10:46This gets at sort of what we were hinting at there, starting to talk about not just what the threat
01:10:50is but what we could potentially do about it.
01:10:52The good news is this asteroid impact may be preventable.
01:10:56We have at least three technologies that we can consider for this and they have different physical effects.
01:11:02So the first is kinetic impact, which is like the DART mission where a spacecraft impacts the asteroid to change
01:11:09its speed very slightly.
01:11:10The second is an ion beam where you use a controlled electric thruster to slowly push or pull on the
01:11:18asteroid and change its speed.
01:11:20And then finally is a nuclear explosive device where you literally boil off part of the asteroid in order to
01:11:25change its speed.
01:11:26And we also need to know the physical properties of the asteroid because all of these methods, whether or not
01:11:32they work,
01:11:33and the specifics of how you would design them are tailored to the specific asteroid properties.
01:11:41Through forums like this one today and tomorrow and bringing together all of you, the world experts,
01:11:47we can tackle the detection and characterization of asteroids, ways to improve coordination among allied nations.
01:11:55That's why we want to exercise all of these capabilities now and not wait until then.
01:11:59We took this opportunity to exercise the whole system and campaign that would be done if a potential impactor was
01:12:07found.
01:12:25Monitor defense is a team sport.
01:12:27Asteroid impacts are a shared risk, and so we really need to work as a team.
01:12:32It's really important that we have a global effort to try to understand the problem.
01:12:35No one nation can independently save the world in case of an impending impact.
01:12:40It's a fantastic community.
01:12:42I am part of a global team of planetary defenders.
01:12:46Very proud to be part of that planetary defense family.
01:12:49It not only protects Earth today, but provides protection for the future.
01:13:21People who will have a resource to achieve support for the future.
01:13:21It's a great Chaos Project as well as I think.
01:13:21Very proud to be part of a event.
01:13:25And you have an impact on a place, which is a great space for its public safety.
01:13:26Don't be part of a community.
01:13:26You have a great space where you can't wait and it's great space,
01:13:28You know, you're going to have a mission for a mission.
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