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- So this next set is finishing up.
We'll have some new data here pretty quick.
Potentially hazardous asteroids can show up anywhere in the
night sky at any time.
So we were up here for 12
to 13 hours sometimes making decisions about
the objects we're seeing if they're real
or if they're just noise in the background.
And so the odds of finding an asteroid are gonna increase
as we move toward the, toward the east.
- 6 3 0 2 5
- Oh this might be something, oh, you guys look at that.
Based off these four images,
this is a new brand new near Earth asteroid.
We got one. No, like I didn't think that was gonna happen.
We got I Yeah. No, it's brand new.
Yeah, I just got the notice back from,
from the minor planet center that they published it.
So there it is. Bam. Live.
This is actually a big rock too right now.
It is absolutely a potentially hazardous object if you guys
were gonna be here for a discovery.
A PHA is definitely what you want. Yeah, this is a big rock.
Yeah, it is nominally about 230
meters in diameter, which is quite large
and it's a minimum orbit intersection distance with earth,
which means how close it comes
to the earth's path in the Earth's orbit is
between us and the moon.
It's only about 150,000 kilometers away,
which is a significant P-H-A-A-P-H-A like this only comes up
a couple times per year, so, so these are the ones we want.
Yeah, that's a nice one.
- When a two mile wide fragment
of the comet traveling 40 miles a second, pieces
of the comet that will hit Jupiter,
three fragments are scheduled to hit,
the planet will slam into the same area,
the same spot on the planet Jupiter.
- About 1993 we learned
that there was a comet heading for Jupiter
- Comet.
Shoemaker Levy nine was a comet that was discovered
by Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy.
It was shown to be broken up into a bunch of pieces.
- They traced back the orbit.
This thing had gone by Jupiter and got disrupted
- And then they tracked the orbit forward
and found out these are getting to hit Jupiter and
- That got - Everyone excited.
It's really the, the first time
that these impacts have been observed.
Impacts were very important in the formation of everything.
- We could observe an impact on another planet.
- Scientists still don't know what they're going
to see tonight, but they do know that they've come
to the best place in the world to see it.
- The whole world community,
scientific community was preparing to observe these events.
- Any telescopes that could observe the impact did many,
- Many ground-based - Telescopes.
- The Hubble Space Telescope,
- All of the images from Hubble
that went on the web were suddenly got everyone's attention,
- Which was a real key to many of the scientific results.
- Also, - Galileo, which was on the way to Jupiter at the
- Time, the NASA Infra telescope facility had a campaign
dedicated to observing Shoemaker Levy.
- This observing run for the shoemaker Levy Nine Impacts.
That was my first observing run ever. We
- Were starting tonight with the near infrared spectometer.
- God that's gorgeous.
- We were seeing something pop up on the screen.
It was really just shouting, literally dancing about
and we saw this bright thing just light up
and it was like, yes, we did it.
- We were all like kids in a candy store. I
- Guess a lot of the energy we saw wasn't just the impact
itself, but it was the sort of the splashback.
- And when those pieces plowed into the atmosphere,
they brought up big plumes of material
that rained back down on the upper part of the atmosphere,
- We're able to measure changes in the
upper atmosphere of Jupiter.
It taught us a great deal about how
- Impacts take place.
- Scientists say if a fragment the same size hit Earth,
it would leave a crater the size of Rhode Island.
- It was one of those wake up calls that you know,
not only our impact something that happened in the past,
but there're happening now in our solar system
- And here it is this awakening.
They kind of precipitated this NASA planetary
defense coordination office
- To make sure to find the asteroids that come close
to earth and the comets that come close to earth.
Get them cataloged, figure out where they've been
and where they're going to be in the future.
Just so we understand, are we at risk
of being impacted on the earth?
- So that's a big component of what NASA does.
Now it has planetary defense to find potential impacts
for the earth and protecting it.
- Let's go back to Senator Cruz's question.
What would an asteroid that is a kilometer in diameter,
what would it do if it hit the earth
- That is likely to end human civilization?
- The impacts of comets, shoemaker Levy nine
with Jupiter in 1994 that showed us that you know
what impacts are still happening in the solar system today
- That really spurred some interest on the
part of the Congress.
- NASA was tasked by Congress in 1998
to catalog 90% of all the large near earth objects.
So those that are one kilometer or more in size,
- Those objects are big enough to cause
what we would call truly global devastation.
Meaning that they could cause global extinction events.
The good news is that we found more than about 95% of them.
- The catalog includes almost 900 asteroids, one kilometer
or larger in size.
- That said, none of these known large NES pose any threat
of impact to the earth within the next a hundred years.
- And then eventually in 2005, that direction from Congress
to NASA was set to find the population of asteroids
that are 140 meters
and larger in size
that could do regional damage should it impact earth
- A city killer.
Now the picture's not so rosy.
We know of about 40% of those objects today.
- Today we do not have a complete inventory
of all the possible impactors
- And that is something that NASA
and the worldwide planetary defense community has
been endeavoring to do.
- Well here at nasa, what I lead is the Planetary Defense
Coordination Office.
We are helping
to coordinate efforts not only in the United States
and across the US agencies, but also around the world,
- Finding asteroids, tracking them,
calculating their orbits, figuring out where they're going
to be in the future, studying their physical properties.
And then you get that information you might
need in the event.
And impact threat is discovered.
- We've discovered more than 30,000 near Earth objects
so far and we are discovering, you know,
hundreds you know, every year. But
- We haven't found them all.
So that's really the big question.
There's almost certainly a,
a decent sized asteroid out there
that is gonna pose an impact threat to the planet.
We're just trying to find it right now.
So the way we approach finding near earth objects is
basically just to make a short movie of the night sky
that consists of four frames
and then our software will pick out objects that are moving
inside of the four frames
and we have to identify if they are real
or if they're false detections.
I first started hunting asteroids in my backyard
and I just had the hope of maybe discovering one.
And when that happened, it was a very
special moment in my life.
My interest in astronomy started at a fairly young age.
I remember as a kid seeing Comet hell bop in the
sky from southern Utah.
It was really a spectacular side as a child
and just trying to wrap my mind around
what I was looking at was difficult.
This is one area of science
where discoveries are still happening on a nightly basis
and it's really a neat feeling to, to step into that
where you can be sitting in a telescope at night
and discover a new minor planet that's in orbit
around the sun that nobody has ever seen before.
It's, it's a special thing
and I think that's what draws a lot
of people into this business.
- The first order of planetary defense is
finding the asteroids.
And so one aspect of the program is funding institutions
with telescopes that can image wide swaths of the sky
to be able to look at the starry background
and look for objects moving with respect to the stars
to see is there something there that we haven't seen before.
- This is the whole sky, that's a all sky camera.
So you can see this is a live video feed from the end
of the telescope and you can make out the
Milky Way right here.
And this is the size of the images we're taking right now.
And then we subtract the known objects
and the stars from those images
and then we look for moving targets.
- The object is moving because it's closer
to the earth than the background starts.
- I can tell this first one is a star.
You can see that that object stays there.
So if I load up a catalog image, which is a very old image,
you can see that first it is actually a star.
That one's actually a star.
Those moving targets are gonna be asteroids
that are in orbit around the sun.
So that's a known asteroid.
It comes up green and it has the designation above it.
And oftentimes they're new, we've never seen them before.
So what we have here is a near earth asteroid
that is likely brand new
and I can already tell that it's not coming up in any
of the known databases.
- And then what you have to do is go
and identify whether it's a known
asteroid or a new asteroid. So that's the next step.
- When the asteroid is first discovered,
we submit the information almost immediately
to the minor planet center at Harvard
and we are gonna send this data off in real time here.
The temporary designation we're going to assign
to it the date and the time
and the location on the sky that it was located
and then it's approximate visual magnitude.
I'm going to report it as a brand new near earth
object candidate.
- It's important to turn that information around quickly.
The different survey telescopes quickly feed those position
measurements to the minor planet center,
which is the internationally recognized repository
for position measurements
of small bodies throughout the solar system,
- Minor planet.
I like to think as the link between the astronomic community
and everything that comes after that in planetary defense.
My name is Federica Spotto
and I'm the project scientist of the minor planet center.
So part of the role of the minor planet center is
to actually distinguish what is known and what is not known.
We keep all the observations
and all the orbits of the objects
so we don't see the imagery, we just see this spines
and does represent a different position
of the object moving.
And so it tells you very accurately the time of the app
of the observations and then then the position.
So once we have the position
and the time we can get the orbit
- So all the data comes in from,
everyone gets consolidated there.
So we have a common catalog that we are working from
- An arch archive of everything that is known
and everything that is not known.
The cool thing about the minor planet center is
that everything we do is public.
So as soon as we receive the observations,
the observations goes out,
- That information can all be rolled up there
and available for other observatories to see them
and then go get additional observations so
that there is enough information to get an orbit
- And anyone can then access that data
to track these objects down
and help us determine if they are gonna be an
impact risk in the future.
- Once we find an asteroid
and we've got an orbit for it, the next logical question is,
is it going to hit the earth?
Fortunately there's a group here at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory called the Center for Near Earth Object Studies
or CNOs for Short that is tasked with doing exactly this.
- They assess the hazard potential
of this newly discovered near earth object
- And they do orbit determination to see both short term
and way out into the future a hundred years into the future.
Could any of those pose an impact threat?
- My name's Ryan Park
and I'm the supervisor
of the Solar Assistant Dynamics Group at the Jet
Proportional Laboratory.
And I'm also serving as the project manager for Center
for nearest object studies.
So date, we maintain about a little over 1.3 million
objects, most of them being asteroids.
We predict the motion of unknown asteroids
and we process the entire data set from the minor planet
center to predict
and reconstruct the orbit of the asteroids so
that we can perform statistical assessment
of the potential earth impact.
Yeah, so what we do is the,
we process the astro metric collected
by ground-based observers
and we fit those through
what we call the orbit termination process to get the orbit
of the asteroid as a function of time
so we can propagate backwards forwards
and figure out where the o where the
asteroid is in real time.
So this basically catalogs all the potentially hazard SRUs
that might come close to the earth
and we document the, the probability
of potential earth's impact
and if it were to hit the with certain probability,
when is it going to be and where is it going to be?
And we do this for next hundred years
and assess whether it's going to be hitting the earth
and if so with what probability.
And that information gets shared with the senior's website
as well as with the entire world.
- This data gets disseminated immediately
to many different organizations
and NASA's center
for Near Earth object studies runs watchdogs
that are constantly ingesting this data
and calculating the odds of an impact in the near future.
And if they find that this object has any probability
of hitting the earth in the near future,
we will get an alert on our systems within about
10 or 15 minutes.
- And then when people start receiving this type
of like warning, then there's a huge community
of astronomers that start observing it from
- All around the globe as the earth rotates
and nighttime falls across Asia or
- Europe.
And so we start getting observations from all over the world
at every time and we start processing them really quickly.
- It's a very smooth running machine.
It transcends boundaries of countries.
- Asteroids don't care about international boundaries.
- It doesn't matter where the asteroid impacts, it affects,
you know, the entire humanity.
In fact any anything alive on the earth, it
- Transcends basically anything except what makes us human
and what, what it means to help discover
and protect the planet from a hazardous
asteroid that might be incoming.
- Yeah, I'm really proud of it.
I would say it's, that's like, yeah, I'm proud
and I'm proud that I'm working on something
that is actually very useful for the community.
Like we are part the defense
but also like we do everything so
that we can help the community.
- It was a great honor to have an asteroid named after me.
So there's Ryan Park asteroid.
I mean this was a huge deal for me.
I mean I, this basically led me to believe
that I'm making some contribution to the field.
- We didn't even know asteroids existed 200 years ago
and it's only been in the last few decades
that we even had the technology to be able
to detect these things.
So yeah, I might be referred to the follow
of planetary defense.
I created the term perhaps, but it is only
because I, you know, stand on the shoulders of,
of those asteroid hunters
before me that we are now able
to protect the world from asteroid impact.
- So this object has already been ingested by the Center
for near Earth object studies scout watchdog right off the
bat it tells us that the probability this is a near earth
object is already 100%
and the probability it is a potentially hazardous asteroid
is 67%.
There is no real impact rating or probability.
So it's not currently a threat but long term
after the arc is extended
and we have a better idea of the orbit of this object,
this might be a brand new unknown,
potentially hazardous asteroid.
- So finding asteroids,
that's probably the most important part of planetary defense
or the fundamental part of planetary defense.
But it doesn't help
to see an asteroid if you don't have enough information
to know where it's going to be in the future.
- You can't do anything about 'em unless you find them and
and know where they're going.
- That means the race is on to try to figure out
how can we get more data, can we get more exposures of it so
that we can figure out which way it's actually going
and then eventually get a really good orbit for it so
that we can predict far into the future where it's gonna go,
especially with respect to the earth.
- So then there are telescopes
that go zero in on those initial observations by the surveys
and they get even more measurements of those positions.
- My name is Cassandra Luli Space watch is
where follow up survey essentially.
So the telescope behind me is a 0.9 meter telescope
that we use to follow up near earth objects.
But when they're first discovered they have very short
orbital arcs so they have very imprecise orbits
and so if we follow them up we get a better orbit
to determine if there's a higher chance
of them hitting the earth or not.
So these are the type of I images
that we get back from the telescope
and so you can see that our asteroid is essentially a dot
that's moving and then the stars look like long lines
because of how we track on the asteroid
and not on the stars.
When an asteroid is first discovered,
the minor planet center is able to calculate kind
of a location on the sky where it should be.
So we already have an idea of
how the asteroid's gonna be moving so we take
that assumed motion and move with it.
So my typical day
or night I guess we typically observe for four
to six nights straight and we come up to the mountain
and we have dorms up here.
So we stay up here the whole time we're observing
and what happens is that we'll open the two telescopes we
then have on our computers kind of a list
of all the objects we can see
that needs follow up right away.
There's a few objects we can choose here.
I like to go for virtual impactors
'cause they're top of our list.
They have a probability of hitting us.
We'll pick the best targets for the night.
Some of them come in as we're observing overnight.
If they're newly discovered
and they need follow up then so let's say I want to go
for this object, what I would do is I would accept it in my
queue and then I would accept the value
and send it for recovery.
What that would do is that would move the telescope.
So we get three images of it to see it move
and to see what speeds and move
and then we measure its location on the sky,
that is the measurement we report back
to the minor planet center.
Well that's an asteroid right here.
It's really cool when you're looking like at an image from
the sky and you see a moving dot.
Like every time I find that moving asteroid, I'm excited
by it because it means you found it like you found a thing
in space that is moving, like it's right there on my image,
I can see it.
So right there is our object and it's moving right there.
So the first image is in the star, so we can't measure that.
But then the second and third image are right there.
So we can actually measure those
and that new measurement then helps better predict the orbit
fit and thus better predict
where it would be in the sky next time someone needs
to observe it to follow it up.
- The most important thing is always get more data
because the more data you get,
the better you are at refining the
orbit and know where the object
- Is.
And if you take another image a little bit further,
you can then put another data point
and then you can keep tracing that orbit around.
- As you collect more observations, the orbit
of the asteroid in question will get better and better.
- I really like that I'm protecting the planet
and yes, I'm not the one that's like
with a cape pushing the asteroid away.
That's not what I do. In some ways like my little
contribution might help not just myself
but someone in the future
and I think it's very important to do that.
- So last night while surveying in an area of the sky
where we don't typically find a lot of objects,
I di discovered an object that had to be fairly large
to be visible for where it was in the sky.
- So here is the asteroid
that Catalina Sky survey discovered a few days ago
and we can also tell that it's a pretty big object.
- The asteroid has to be observed for many weeks
and months into the future so we can extend that data arc
- So the orbit of
that potentially hazardous asteroid is known
into the future.
- So the discovery arc of the asteroid consists
of just four points of data over 20 minutes
and that is a really small snapshot
of the entire orbit of the asteroid
- And it was able to be followed up all around the globe so
that we didn't lose that asteroid.
And you can see that it's been followed up
by several different telescopes right here.
So the R arc length means it's been
observed for more than a day.
So that is where it comes the closest
to intersecting the earth's orbit
and telescope around the world will continue taking
observations of this object
to keep seeing if it has a potential
of hitting the earth or not.
- Well at the current rate of detection
of near earth asteroids is gonna take us about another 30
years before we have this catalog
that we've been tasked by Congress to do.
- We've only discovered less than 40% of the 90%
of the object we need to discover.
- Finding the asteroids isn't something
that can just happen overnight
because telescopes can only see so far away
or they can only see so faint into
what they might be looking for out there.
- Ground-based telescopes are kind of limited
to looking at night away from the sun
- And we have to wait for the solar system
to bring asteroids around.
The earth is traveling around the sun,
the asteroids are traveling around the sun
and so it isn't possible
to see the entire solar system at the same time.
- It's hard to find asteroids
because relative to the size of the earth
and the distances within the inner solar system,
they don't get bright enough to spot
until they get closer to the planet.
- One of the tricky things with searching
for neuro objects is that some of them are extremely dark,
they're darker than lumps of coal
and that means that when we look for them using the sunlight
that reflects off their surfaces, they're actually hard
to spot because they're dim and faint.
- There are asteroids out there that are very darkly colored
and don't reflect a lot of light from the sun
and so they're difficult for the telescopes on the ground
to discover that are looking at the light
that we can see with our eyes.
- So how do you overcome this?
We have to go into space, we have
to use different wavelength and reflected light.
All the telescopes on the earth
that are currently finding near the asteroids are
discovering in the visible wavelength.
They're primarily looking at light reflected
by the asteroid from the sun.
The sunlight hits the asteroid reflects just like
everything in the solar system.
- One way we can kind of get around this is instead
of looking at the sunlight reflecting off their surfaces,
we can use the heat that they emit to search for them.
If we have a heat seeking telescope working at infrared
wavelengths, even the dark objects just pop right out.
They stick out very brightly
because they've got a lot of heat that they reradiate
and we can see that energy.
- Once you go into space,
you're away from the heat of the earth.
You can start looking in the infrared wavelengths
because in in in the infrared wavelengths,
asteroids have more energy being given out
because a lot of them are darker.
So they absorb that radiation in the daytime
and in the nighttime they re reradiate.
So they're very bright. You don't need
that big a telescope in space to detect the asteroids
that you would from the earth using visible light
and near earth object surveyor is one such telescope.
- The near earth object surveyor mission
or NEO surveyor for short neo surveyor is a space telescope
that we're building that's designed to detect track
and characterize asteroids
and comets that have the potential
to get close to the earth.
- That'll also be positioned in such a way
that it can survey closer
to the sun than the telescopes on the ground.
- Because of this nice tall sunshade,
we can actually point relatively close to the sun
and that lets us look far across the solar system so
that we can spot the asteroids when they're far away from us
- So that working in concert
with the telescopes on the ground is going
to really accelerate those objects getting into the catalog.
- With new surveyor, we should be able
to see something like a few hundred thousand new near earth
objects over the course of its survey.
- We expect the numbers will increase by somewhere
between factor of five to 10 in the next decade.
- They're gonna give us lots of data
and they're gonna require from us
to have different tools ready
to handle the data in the best way we can.
- This increase rate of detection in the number
of observations that are will be coming into the minor
planet center does require the minor planet center
to be able to process things at a more rapid rate
and we are ready for it.
- And hopefully that's gonna tell us a lot about the largest
objects in the populations.
The ones that are, are really truly large
that have the potential for a large amount
of ground damage if they were to impact the earth.
- This is still kind of a golden age of discovery
for asteroids.
One day in the future we will have found all
of these objects and this period
of asteroid discovery will come to a close
for the most part, at least the, the rocks
that could pose a significant threat
to the earth will eventually all be catalog characterized
and either dealt with or removed from the risk lists.
- Any piece that you can do to help you should do it
and I think that's really important.
You don't have to be a planetary scientist
to go into planetary defense.
- It's just an amazing thing to take science
and apply it in such a way
that it affects people's everyday lives.
- Well for me it's very personally satisfying
to be involved in in,
in an effort like this found my role in life so to speak.
- So for me it is very personal
because I have a chance, I'm fortunate enough to contribute,
you know, using science to protect the humanity, you know,
to protect the planet for that matter, you know,
and everything that is on it because we only have one earth.
- The explosion of a meteor over Russia last month injured
1500 people.
- The recent meteorite that hit the Russian murals
with the force of an atomic bomb was a stark wake up call
regarding threats from space.
- When the arid passed through the earth's atmosphere,
it did so at a really high speed,
something like 40,000 miles an hour.
- I had an explosive energy about 25 times the ex,
the bomb used in Hiroshima or about 470 kilotons of TNT.
- It did cause a massive shockwave
that shattered windows all over the city.
- This much smaller meteorite was not observed prior
to its entry into the atmosphere.
- The bins impact came from the direction of the sun.
- It was on a very difficult tr trajectory for us to be able
to see from ground-based telescopes.
- Scientists testified about how these objects are tracked
and how those risks can be minimized.
- As we were reminded a couple of weeks ago,
the earth is sometimes hit by asteroids.
- Impacts have happened and they will happen in the future.
- That asteroid was only about 18 meters across
that would fit inside this room. Roughly
- This asteroid never made a big impact
crater on the ground.
That's because it wasn't big enough originally to make it
to the ground fully intact.
- So the impacts of airbus are different from an impact
that is physically going to touch the ground.
- The asteroid slammed through earth atmosphere.
It was like hitting a brick wall
and it just pulverized it into a million little
pieces like this one here.
- Even just from that 20 meter asteroid disintegrating in
earth atmosphere, the shockwave from that that did damage
- The inside of the asteroid is stony.
It looks like an ordinary rock.
- We need to know more about these objects
that could impact us.
- How big is it? What it made out of? How does it spin?
How much potential for damage it might pose on the ground?
- The earth has been bombarded by asteroids of its history
and it will be hit by asteroids.
Again. The questions that we're trying
to answer in planetary defense are when, where,
and which rock is gonna do it.
- So what we have here is a diversity of meteorites where
they range from stony meteorites like the ones you see here.
A, a great example of that is
bins which fell in Russia in 2013.
We want to understand the threat that is coming towards us.
Part of understanding the threat is
understanding the capabilities.
Oftentimes the physical make makeup
of an object tells us about its capability, its impact,
potential, what can it do on the earth?
So studying the composition tells us whether it's an iron,
whether it's stones or stony iron or carbon ace.
A weak object which has low density is not going to make it
to the, into the atmosphere and intact onto the earth.
Okay? So you would have an airbus for example.
Whereas if you have really dense object like this iron
meteorite, it'll punch right
through the atmosphere even if it's a small object
and then it will create a crater like the meteor
crater we see in Arizona.
So what do these meteorite tell us, right?
Why do we need to characterize these objects?
So by understanding the composition we can figure out
what is the mitigation mechanism we are gonna use
because the tools we would use vary vastly depending
upon what they're made of.
To understand what asteroids are, you had to go back to kind
of the beginning of our solar system.
- Asteroids are rocky bodies that are kind
of left over fragments from when our
solar system first formed.
A long time ago, more than 4 billion years ago,
- Major planets formed when the first solids condensed
out of the solar nebula.
These solids slowly coalesced, you know,
came together eventually to form what you call
as planetesimals.
These are objects that are, you know, a few tens
to a few hundred kilometers across
and you had, you know, internal heat, you know that led to
what you call as differentiation.
They'll have a core, a mantle and a crust.
So these iron meteorites we see here represents the cores
of those planetesimals.
So we believe that they were more than a hundred
planetesimals that differentiated between the orbits
of Mars and Jupiter.
But most of these planet als were destroyed catastrophically
due to impacts over the next few hundred million years.
And what we see now in the asteroid belt on remnants
of those catastrophic destructions,
- Most of the material that made up our solar system kind
of got swept up into the sun
and to the individual planets. But not all of it,
- You know, it's kind of like shattering a
plate on the floor.
You know you have a few big pieces but lots
and lots of small pieces.
- So asteroids are kind of those leftovers of the formation
of the solar system.
A lot of them keep their distance very nicely in the
asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
But some of them over time
because of being tweaked by the gravitational pole
of Jupiter and whatnot,
have made their way into the inner solar system.
And so some of these leftovers from the formation
of the solar system can get a little too close
for comfort to earth.
- That's how we end up with near the asteroids.
- We'd really like to understand the distribution
of these objects, their compositions
and kind of where they come from.
- So that's what we're trying to find out.
- How do they leak into the inner part of the solar system
and get into this region near the Earth's orbit?
- You don't wanna just know that the asteroid is there.
You wanna know how large is it, what is it made of?
So there are telescopes that then go out
and study particular characteristics of asteroids
to the extent they can from the ground.
- So we want to find out what is the composition
of the object, how fast it's spinning,
whether it's one object or two objects.
And of course we want to know, you know, the mass
of the object and for that we need
to have an accurate idea on its size.
That's where radar comes into play.
- Yeah, that's cool to finally see it.
- This is the biggest in this complex.
The it's 70 meters in diameter, all the other ones are 34.
This is the most powerful planetary radar on earth.
So here we are at the Goldstone Solar System radar in the
middle of the Mojave Desert about a few hours drive from
Pasadena at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
This is where I connect remotely to observe
near earth asteroids.
I'm Shante Nunu, I'm a asteroid radar researcher here at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
- Oh that's amazing. - Whenever an asteroid comes close
to earth, we use this radar to observe it,
which can tell us about the shape of the asteroid.
It can show details on the surface of the asteroid such
as ridges, concavities, craters.
We can also measure the precise distance to the asteroid.
- And then from all of that you get,
you get really fantastic science
and then you get that information you might need in the
event an impact threat is discovered.
- So radar is an active form
of observing an asteroid in the sense
that we generate our own electromagnetic waves.
We use really high power transmitters
to transmit electromagnetic waves in the
direction of the asteroid.
The asteroid reflects these waves.
They get distorted during this process
and they come back towards earth.
So you have signals from space coming in, reflecting
of the primary dish, reflecting onto the secondary dish
and then they reflect onto the instruments.
We can compare the distorted received waveform
with what we sent.
And using this comparison we are able
to generate highly detailed images or maps of the asteroid.
So one example I can show you is 2024 mk,
which was a recent target that we observed.
We were able to obtain these very high resolution images
where each pixel is under two meters in resolution.
If I zoom in here,
you can see all these intricate details on the
surface of the asteroid.
Like you can see these radar dark regions,
you can see it's a very irregular shape.
There's a lot of things that look like ridges.
So we can, we can track these features
and we can measure the spin rate of this asteroid.
So there's a control room in the pedestal.
This is where the telescope operators sit.
We send them the orbits of the asteroid,
we send them the observing plan,
we send them the configurations we want
to observe the asteroids with.
So this is where the telescope, the operators sit
and this is where they control all the equipment from
and that's where the data gets collected in the
computer behind.
And that's what we connect to
to download the processed images at JPL.
This seems like a nice setup, so I'll send it
to the telescope operators.
When we start observing an asteroid,
we need a very accurate orbit
so we can point accurately at the target.
We get a spectra, update the orbit,
we get a course revolution image, we update the orbit again.
And so we transmit for a fixed amount of time,
which is the round trip light time to the asteroid.
And as soon as that time elapses,
that is when we start receiving the echo.
We switch from the transmitter to the receiver.
It takes a few seconds to travel a few million miles
back into space and reflect off the asteroid.
So we transmit for an entire round trip time
and then as soon as the echoes start reaching back
to the telescope, that's when we switch to the receiver and,
and then we record the whole transmitted wave.
So for one round trip time and that constitutes one image.
And once we get a good orbit,
we can start getting these higher resolution images.
It's always exciting
because it's the first time anyone is looking at the
features on the surface of this asteroid.
Most of the asteroids that we observe,
we've not seen them before.
And so whatever you see with the radar is a surprise
and a lot of the times it's discovering something new.
It is very cool to know that at least for a few minutes
or maybe even a few days,
you're the only person in the world who knows this thing.
It's, it's very exciting, it's a very exciting feeling.
There's a sense of responsibility knowing that,
that I'm part of such an important team
and we are all tackling such an important problem
of asteroid threat assessment and medication.
- Let's say we discovered something
and we only had a small window to observe it
and quickly turn around information about its properties.
- What if we find an asteroid that's going
to impact the earth next week?
- Then all of a sudden an opportunity came up
that nature gave us an asteroid designated 2023
DZ two was discovered.
- So this object was discovered
by a team in the Canary Islands in in Europe
- When it was discovered, the observations were directly
sent to the minor planet center
and then we publish everything.
The role of the minor planet center is to distinguish
what is known and what is not known.
We define them as a complete new object.
And so in the following couple of hours, a lot
of observers from all over the
world that started observing it.
And then it was like a really large impact probabilities,
which means it could impact the earth
- Over a period of a few days.
It was had high impact potential
three years from the discovery date
- And originally it had a decently high probability
of hitting earth at its first discovery
and then it was followed up and the probability went up
- And that this IMP probability stayed high even if people
were sending more and more observations.
Which means that the path on which the asteroid was,
was really towards the Earth.
- 2023 DZ two was a significant asteroid.
That kind of close approach to the earth of a rock
that size might only happen a handful of times per century.
- And then eventually it turned out
that it was coming really close
but it wasn't hitting the earth.
- Other observations had been made
to take 2023 DZ two off the risk list.
So that was a good thing.
- Suddenly the probability of hitting earth goes down
and that's because the more points you gather,
the better refined your orbit can become.
- At nasa, we thought this would be a good opportunity
to launch an observing campaign in coordination
with the International Asteroid Warning Network to try
to get the worldwide community together
to gather observations about physical properties
of an asteroid and turn that around quickly.
- So we essentially had a very short five day campaign
where we had to reduce the impact risk
by observing the object
and collecting more positions along its orbit,
understand its rotation period, understand its composition,
try and observe it with radar
to get some physical information like the size and volume
and try and input all this information in an impact hazard
model to see what would be the impact on the ground.
So we were able to pull all
of this stuff off within a matter of five days.
- We took this real world opportunity to exercise the whole
system and campaign that would be done if a potential impact
or was found
- In case we were ever faced with a situation
where we needed to do that to measure the properties
of an asteroid during a short window in a coordinated
fashion with the worldwide community.
- So we used the Goldstone radar to observe it
and we managed to obtain images with the resolutions
of under four meters on this asteroid, which showed
that it was an irregular body,
it was spinning extremely rapidly
based on the visible extents in the radar images,
we could tell that the asteroid was somewhere about
30 to 40 meters.
So a bit smaller than
what we could estimate using just the visible,
it was an important target to practice working together
to exercise the systems in order to refine the orbit
and improve the characterization of the asteroid.
- So my students
and I, we observed this object using
telescopes one on campus.
We use the NASA infrared telescope facility,
which is on Monica Hawaii.
It is one of the few telescopes in the world that is capable
of telling what asteroids are made of.
So we try and do geology with the telescope.
We're trying to do prospecting, you know, trying
to understand what minerals are there on these asteroids
and using those ral signatures, kind
of the spectral fingerprints to identify
what fingerprint matches with those of as meteorites
that we have in the lab.
So that's what we were trying to do with DZ two.
- So this is the 2023 DZ two,
- This is the motion, this is the, the object
that's moving there is DZ two, correct?
- Yeah. So you can see it moving through the starfield
- Starfield and that's the spectrum
of the visible spectrum right next to it.
The first order visible spectrum. Yeah.
So in the end what we assess about DZ two was
that it was a much brighter than we expected
because when an asteroid is discovered, we don't know
how bright or dark it is.
So that sets a range in size, okay?
You can slowly narrow down the size depending on more
characterization information.
So if you have radar that gives you a very accurate,
you know, diameter, you know,
pretty close to the final thing.
If you have thermal infrared measurements,
you can constrain the observation.
So you can constrain the diameter for that.
But you also have composition,
composition tells you something about
how bright the object is.
So that gives you an additional piece of information.
So no one technique gives you the ultimate answer,
but complementary sets
of information from different telescopes,
different techniques kind of let us converge to
to, to one answer.
And the case of DZ two, what we've done is with the IRTF,
we spectrally characterize, we looked at the light reflected
of DZ two in different wavelengths
and in the infrared, in the wavelengths we cannot see,
but rattlesnakes can see, you know, kind
of like heat seeking stuff.
What we see is a unique spectral signature
for a specific mineral
that is only found in this particular type
of meteorite called alite.
And we have a few of those in our collection.
You know, both that fell on the earth fell in Antarctica.
So here's an example of it.
This is an alite, it's essentially white, okay?
It's reflecting 60 to 70% of the light.
What we do is that take this meteorite,
crush them into a powder
and put them in a lab spectrometer to get the spectrum
of this meteorite.
In other words, how is light interacting
with it at different wavelengths?
So what we do here is that we take a sample
and then we crush it and we have it, you know,
being observed by the spectrometer
that we have it here instead of the sun.
We have a light source that is reflecting, you know,
off the sample and we're collecting visible infrared spectra
off that sample that we have.
Spectrum is nothing but light split into many wavelengths
and using that spectrum we compare the same thing we get
from the NASA infrared telescope and we can try
and match, you know, the spectrum
of the meteorite in the lab versus the telescopic spectrum,
you know, off the near earth object itself.
And by taking this spectrum
and comparing it to the one that's coming off the telescope
off the near earth asteroid, we should be able to compare
and tell what the near earth asteroid is made of.
Because it was so bright,
you don't need the object to be that big.
So it ended up being smaller than
what we expected of the size range.
And because if it's smaller, you know, hopefully we pray
that the atmosphere takes care of it
and we won't have much impact on the ground.
So that's what ended up happening is that we managed
to nail the composition
of the object very well using the NASA
infer telescope facility.
- So 2023 DZ two was a really interesting
example of planetary defense working
on an international scale.
So it's really a resounding success in
multiple organizations across the planet coming together.
And the fact that we were able to discover it,
characterize it, determine it was a risk,
and then remove that risk all
before it passed close
to the planet was a pretty amazing feat.
- Let's say we do find something
that poses an impact threat to earth. What next?
- The day is coming when Earth will get impacted.
The D source went to extend
because they didn't have a space program.
We do have one
- We can, so why stop there?
- 10, 9, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
- And lift off of the Falcon nine
and DART on NASA's first planetary defense test
to intentionally crash into an asteroid.
- We're embarking on a new era of humankind.
- We're doing this mission to prove
that we can deflect an asteroid
- Even if we do everything right, our sensors work well,
our spacecraft is doing well.
Even then we might still miss
- 4, 3, 2, 1.
- For the first time ever,
humanity has changed the orbit
of a planetary body.
- NASA confirms
that DART successfully changed the targeted
asteroids trajectory.
Now this is a watershed moment for planetary defense
and a watershed moment for humanity
- As was demonstrated with the DART mission.
If an asteroid were ever discovered
that could pose an impact threat to earth
and we do have the capability
to deflect an asteroid in space
and to change its orbit.
- You know, once we've found an object
and determined that it could be an impact threat
to the earth, what do we do to mitigate it?
- Eventually we have to be ready
to nudge an asteroid off its scores.
- NASA's recently demonstrated a a particular type
of mitigation technique that we call kinetic impact
- In case there was an asteroid coming towards earth
and you are there, you can actually stop it.
I mean that's kind of fantastic.
- Our double asteroid redirection test dart always a
demonstration of using a kinetic impactor technique.
- The idea is pretty simple.
You basically just take a spacecraft
and you run it into an asteroid
and bump it out of the way what
- You think science fiction.
But this is real.
Never in my life would I have thought I would take a couple
hundred million dollars spacecraft
and crash it into an asteroid.
- Its main goal was to go to an asteroid with its moon
to hit the moon and see
how much it changed the orbit of the moon.
- The moonlit dim morphos, which orbits the asteroid did.
Amos, in order to change dim Morphos orbit
and show that we can deflect incoming
asteroids if we need to.
- Dart will only be changing the period of the orbit
of Dior FOSS via a tiny amount.
And really that's all that's needed In the event
that an asteroid is discovered well ahead of time
before it might impact
- Earth and space just a little bit is just enough
to make an asteroid actually miss us.
So behind me you see the spacecraft, it's really cool
to see it coming together in
- Real life.
It is fantastic to see it in real life,
- To see it turn from ideas into real pieces
that are gonna go into space.
- The solar arrays will actually roll out
to 28 feet in length.
Once the solar arrays are deployed, it's going
to be the size of a school bus.
As the solar array opens out, it's going
to swing out in this direction.
To me the most important thing
and the most exciting things is all the
technical challenges.
My job was primarily
to make sure all the systems on the
spacecraft work together.
On top, you see the next sea thruster over here is
our star tracker.
And then over here is our high gain antenna.
My job is to make sure we launch.
My job is to make sure we're able to receive data back.
My job is to make sure we hit, there's Draco on the bottom
of the spacecraft as well, of course is integration
and test
the asteroids.
Only two football fields in size
- We're flying at over six kilometers a second.
- 30 days out we see one pixel on our field of view.
- They can see did Amos and demo
Morphos is one point of light.
- About four hours out our spacecraft becomes autonomous.
- And then that's where everything gets really exciting.
- You actually are seeing impact.
- The algorithm has to identify
and hit the target in the field of view of the camera.
And so you could just imagine if it was a human being
joysticking this because we don't know for sure
what the asteroids look like.
Our simulation gives us the capability
to use different asteroid shapes
and asteroid objects to see
that our smart NAV algorithm performs
against all these unknowns
- Astronomers that are going to measure
how much DART changed DIM Morphos is orbit using
ground-based telescopes all over the world.
These curves show the brightness change due
to dim morphos moving in front of and behind.
Did Amos, we can tell
how quickly DIM Morphos is moving around.
Did Amos, we make these measurements before DART arrives
and then this is the same technique that we'll use
after the impact to determine
how much we've changed the orbit by
- This is Lowell Observatory.
Lowell is one of many observatories around the world
that will be observing the dark impact.
NASA's first ever planetary defense test mission to see
how much a spacecraft impact can
deflect an asteroid in its orbit.
This is where Pluto was discovered
and we are still doing research in all areas
of astronomy today.
So let's go check it out.
This is the Pluto telescope, the telescope that was used
to discover Pluto almost a hundred years ago.
So here we are at the Clark Telescope.
This is where first of all, low's at to observe Mars.
Let's head on over to the Lowell Discovery telescope about
an hour south of Flagstaff, which is where we are going
to be collecting data for the DART mission.
And the reason we're all the way out here in the middle
of this forest is that we have really dark skies here.
And this is the lull discovery telescope.
This is what a 4.3 meter telescope looks like.
This is what we'll be using to study DIDYMO and DIM Morphos.
In the days and weeks
after DART impact,
the DART spacecraft will be hitting an asteroid called Dior
foss a special because it's a binary asteroid,
which means a satellite
around a larger asteroid called Diddy Mouses
and DART will actually be hitting DIM morphos.
And what we will be measuring is
how much DART changes the orbit
of DIM morphos around Didymo.
And so this is an important test
for planetary defense mitigation strategies in case we
have to do this for real.
The Lowell Discovery Telescope is one of many telescopes
around the world, which will be used
to study did IMOs and Dior fos.
It's really a global coordinated effort.
And what we're looking at here is a large 4.3 meter primary
mirror that's in the middle of the telescope tube here.
Up at the top is a secondary mirror.
The secondary mirror up top there is
what is focusing the light down onto the instruments
and allows us to take images with the camera
that's located down at the bottom.
This is maybe one of my favorite hidden rooms
at the telescope.
We're like standing inside the telescope
and underneath the telescopes,
a hundred tons above your head.
Held up by this and this, which is cool.
It's sort of as you can see the
the highest peak around here.
Just over 8,000 feet. And come up here for sunset.
Oh my god, you know, sun setting right there.
It's just, it's perfect.
For dart, we're gonna be collecting images of the night sky
and typically an observer would be here in front of one
of these consoles controlling the instrument
and taking images like these
as they're coming in off the telescope.
DART is really a sort of before and after experiment.
We need to understand the system
before the spacecraft intentionally impacts,
and then we have to understand what the outcome of
that impact event is as we watch from the earth.
Dior FOS will pass in front of did mouses
and behind did mouses.
What we will be doing with those images is measuring the
brightness of Diddy mouses in those images
and looking at how that brightness changes.
And those dips and brightness allow us to measure when
these eclipse happen
and measure the orbit period of dim morphos.
And so you have essentially a fixed star field here.
All the white dots or stars of different brightness.
And moving through this field is Didi Moss
and DIM morphos, which again, we can't distinguish them
as discrete points of light,
but we have that small object moving
through the field of view.
So after impact, we will then be able to go back
and start observing intensely looking
for those mutual events, those eclipse events
of dim fos passing in front of and behind DIDI Mosts.
And on each one of these frames,
we're measuring the brightness to assess whether
or not it's undergoing one of these events
where Dior FOS is passing in front of or behind.
This is such a cool experiment.
It's such a singular experiment using the ground-based
telescopes like this one
and others around the world to to watch the systems
and see how it's affected by this impact event.
Because that's really what's gonna give us the answer to
what did DART do at the time of impact.
And that will be exciting to see how
that evolves over the days and weeks following that impact.
- Good afternoon everybody.
Two weeks ago we conducted humanities,
first planetary defense test.
- The team is measured that the orbital period
of dimorphic has changed.
- Astronomers have been using telescopes on earth to measure
how much that time has changed.
- These telescopes have been observing this system nightly.
And that's what you see going across here on this
graph on the top.
Just this nightly telescopic data night
after night after night.
- And it resulted in moving an asteroid
and actually changing its orbit
by a few millimeters per second.
Now that doesn't sound like a lot,
but acting over a long period of time, it could be enough
to help move something out of the way
of the earth should we ever need to do so.
- It was expected to be a huge success if it only slowed the
orbit by about 10 minutes,
but it actually slowed it by 32 minutes.
- The whole world has been watching this.
Wow, I need, what an exciting
- Day for the DART team in case you're keeping score.
Humanity won asteroids zero.
- So dart, the dinosaurs are made completely extinct
by an asteroid impact so many years ago.
Here we are, we can actually do something about it.
I think this is just wonderful.
- There are times, you know, in a year
or in in a decade when you are in awe, humanity.
You know what I mean? Despite everything
that happens in the world on a day-to-day basis in a new
cycle, there are times when you know, human beings kind
of come together to do great things.
And I think for me personally, dart was one of those moments
where you are just in absolute awe of humanity.
You know, here we are taking a spacecraft
and flying it, you know, hundreds of millions of, you know,
kilometers away and hitting an object with that Christian
and it all happens in, in, in a blink of an eye.
You know what I mean? It was not a long mission, you know,
and, and, and I think I, I'm very, very proud
of my colleagues who managed to pull that off.
- It demonstrates how far we've come as a species
in the last few centuries,
even from the first rockets launched into outer space,
the first asteroids being discovered to the ability
to realize what threat asteroids pose to the planet.
And now the capability demonstrated to send a spacecraft
to an asteroid that's in orbit around the sun and
and show that we have the capability if we have enough lead
time to alter its orbit.
That to me was just a fascinating moment in human history.
- Oh yeah, did watch it. I was like, it was super cold.
I did watch the the Dark Mission.
- Yes, I have watched the dart impact. It was pretty amazing
- Last video that they were showing live
and then you saw everything up until to the last moment.
I thought that there was such a big achievement
as something like people work on it for so long
and it proved that we can do it.
- The dart impact day was one
of the most exciting days in my career.
We watched the impact here at JPL.
The impact was bigger than I had expected,
but I was also excited
because we had an observing run
for observing Didymo just about 11 hours after impact
and it would be the first opportunity to see how much
of an effect the impact had did.
Amos was all I was thinking about the whole day.
I couldn't sleep. The observing run started at about 3:00 AM
that night and we had our first echo
of did Amos after impact.
We weren't expecting to measure the deflection that night,
but the echo was off from
where it should have been if there was no dark impact
and I couldn't believe my eyes.
I was like, either there's some
problems in the measurement
or this is a real detection, just 12 hours after impact.
So this was the first Goldstone radar detection
of the effect
of the dart impact on the orbit of Dim Morpheus.
The yellow circle, it circles the location
where the echo from amorphis should have been had there been
no dart impact.
But then the red is circles, the echo of dim morphos,
which you can see is this white.here
and you can see it's quite far away from
where it should have been without the impact.
- And it just gave it a small nudge.
But if you wanted to do this in the future,
potentially it could potentially work,
but you'd want to do it years in advance.
Warning time is really key here in order to enable this sort
of asteroid deflection to potentially be used in the future
and is part of a much larger planetary defense strategy.
- The dart mission was the first kinetic
impact or demonstration.
- It was a successful demonstration of of that technique.
There are also other possible techniques
- If you do find one that is coming.
Definitely there are several options.
- There are different type of mitigation
and they actually depend on when you discover
that the object is gonna impact.
- Well, one of the most important things we can do to ensure
that mitigation actually works is we need to provide time.
- Time is your best friend.
- I have time to build a spacecraft, go to space,
analyze the object, try to understand what type
of physical properties this object has.
- Then what we call the reconnaissance mission to fly
by a rendezvous so that we have a better understanding of
what the asteroid is, such as the size, the mass
- Chemical composition for example.
It is a solid rock as it has boulders, something like that.
And then you wanna know its target in a very accurate way
because you wanna track it down and like go straight on it.
- The next step is to figure out a, the mission
that could potentially deflect the asteroid.
- There are other techniques though that still remain
to be tested for asteroid deflection.
- A gravity tractor for instance,
where you just have a spacecraft of, of,
of some significant mass a station keep
with the asteroid in the right position and,
and the mutual attraction
between the two objects will allow the spacecraft
to slowly tug the asteroid off of the impacting trajectory.
Another technique might be an ion beam deflector
where you've got a spacecraft
that turns its ion engines onto the surface
of the asteroid, continuously bombarding the surface
of the asteroid, does create a pressure on its surface and
therefore a force that
changes the velocity of the asteroid.
Of course, all the Hollywood movies like
to use nuclear explosives.
It's very dramatic and exciting,
but we wouldn't blow the asteroid up
like they do in the movies.
You detonate the device, the
bombards, the surface of the asteroid with heavy radiation
that causes the surface material to vaporize
and jet off and
and creates instantaneous rocket engine so to speak,
and shoves the asteroid.
- Really the goal that NASA is to find the asteroids years
or decades in advance
that could pose an impact threat to earth.
And then you have the gift of time
to address possibly not having that impact happen at all.
NASA is just one piece in the puzzle.
NASA has its role
as the information gatherer from space
and conveying that information to other agencies.
- Every piece of the puzzle mu must rise up to the occasion
and perform seamlessly.
To do that, we have to practice.
- NASA also participates in interagency exercises
with many others across the US government to step
through a situation where an asteroid is discovered
so many years ahead of time.
Here is the type of information that is known about it.
Here are the possibilities of what could happen next.
- Good morning everybody. Thank you for coming.
It's been a pleasure. This is our fifth exercise.
- Welcome to the fifth Interagency Planetary Defense
table tap exercise.
- This exercise is incredibly important
to bring together the world experts and decision makers.
Op Planetary Defense, national Space Council,
- Shema - NASA headquarters,
- US Space Command,
- The Department of State to better prepare us for
what is an inevitable future asteroid impact.
We know it will happen.
We, we just don't know when it will happen.
- You know, really this exercise is focuses on is
how we plan and coordinate our activities in response
to a potential impact for it all
to come together into a plan on, on how we save the world.
- And with that, I invite you all
to open the blue envelope in your folder.
And what you have in front of you is a notification from the
International Asteroid Warning Network about this
hypothetical scenario of a asteroid impact
for the near Earth asteroid 2023 TTX.
- At this point in the scenario, the impact probability
of the asteroid is 72% as calculated
by NASA JPLC Neos, and by the ISA NIO Coordination Center.
The impact date would be the 12th of July, 2038.
The potential impact locations would span a corridor from
the South Pacific across North America, the Atlantic,
the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean coast of Africa,
Egypt to the coast of Saudi Arabia.
Now the size of the object based on observations from the
ground, it's highly uncertain based on the brightness
and the unknown surface reflectivity,
the coloring of the asteroid.
And so it's most likely estimated to be in the range
of a hundred to 320 meters based on, on
what is known about asteroids,
but potentially at the extreme range of 60
to 800 meters in diameter.
- Alright, so the next critical factor to consider is
of course, how many people could be affected
by these different damage sizes along the
different impact locations.
- It's certainly regional to country scale based on that,
that size range
- Four asteroids in this general size range,
the primary hazard is going to be local blast
and thermal ground damage.
And the larger sizes could also cause tsunami.
So overall the average population risk is
around 270,000 people
among all the potential earth impacting cases.
And then of course there's still that 28% chance
that the asteroid could swing by earth and miss us entirely.
- We have filled out the uncertainty in 2038 with a bunch
of white dots and,
and we really don't know which
of those white dots is the real asteroid.
And so we just, we simulate virtual asteroids
and we just run them all towards the earth.
The current situation is
that we don't know where it will hit.
We just know that it will hit along this line.
- For this exercise over the next two days,
we're gonna stay frozen in time right here, right now,
14 years ahead of the asteroid impact
and figure out what do we do
with the information that we have now.
- Disaster preparedness planning,
international space response information sharing
in public messaging. So the
- Challenge now is to figure out how do we respond
and prepare for an uncertain event like this where
we're not sure what could happen,
but the potential consequences could be cut
quite catastrophic.
- This gets at sort of what we were hinting at there,
starting to talk about not just what the threat is,
but what we could potentially do about it.
- The good news is this asteroid impact may be preventable.
We have at least three technologies
that we can consider for this.
And they have different physical effects.
So the first, it's kinetic impact,
which is like the dart mission,
whereas spacecraft impacts the asteroid
to change its speed very slightly.
The second is an ion beam
where you use a controlled electric thruster to slowly push
or pull on the asteroid and change its speed.
And then finally it's a nuclear explosive device
where you literally boil off part
of the asteroid in order to change its speed.
And we also need to know the physical properties
of the asteroid because all of these methods, whether
or not they work and the specifics of
how you would design them, are tailored
to the specific asteroid properties
- Through forums like this one today and tomorrow
and bringing together all of you the world experts,
we can tackle the detection
and characterization of asteroids, ways
to improve coordination among allied nations.
- That's why we wanna exercise all of these capabilities now
and not wait until then.
- We took this opportunity to exercise the whole system
and campaign that would be done if a potential impactor
was found.
- Planetary defense is a team sport Asteroid impacts
our shared risk.
And so we really need to work as a team.
- It's really important that we have a global effort to try
to understand the problem.
- No one nation can independently save the world in case
of an impending impact.
- It's a fantastic community.
- I'm part of a global team of planetary defenders.
Very proud to be part of that planetary defense family.
- The not only protects Earth today,
but provides protection for the.