 Okay, and welcome to the March webinar of the NASA night sky network this month We feature Michael Zelensky with our webinar who's going to take us on a tour of NASA's collection of materials That they have from space but first here's Vivian white with an activity you can engage your audiences in astro materials Hi, everybody I know a lot of you out there have meteorite collections and one of our toolkits that we have through the NASA night sky network is called space rocks and In that is a really fun activity. That's super easy to facilitate called meteorite or meteor wrong We got this originally from Shabo Space and Science Center and we've made it compact So you can take it with you put it in your telescope case You can make one of these on your own or make sure you get a space rocks toolkit. So I'm going to tip my Screen down just a little bit so you can see it at this camera. This is the Flipbook that comes with it and it's appropriately called meteorite meteor wrong it also comes with lots of different rocks including a few space rocks and As well as a tech tight it comes with a Magnet and a magnifying glass, which are both very useful when looking for meteorite So it starts off and it says it's got three different sections here One of them says not sure about these rocks and you put all the rocks in there in the beginning And then you have one section up here that says I think these are earth rocks and these I think over in this section You're going to be meteorites. So this flipbook is really easy We have a lot of Girl Scouts who really love doing this activity because you don't have to know much to begin with and you Get the hang of it quite quickly. So while on this side It talks to the public about what you were going to talk about on the flip side It gives a little bit of a script here for the presenter so presenter goes ahead and flips it over and It gives you different clues That tell you how to identify a meteorite. So it talks about they need to be light in color They need to be I'm sorry, they cannot be light in color anything that's light in color like this one We'll go and be an earth rock anything that's light weight will also probably be an earth rock so the your participants go through and Feel these different rocks and look at them and examine them see what they look like and Eventually use the magnet to detect some of these. It's a fun activity That's very very easy to facilitate and it goes through quite a bit of information about rocks include about space rocks and meteorites Including what they look like and how to find them and and actually how difficult it is also to find them So it it talks in the end about well You're not going to want to go into a stream to find these Meteorites and talks about where many of the meteorites are found which I'm sure will be covered this evening So that's it. You can find it Dave will put a link to that hopefully in the Chat and you'll find it if you're listening to this recording after the fact in the information below So enjoy the webinar. I'm looking forward to it. All right. Thank you Vivian Okay, so now for our featured program Michael Zelensky works on understanding how asteroids have undergone chemical weathering As well as the mineral composition of comets He's currently leading efforts to locate and characterize fluid inclusions in astro materials And I'm an important thing to find out where what kind of fluids might be out there in space He's led or participated in successful meteorite recovery expeditions on four continents and developed techniques For characterizing the meteoroid in space debris impact features on spacecraft Dr. Zelensky has also led the effort to characterize the impact record of the long duration exposure facility satellite Developed new techniques for the analysis of micro particles He led the sample analysis teams for the stardust comet material return mission and the Hayubas Bousa Asteroid sample return mission. He's now on the Hayubusa to mission science team Which is developing the next generation of astro material sample handling and analysis protocols So please welcome Michael Zelensky Hope you can hear me Yes, we can great. So first of all, I apologize. I'm getting over a cold. So if I start coughing like crazy, please forgive me So I work at Johnson Space Center in Houston. I've been here for a really long time I really came up to New York a long time ago And I always wanted to be a geologist and so do you rocks out in the desert that never really happened Instead of it came kind of a space geologist Looking at samples of asteroids and comets and and getting those for the lab. And so we'll just click ahead here You want to tell them about that picture? Oh, no, no, no Okay, so quickly this talk is very broad and so if I go over things, you know, very very well I apologize ahead of time But you know every astronomical talk I've been do shows picture of the solar system like this Of course, this isn't what you'd actually see if you were out in space looking back at the planets This is what you'd see. This is actually a mosaic Taken of the solar system by the Voyager to spacecraft asked for after a pass by Neptune got like 20 years ago and Carl Sagan When the past Neptune Carl Sagan said, why don't you turn the spacecraft around it takes the pictures of the solar system and it did and it got this amazing. It's actually a Mosaic images and you can see the Sun in a little box there and you can see the giant planets Around it at this scale. You really can't see the terrestrial plants at all if you zoom in closer then you can see here's the Sun obviously and Mars wasn't visible, but you see Venus and you see the earth And it's mirrors right here. And so in this image And this is Jupiter in this image. The earth is only one pixel. I'm thinking Carl Sagan called it a pale blue dot So the idea that we're talking about going out in space and sampling space rocks or asteroids or comets You know, most of what's out there is pretty empty and the average Density of space is about one grain of dust per cubic kilometer. So it's pretty empty But so very very exciting I'll press the head here So I want to talk about missions that return samples from asteroids and comets kind of recently, but I'll step back The building we're sitting in was built to house the rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts You know, exactly 50 years ago. And yes, they really did go to the moon. It wasn't faked by NASA The rocks weren't actually created in laboratories in Arizona The rocks really did come from the moon a bunch of sites here and the US and also the Soviet Union had several separate term missions from the moon and those samples are brought back by humans all men unfortunately and also by robots And here's Dave Scott walking around on the Apollo 15 mission taking a photograph and These astronauts are now getting pretty gold down kind of passing away But fortunately the rocks they brought back will be on the earth. Hopefully forever They're a resource for continued generations when these missions were flying. I was in grade school basically and here I am 50 years later In the lab where these samples were stored and the sample to me the samples have not been looked at in 50 years In fact, they're about to open some lunar samples They've been sealed on the moon and not opened until this year. And so the idea is that We recover samples as cleanly as we can from no locations bring them back to earth Making available for analysis by scientists on the earth. Not only that we also tuck a lot of them away Keep them as clean as we can so that the grandchildren of those first scientists can say these samples now And so we're we're hosting Scientists now who were children when the samples were cluttered not even born yet And the goal is to keep these samples for hundreds of years even further on as a resource for for the future So the samples were all kept in in vaults in this building Not all the vaults are as serious as this one, which is the lunar vault But they're all kept behind guarded locked doors. And that's we're mainly to protect the samples from getting a Altered by interactions with the atmosphere or people So I'll skip ahead again here So 50 years ago, we were collecting rocks on the moon and brought them back And so this building was Was built to house the geologists who were training the Apollo astronauts But also to build laboratories to care for those Apollo samples But in 50 years since then we've acquired many new samples of of rocks from various places in the solar system starting with the asteroid belt and You all know where the asteroid belt is out to show you you're all astronomers Most of them are between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter as shown on this plot here But of course, they're really off through the solar system and there are asteroids orbit entirely within the orbit of Mercury for example And there are asteroids out there following the giant plants around as well And you know, sometimes we have to go out and get asteroids in spacecraft But but often we can just kind of wait for that for the asteroids to come to us This is what happened in February 15th 2013. I can't believe it's already six years ago. It's amazing There's a huge far ball over Siberia And here's a view here and this is taken from near the city of Chelyabinsk and This bright far ball actually the locals thought you might think that the average Russian might believe they're being attacked by American ICBMs, but actually the average Russian at a time. I was told believed this was actually exploding nuclear weapons dump Because it actually happened 40 years ago they have a nuclear weapons dump near Chelyabinsk and they explode it and they had something like this happened that So a lot of the locals thought oh, it's happened again. It didn't first think it's an asteroid, but it was Okay, what happened was an object about 17 meters in diameter entered the atmosphere 40,000 miles per hour about 10,000 tons of rock And of course it broke up As most of these do thankfully Here's a view looking out of a truck driving and if you can understand Russian He's gonna be cursing in Russian in a minute. So I apologize for that See this bright object right towards you. He got pretty scared The amazing thing was that Several thousand until this day as far as you know and no more than one person at a time They were been injured seriously by a falling meteorite, but on this day or the two thousand people were sent to hospitals From this this fall So these are unfortunate guys, but they were not they were more than two thousand people seriously injured mostly by broken glass in the Chili of Chelyabinsk So this okay, so here's a little piece. So this was winter times since February and Here's a little piece of the meteorite that fell. It was an ordinary conduit meteorite a very common kind of meteorite And it fell in the snow people were covered thousands of pieces of this meteorite and you can buy them on eBay very easily right now The largest piece there's a left side is a view looking down at a lake Some people around the lake. This is a hole made in lake by the largest piece entering the lake Through this ice and about a year later They found the piece sitting on the ground in the bottom of the lake diver brought it up It isn't as big as this hole is but several feet across and it's now in the museum so went from Like several ten about about two about 20 meters in diameter to about one meter being the largest recovered piece So, you know the US was thinking about doing a mission to an asteroid an earth-costing asteroid Grabbing a sample of it bringing it back to see what was like that would have cost billions of dollars Then it happened for free like that same year. So, you know, sometimes the meteorites come to you So again, you can wait for the meteorites to come to you or you can go looking for them That's something else we do every year and you can do that too For example in Texas if you go out to West Texas, you walk around try lake beds. You can find meteorites as most of you know This is a place. This is the Namib Desert. I was there in 1990 We walked around for several weeks. We found meteorites and you almost can't avoid finding them out there The best place to find meteorites on the earth is is in the cold desert of Antarctica This is a really old satellite view of Antarctica And basically the meteorites fall all across the earth in equal frequency pretty much For the most part when they fall they land in the ocean or lakes or someone's backyard or the top of your house or You know a stream and no one ever finds them. They fall apart They rust and they're gone But in hot deserts, especially in cold deserts where there's limited water meteorites can fall and they can persist for millions of years In Antarctica their meteorites been found in the middle of the earth for more than four million years And then Antarctica they just gradually move on the ice sheets as they is a Slowly move towards the edge of the continent along this cursor here and drop in the ocean Unless they're carried down an ice sheet that hits a barrier range of mountains like the transit Arctic mountains right here Then as the ice stalls behind mountains projecting up through the ice the winds the Cannabatic Antarctic winds sweep across the ice Cause the ice to evaporate and then the meteorites then they reemerge from the snow and ice and just start to sit there as On top of the ice easy to pick up Here's a view of blue ice that's been stranded behind some mountains in Antarctica So every year people fly down to Antarctica or take a boat down there and spend some time Walking or still be on the cross the ice looking for meteorites And more than 13,000 meteorites have been found in Antarctica in the past 50 years So when I went down there a couple of times we flew down in c-130 planes went into the ice Going to the field then In a small twin otter or helicopters The view on the right shows the plush Commodations in the c-130 as you're flying down to Antarctica. It's about a seven-hour flight from New Zealand It's not the most fun flight, but it's really fun landing in Antarctica Here's a view of McMurdo Station the largest city as it is in Antarctica on the edge of the continent and this little down here on the left This is actually um one of Robert Falkin Scott's huts that's still there preserved as a landmark site Is there dead seals there and everything else outside of it? But to go you then you go into the field looking for meteorites you to in the field in another c-130 Or me on helicopter You move around using these snowmobiles You live in scott tents This is a two person tent. It's about six feet across We'll be there for six or seven weeks living on the ice And if you look around you can see the bathroom This is the bathroom once you're outside the tent you're in the bathroom basically So you wonder what it's like going to the bathroom in Antarctica It's it's not that much fun, but you can use to it. I'll say that But most people go down there really love it because they really like being in an unusual place And being able to collect meteorites This someday is very windy like this which case you feel kind of stranded Come near the nearest towns, maybe hundreds of kilometers away But most days are like this really beautiful. It looks like your these snowmobiles are are on water But it's just blue ice just a really beautiful day these mountains the background are several thousand feet high And you find this here's a meteorite sitting on the ice It's really fun to find meteorites and you could you could find in a field season maybe 2,000 meteorites down there So That's definitely the place to go for meteorites And the cool thing is you might think gee if we have 13,000 meteorites, you know, I bother finding another 200 But the fact is that every year they find new and unusual kinds of meteorites From different asteroids that had never been sampled before So every year we go down there. It's like a new spacecraft mission to a new asteroid They come back to houston just across the hall for where we are right now Meteorites are stored first in freezers and they're slowly thought out in nitrogen gas and then stored And then sampled and analyzed And then the results are published in catalogs Any scientists can request them We have meteorites from mars already You don't have to send a spacecraft to mars to get samples who already have like sitting like 16 meteorites from there already Of course, you want to get samples from known well Characterized places But we have some idea of what it's like already from from these meteorites many of which have been found in Antarctica And we have meteorites also from the moon It wouldn't have recognized these if we hadn't brought samples back from the moon But because we did that we recognize them very easily the martian rocks recognize pretty much only because This is the martian rock here. This one contains these areas of black glass That i'm looking at where the cursor Those are places where the impact that knocked their rocks off of mars Partially melted the rock and when they melted the rock they they squeezed some of the atmosphere of mars into that melt So when that freeze when it froze to glass the glass trapped the atmosphere of mars And fortunately the viking spacecraft were the first spacecraft back in the 70s Who sniffed the atmosphere of mars and analyzed it? And the scientists actually in this building first melted These bits of glass in the lab and then sucked out the gas analyzed it found that it was an identical match To what the vikings spacecraft has found in the martian atmosphere This was proof these rocks really were from mars We haven't yet found any meteorites from venus Or mercury or or the moon or rather from from the earth yet But probably those are around to be found you keep hoping So uh, we found that meteorites are really important They tell us a lot about the asteroids and how planets form you know about that already pretty much I'll just say briefly that you know the interest in asteroids Probably it's because they're kind of a threat to us or are worried about an impact from an asteroid You want to know how to characterize them what the properties are like so that if you have to destroy one The future might have an idea of how to do that But for the scientists the real interest is that they tell us about Other environments in the early solar system And a lot of them record the first stages of planet formation They're kind of plants never quite made it, but they record a lot of the early stages of planet aggregation and formation And that that history is locked in and so we're looking at many meteorites You can look at different stages of how say the earth form or the moon form And as I said already they were also a threat to civilization Um As you know, but if you've been to any crater in city new york career, there are several new york craters in texas I was actually one last weekend. Uh, this is the one in arizona, which is probably the best preserved one on earth But there's there's uh, many of these on the earth Remind us that uh, you know, we're all part of the solar system Occasionally, uh, you know things happen that are maybe kind of bad Here's two scars of two impacts in canada Each of those are the size of the city of tokyo. They're quite large And those are probably from cometary impacts and comets are maybe a more awesome threat than asteroids because asteroids give a chance of uh Characterizing where they are the orbits years ahead of time And then figuring out if you're going to hit the earth in the future Let me take some action against that. All right for comets the long period of comets They might appear just a few months Before they hit the earth giving us real little warning of what's going to happen So the comets are even which are traveling faster than the asteroids potentially larger in some cases Are perhaps a bigger threat than asteroids are So with that in mind, we had a mission that launched, uh, 20 years ago in 1999 to visit a comet and bring samples back called the stardust mission And the stardust mission we only had 200 million dollars to do this mission, which seems like a lot of money, right? But in fact, that's what half of what a shuttle launch cost That isn't that much money And so for that much money All we're getting forward to do was to sort of fly by the comet coma the atmosphere of the comet open up a tray of some clutter material Try to catch some dust from the coma and bring it back to earth and that worked. It was amazing And we used this tray here It's shown here being loaded into the spacecraft before launch And this was a silica aerogel. It's the lightest material known to people, right You can make it. No, I think you can make it people have made it for high school projects actually in their kitchen And the thing here is it's very very light very transparent And you can capture a very fast moving grains of comet comet dust And and bring it back. And that's what we did launched 20 years ago. I can't believe it's 20 years ago this little diagram showing you the orbit of of Let's see the earth's orbit is a little inner white circle the sun's here in the center Um, here's Saturn's orbit Jupiter. I'm sorry. You're in his orbit Uranus's orbit Yeah, that's right. Jupiter is here. That's right uh, so Uh, the comet viltu was a comet visited in this spacecraft and it has the orbit shown in the red here So travels out to where Jupiter is And then comes in pretty close to the earth's orbit making it a good candidate for a mission to return samples Um, it turns out that by calculating the orbit back in time scientists found that before 1974 Which is here. I go from high school The comet had this orbit on this yellow circle Yellow ellipse took it took it out beyond the giant planets And had a close approach to Jupiter in that year which swung into this new red orbit So we figured since it's like kind of freshly in the inner solar system might be an especially dusty comet And very primitive and those proved to be incorrect Here's a little cartoon showing the spacecraft Solar panels the comet viltu is about to pass it. This is January 2nd 2004. So long time ago now This capsule is opened up on the left here and the tray of aerogel has looks like a tennis racket has extended up Above the solar above these little detectors here these little shields take the spacecraft from the comet dust Because the comet is passing by the spacecraft with a relative velocity of six kilometers per second. So it's The grains of dust smacking into the spacecraft from the comet are hitting about twice as fast as a bullet for rifle travels So the trick here was to design some material we use silica aerogel to capture the dust grains Uh, without destroying the spacecraft without destroying the dust grains without destroying the capture cells And it all worked. It's amazing the first time we tried it. It isn't always the case with spacecraft as you may know So this worked These little views of the comet nucleus as we passed by it Covered with craters. That was a big surprise. So quite understand that It's kind of shaped like a like a hamburger with a bite taken out of it Um, and you can see in this image is a composite of images of the atmosphere. You see dust coma Trails coming out of the dust jets coming out of the comet and nucleus here It's all about seven comers across That's a medium-sized comet nucleus You know comets are the biggest things in the source system. They're they're they're comas and tails are millions of comers along But the nuclear are quite small So we passed through three of these jets During the time we were opening the air gel and collecting dust. So we brought back to the earth of thousands of of coma grains from this comet From three jets. This is a view showing the spacecraft bearing the atmosphere over central utah 2006 And here's the capsule back on the ground And in the lab opening up just across the hall. This is a really exciting times about 10 p.m. At night Really tired opening up the the capsule looking at the air gel for the first time And you can see impacts from the comet these cells about the size of ice cubes uh at like uh 7 11 or bucky's right and these are impacts from rather large comet grains Most of the impacts are like here and here very tiny little millimeter sized trails Of dust grains entering the air gel. We had about 15 really big ones like this And this shows a view of a piece of the air gel pulled out of the tray and here's an impact in You can see a profile. This is the grain entered from the top smashed into the air gel here made this bulb shaped track And then grains ejected. I'm sorry. Can I go back? Yep Grains flew out of that and were captured in the air gel along the wall of the track And then also some grains passed down and were recovered from the very base of these little tracks So we have hundreds of these of these impacts and thousands of comet coma grains Uh, it's so basically the lab across the hall here. The trick is to go in and identify these These tracks extract the tracks from the air gel and make them available for analysis by scientists anywhere really It should show some more tracks. There's a pair of tracks And you see a loop of the grain here capture at the end You have an idea how large these tracks are a human hair Would be the same size uh same diameter as this track right here So these are human hair diameter tracks These tracks are even thinner and the grains captured here are In the order of a few to a few tens of microns in diameter. They're really tiny But these days we can do a whole lot with grains that small We have exciting people visit the lab. I like my daughter here came over with her friend Which she was six. Here's Stephen Hawking who was here years ago That was very exciting So i'll move on now to discuss the genesis spacecraft which returned dust from actually dust atoms from the sun um the solar wind Tevelled out went into uh an earth an earth uh sun Lagrangian point and then soaked up rays for several years and these uh They had a rays of looks like a watch them folding here They had a raise of different types of materials and mostly mostly silica wafers but also Gold and sapphire all kinds of earth things Capturing atoms bits of the solar wind and the goal here is to find out What the bulk composition of the sun is it really isn't very well known at all I'll I'll go on now. Those those tables are also here in the building Mission I worked on mission to start us was the Hayabusa mission. This is a mission There's primarily a Japanese mission and Jaxa is the Japanese space agency By the way, Jaxa is Japanese for weak man. So maybe it's it's ill name for a space agency There's a cartoon showing the spacecraft this was to see 2000 and Launched in 2004 In 2008 and got to the asteroid Itokawa. It's shown here on the right ship kind of like an otter This asteroid is less than a kilometer in diameter. It's really tiny Very rocky as you can see and the spacecraft did some touch and goes on the surface And the goal was to do a touch and go this little elephant foot here sticking out that would Pound into the surface it fired a little gun And then dust would rise up and be captured by the spacecraft and turned out the gun never fired They they landed three times and never fired But just because the grains on the surface are so charged up by the solar wind All kinds of grains just were stuck to the spacecraft by static charge So thousands of grains came back to the earth anyway, you know the question mechanism didn't really work properly So it's an amazing Spacecraft it didn't work because it's supposed to work But so we're turned samples to the earth like it was supposed to that happened in 2010 I can't believe it's nine years ago already. It's hard to believe So those samples are mostly in tokyo. You can visit them if you like But about 10th of them are here downstairs actually in our building because the u.s NASA rented some assistance on this mission The u.s. Got 10 percent of those samples So those samples were the first samples we ever returned from a known asteroid Now it's very exciting because if you're an astronomer People look at asteroids from the earth using telescopes You look at reflected light from those spacecraft you measure the spectrum from from the telescopes You measure the the spectroscopy of the reflected light And you'd think you could compare that to To measurements some measurements of meteorites in the lab And then and then matched meteorites in the lab to their parent asteroids But turns out it doesn't work Uh The meteorites are somehow changed Um, the asteroid surfaces are somehow not exactly like the meteorites Uh, we suspect it has to do with the processing by solar winds smacking into the surface and other processes We didn't know for sure until we returned samples from this known asteroid Which we then could compare directly on the ground to meteorites And then we realized okay, here's here's the processes that affected these little grains It was solar wind in fact and here's how it changed the surface And that enables us like rosetta stone then to read the mineralogy of all kinds of other asteroids Now that we know what effects to to understand to uh, To kind of transfer the knowledge of spectroscopy of meteorites to spectroscopy of asteroids So this is a really important mission even though it only returned it was less than a milligram of dust So that was a really important mission so happening right now as we speak The idea with the two spacecraft is that the asteroid ryugu if you're watching the news two weeks ago It did its first sampling on the asteroid Asteroid ryugu is thought to be a carbon water rich object Perhaps similar to the two the objects that would have brought raw materials of the oceans and life to the earth So there's a lot of interest in in the samples from this spacecraft As a cartoon the left here the asteroid shaped like a diamond. It's kind of cool. So basically it's shaped like this because Uh, it was once part of much larger asteroid. It was just aggregated by a little large impact Some small fraction of that re-aggregated into another secondary body Which is why it's a rocky looking and spinning faster and faster while you're up spin up Uh process which causes asteroids to spin faster and faster which causes uh them to achieve to kind of have these diamond shapes with uh the equatorial Area is bulging out because the trills moving towards equator as it spins faster and faster They spin fast enough. They just fly apart. So these asteroids are spinning up due to Interactions with with the solar radiation actually So here's a movie. I hope Let's see of All right, yes playing. This is a movie. Uh, the foot of the cutters right here This is a spacecraft here body. This is the shadow of the spacecraft on the surface Getting closer and closer now it dives down Touches the surface and fires a gun and you'll see material rising off the surface As it's hit by the both the gun and also by Uh, the jets spacecraft fires to them to rise up again. Now it's here. Now it's hitting the surface fires the gun And then rises up and you see materials scattered up all around the spacecraft Uh, and they're hoping to get Like 10 grams of dust They probably got a lot more than that and these big pieces here some of these pieces are are like 10 centimeters in size And another movie which is still secret. They haven't shown yet. Uh, there are boulders as large as Uh, 0.6 meters in diameter that are rising up towards the spacecraft from this so the spacecraft touching down on the surface caused this this uh, Kind of a inverse landslide material up into space Uh, and now the worry is some of this material may have hit the spacecraft meaning damage some things I don't know. It's it's kind of a scary thing It just happened two weeks ago two weeks ago and the spacecraft is now actually about to fire a gun from space at the asteroid that's going to to launch for dectile Then passed around behind the asteroid Checked out the explodes and sends a large cannonball basically into the asteroid makes a crater The spacecraft will then come around and then try to sample material that was exposed by that impact And they'll do the you'll do this explosion event in april And then the you'll try to do the second sampling in mid june. That's the plan It'll leave the asteroid in December of this year and return to earth leave back on earth two years from now So we just had a meeting last week that planetary science being discussed results from planetary science To your Chanel will be talking about analysis of the dust and rocks from the spacecraft. It's really exciting So I'll tell you something now. It's here a cyrus wreck spacecraft This is a billion dollar, you know mega mission that the nasa sent to the same thing another water carbon-rich asteroid venue Which as you can see on the right looks exactly like ryu gu The the target of the high boost of two mission. Oh, it's a lot smaller. It's a quarter of the size So the spacecraft cost five times as much as high as the two that's going to an asteroid. That's that's one fifth the size That's that's somehow that's uh, that's a fair I think anyway Right now the spacecraft the surface is orbiting this asteroid venue And it'll it'll do sampling. I think two years from now it'll do its sampling missions and returned earth in 2023 So returns the earth three years after high boost of two does with uh, probably very similar samples. We don't know um We'll find out it's possible that one of these objects has been heated more than the other which might Give us a different sample return from one versus the other we just don't know But these are both very very exciting objects Because they're based on spectroscopy. You know, they can today have a water of hydration of clay minerals On board and they have organics as well And so again these may be surviving objects of the type that brought You know raw materials for life and the oceans to earth billions of years ago That's why these missions are so exciting I'm going on also about to happen um The jet the jet so the jet piece piece agency is going to send a mission to collect samples from the largest moon of mars Phobos It's going to launch in five years. This is called the mars moon exploration mission or m and x mission They haven't announced it But they're going to and it'll launch uh five years from now and 10 years from now That we have brought samples of phobos back to earth Uh, the previous I'm working on this mission right now. This is a really exciting mission So we've been wanting to do for generations As a chance that phobos has samples from mars on the surface You know, no one knows how phobos formed It may be a captured asteroid Maybe the type that the osiris rex live is a two spacecraft are orbiting right now Or it could be a piece of mars um Chossed up by big impact a giant impact in its past or it could have formed in mars form. No one really knows um We'll find out in 10 years maybe less so, uh The curious thing is because the the samples could be anything from mars type samples To water and organic rich coverages chondrites It's tricky to to design the capture system and containers to hold the samples Because you kind of want to know if you have an organic barge sample You might want to treat samples one way if they're water and organic core basalt samples like you'd see on mars You treat them a different way So it's a real challenge to design this mission But that's going to happen. Uh, it's happening right now. It's really exciting And uh, so there are plans you've heard today. There are plans to return samples from the moon and mars Both the u.s. Also india Also china Are planning sampler term missions both to the moon especially but eventually to mars um You don't hear much about the chinese space hc perhaps, but they're also planning to do a satan asteroid separate term mission Next decade as well. So this is really i mean you think of apollo as being this great time in space exploration But in fact, this is now the golden age of sampler term missions for us This is the best time to be uh scientists studying rocks From the solar system because samples are coming in all the time. It's just really great So, uh, if any of you are thought about being a planetary scientist Uh, working on rocks or just studying these objects this is the best time ever to be to be doing that And I think that's to be all I have. Yeah, I'll stop there. Thank you And just to add this is page. I'll say that we're lucky enough that in the building we're sitting in right now We house these samples or percentages of the samples from the japanese missions Right here in this building and so mike gets up close and personal to these things probably a little bit more than than most All right. Well, this is really fascinating and and the number the amount of material that's there is just kind of Staggering in some ways So we do have some good questions here. So let's kind of get to these questions and um I'm gonna defer one to uh david here in just a little bit. Let's start with the one from carol She asked why are there about an equal number of samples? Meteorites from mars and the moon shouldn't there be more from the moon? Yeah, that that's a really good question nobody knows the answer so Since the moon's a lot closer when you've impact the hits the moon and sense samples of the earth they probably arrived within a few years Whereas an impact on mars might take Thousands of years to get for samples to get to the earth And so somehow That's evening out. That's a really good question. There also haven't been, you know, there haven't been any observed falls Of meteorites from the moon. They're all recovered masses just fell on the earth But there are plenty of observed falls from mars So when mars when it gets hit Then the impacts on the earth are spread over thousands of years on the moon. They're over. It's over pretty fast So, uh, I suspect the moon being closer It's just that we haven't had a big impact on the moon that a really long time Big enough to send samples to the earth. Although we do see, you know, grains in the atmosphere coming in from the moon sometimes We just haven't seen the rocks. That's a really good question And they're about I think about 60 meteorites each from the moon that mars recognized so far If you think about meteorite fall statistics, that means that a meteorite's falling from from mars about every day actually Most of which, of course, I never recognized Wow, that's amazing Okay, so we've got two questions one from carol and ron and I mean they're going to combine these carol noted that um That about stardust stardust was a Not the one that that crashed and right Um, then ron kind of elaborates on this and and so they both kind of ask the question is Were they able to get some samples from the genesis mission that crashed in the desert? And what were the ultimate results of that? Yeah, so the goal of genesis was to uh capture atoms from the sun And analyze the bulk composition and isotopic composition of the sun They were able to do that. It took them about Three times as long as they thought it would because they had to carefully pick up these tiny little pieces of broken solar cells Uh, put that together again But because the atoms were embedded in the solar cells once you remove the dirt and soil from utah from those crash materials You could then analyze Sputter down, you know mill down into the samples and analyze the solar atoms It took them a lot longer to do that and fortunately also the most important sample was this piece of gold That was kind of hanging the center part of the spacecraft. That somehow survived being destroyed. It was it was kind of just slightly bent But uh miraculously that survived almost intact And so the most important science Was that came pretty easily quickly and uh as a result actually they thought the sun would have a certain Oxygen isotope composition people were totally wrong about that Uh, it started us too, you know before we had this mission You know, we thought we knew what comet brain dust would be like based on analyses of meteorites As trash here dust and we're totally wrong It's just great and with the sun the same deal. I mean people thought they knew What the bulk this would be like for the sun and for most part they were totally wrong That makes these missions so exciting All right, so always uh, it's the surprising things that seem to push the boundaries of our knowledge It seems a lot of times Okay, rosemary. I'm gonna go to someone different here. So rosemary Asked, uh, why does the spacecraft that's orbiting ben new? Why is it doing that for two years before taking this samples? Yeah, I'm not on that mission. Um, that's a really good question. I think just being very cautious Like I said, you know the hybrid submissions cost and started us about 200 million dollars each They're kind of like uh, like viking missions here like swoop in and grab samples and get away, right? But Ben knew it's it's really a you know, like that's like a You know, it's a very expensive mission a lot of different went into actually ever went into doing this So they're being very very careful to select the sampling site and and as uh That was the case for the hybrid situ mission Though the asteroid they they visited is a lot rockier than I thought it would be And everyone thought these asteroids would have uh, you know, a few areas of just dust Where you could safely land and sample without worrying about crashing into something But both these asteroids for yugu and ben new proven to be extremely rocky Extremely terrifying looking objects. And so it's it's uh caused the engineers to think really hard about you know Revising for your plans for how you select the sampling site how you go down sample and get out of there So I think they're just being very very careful to survey the entire asteroid pick up the best possible place for sampling So did they actually extend the mission a couple of years to account for this? Um, you know, we always had we always had planned it's bridging this long They just they had planned to do a lot more at the asteroid characterize it much better Okay They you know, they always have the option of sampling whatever they want to sample Maybe they move the sampling period out later. I'm not sure because it's such a dairy a hairy looking asteroid We'll see Don't figure it out. Yeah Okay, great okay, so uh, Justin Asked a question here and um, you know as all of these missions since they get funding from the government They're all political and nature to some extent but uh any comments on the canceled asteroid redirect missions is this no longer a concern by the international space agencies Yeah, the agencies are still concerned about Earth crossing asteroids and the hazard posed by those And so they still have these plans to go to a couple of these potentially hazardous earth crossers and Ben is one of them by the way And uh either do a sample return or at least try to figure out How solid they are are they beanbags? Or are they solid objects and how could you prepare a defense against them? But the asteroid snap uh the asteroid redirect mission They kept redeeming it that mission went away Uh, and uh, I think they decided the missions are happening now Hi, was the two and uh, oh sorry, I was for X We've been able to answer many of the questions that they were trying to answer with that that mission And you know the plan was to use astronauts to do part of that And now they're being redirected back to the moon as of today So the astronauts are I'm sure very happy to be going to the moon instead of an asteroid. So I'm sure they're happy all right Let's see uh, Michael asked the question have um, how the results of the Hayabusa mission altered the Classifications, and I'm not entirely sure what this is, but you probably do of the HED definitions of Vesta Or are they holding with the current data? Yeah, so the HED Vesta was an animal that was actually visited by the dawn spacecraft not Haibusa Haibusa And so the Haibusa mission went to an honorary convoy type parent body So for Vesta the dawn mission didn't return samples it Orbited Vesta for for quite a while and didn't really change our understanding of The meteorites. We still think the meteorites the HED stands for Howardites, Ukraine, Stalgian meteorites Think those meteorites come from the asteroid Vesta. We still think that So the spacecraft mission the dawn mission didn't really change Our understanding of the meteorites that much we still think they came from either in Vesta Or a related asteroid and we have those in our collection. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah Okay, fantastic Okay, so here we have a question from Calvin age eight How many asteroids are there in the asteroid bill? Yeah, actually I was eight when I decided to be a geologist So you're just the right age to decide to be a planetary scientist. So stick with it um Good question. There are millions of asteroids You know, there are like a hundred thousand asteroids that have been discovered and sort of named and are tracked Uh, that's down to like a meter in diameter if you go to even smaller diameters It depends on where you decide to stop calling it an asteroid and start calling it a micro meteorite or something So there are millions of them And you might think that's a whole lot of mass But of course you put all the mass of all the asteroids together It's much less than the mass of the moon. So it's not a destroyed planet Um per se The cooling of the asteroids is how variable they are and just last week at this meeting we had in houston. We were discussing There's one type of meteorite called eralites Which appeared to come from a Small planet that was a process of totally melting And cooling like the early earth would have done and then it was blasted apart by an impact and then reoccreated it's so cool, but this was a So studying these real light meteorites tells us a lot about you know, these initial stages of planet formation And and geological So, you know, there are millions of of asteroids I said we have something like 40 000 meteorites now in our collections Those 40 000 meteorites come from probably a hundred of those asteroids total So we have a million asteroids. They've only a hundred of them sampled by meteorites So we have a long way to go to understand the asteroid belt What's the you know, kind of a follow up to that and so why is it that the vast majority of the samples are from a fairly small number of the asteroids Yeah, you know, you might think that gee asteroids you could hit all the time they fall apart The rocks go in all directions. They could hit the earth all the time But in fact, most of the impacts on the asteroid was a long time ago And it's mostly pretty quiet out there as a matter of fact And so the processes that bring rocks to the earth today Depending on the giant planets kind of moving the asteroids around Being them out the Earth's causing it's been faster the sun causing it's been faster and faster and pieces coming off And so there there are processes that provide Meteorites to the earth that mostly come from just a few places in the asteroid belt That are especially affected by you the sun or the giant planets And so most of our meteorites come from not only a very few asteroids that happen to be in those places Where it's easy to transport rocks to the earth But have you said that It does size material comes does come from everywhere So I also study Stratospheric dust coming in the atmosphere and those dust grains can come from anywhere And so there are scientists who study the whole career is studying microscopic dust grains from from asteroids And we're looking at samples from thousands of asteroids, but they're much harder to study So, uh Yeah All right. Well, thank you Um, Mike asks and so now that you have these samples what methods are you actually using to analyze the samples? Yeah, we use a hand lens and a magnet mostly just like an immediate kit, right? Okay, so, uh You know, it's you know, it's uh Every year it changes. I mean, we're using um electron beam techniques Uh, electron microscopes to get a good view of the samples of high magnification Especially these comet grains and asteroid grains, which are microscopic to begin with Um, you can look at the the isotopic compositions using ion microprobes You look at the organic compositions by all kinds of techniques people I had a postdoc who was studying um, amino acids in meteorites Uh, that's really cool and turns out that's a that's really really cool Think about that. Um It's all it's a whole talk by itself I study food inclusions in meteorites some meteorites contain In mineral grains droplets of water from the early solar system And you can see these in in a microscope. You can see the large droplets moving around in the sample Um and say the water From 4.5 billion years ago that's been preserved In in like the little bottles in the in the meteorites. So there's a There's really hundreds of techniques for studying these meteorites every year. There are new techniques that come along new scientists who were Maybe studying, you know something over here and it's you got interested in meteorites and turn their technique to study meteorites for the first time That's great because I learned something new about these rocks. Um, I'll say more thing, you know, there's a lab Uh across the parking lot from us 70 feet down the ground and when the Apollo samples came back from the moon They had this detector detector down there for analyzing the bulk composition And to do this you have to have detectors the size of a refrigerator And you had to have a sample of rock that was the size of your brain, right to make this analysis And now 50 years later, you can do the same analysis A grain that's a nanogram in mass And on a detector that's almost microscopic So those are the advances you've made in 50 years in sample analysis for samples The newer techniques we can use is almost endless and growing all the time Wow so While you have these samples there and so john asked the question is Do you kind of store these asteroid return samples? Do you keep them in vacuum until they're opened or what's the storage protocol for all these materials that you have from space? So obviously they're in a different environment now Yeah, that's that's a good question. Um You know, they're captured in a vacuum environment and you want to preserve them in as close to that environment as you can It turns out it's really hard expensive and dangerous to study things in a vacuum And you store them in a vacuum, but it's kind of hard to to handle them Break them analyze in a vacuum. So usually people use um special environments nitrogen cabinets with very very dry nitrogen gas pure nitrogen gas to to Store the samples to break them and do some analyses Some labs use argon gas. Some of your labs use helium The actually the russians put their initial lunar samples in helium They thought that was a great idea. It was a real bad idea The u.s. We first got samples back from the moon two years ago. We stored them in a vacuum That was super dangerous and expensive and now it's almost all stored in nitrogen gas But the high boost of samples in japan those are stored in the vacuum Um techniques have come along to where that's a doable thing now So in the future probably more samples will be stored in At cold temperatures and a vacuum until they're needed for analysis Okay Well, we've got lots of our questions here. I'm just going to go, you know and try to protect your time We're going to go for two more here And so joe asked the questions about what you're looking for When you look at these he asked do you look for signs of life Or in the collection process or are you more focused on the chemical? It's both so Mostly my i'm mineralogists. So mostly I'm interested in the minerals under there compositions of the minerals What those tells about how those minerals formed But I had a postdoc who was looking at amino acids and organics in the same samples So we work, you know, we're side by side your organic chemists with the inorganic chemists looking at these rocks Uh routinely. So on a meteorite for example a meteorite fell in Botswana last year 19 2018 la It's the first the second meteorite seen as natural at first land on the earth as a meteorite So right now we're in or playing now sees of this of this very special meteorite And they're organic chemists working side by side with Inorganic chemists with physicists with all kinds of people to plan You know what order you do now sees in to phase the analysis so each analysis Doesn't erect the analysis for the future for the subsequent analyses But in order to do them in to get the most from each sample. So really doing all those things including organic analyses Interganic analyses people looking For new minerals the biologists are looking for fossils. They haven't found any yet But uh, they're looking for maybe the breakdown products from from Biology they haven't seen any yet. We have seen though are the first steps towards life things like hollow Balls over carbohydrate of hydrocarbons. We see those very commonly. We see amino acids. We see You know all kinds of things which you could think of as being like maybe in this first, uh Soup on the earth in which life emerged all those raw materials are present in meteorites Yeah, so we're looking for everything all the once it's really fun Great. Okay. Well, this would be our last question. And so uh, ron asked the question He notes that once upon a time He was able to visit the lunar receiving lab at johnson space center And he notes that he was understood that um, the lunar lab was going to close or did close And if so, what's going to happen with the rocks from the new missions and if it's open You know, are you going to do anything different with the new samples to compared to what you've done in the past? So let's have us still open. It's the next building over