 Welcome everybody! I am excited to have you all here and welcome you to Asteroids for Everyone, talking about how amateurs and professionals hunt for asteroids and we're excited. I'm going to turn it right over to Jessica Swan, who's here in Finescope. Hi Jessica. Hi! Thank you so much for hosting this for us. We sincerely appreciate it and I want to welcome all of you and also send out a huge thank you to Gerald and Rachel for joining us today. So we've sent this as a shout-out to our entire network over here at in Finescope and so if you're not a member of in Finescope just real quickly what we do is we design digital learning experiences and one of the reasons that we were really interested in having this webinar for our network and for the night sky network is that asteroid week is coming up or I'm sorry astronomy week is coming up and that actually starts on September 29th and we here at in Finescope have a surprise announcement to make at the conclusion of this webinar a cool new resource to share with you that is completely related to asteroid hunting and astronomy week so we thought what better way to launch this new learning experience than to bring in some of the friends from the night sky network to talk with you all a little bit about how we find these asteroids and so let me do a quick introduction and introduce you all to Gerald and to Rachel so Gerald is an astronomer he's a telescope operator and a planetarium show producer he's at the Shabo space and science center in Oakland California he has a master's degree and I'm sorry a master of science degree in space studies and over 40 years of experience and working in the space industry and since 2008 Gerald has been the principal investigator we call that the PI for Shabo's asteroid search and tracking program he's also appeared in numerous television and other media interviews isn't that fantastic and so he's you know been answering questions about significant astronomy events and then also on the line we have Rachel freed and she is the co-founder and president of the Institute for Student Astronomical Research also known as NSTAR as well as a seminar instructor with a mission to incorporate true scientific research into secondary and undergraduate education she helps to coordinate international conferences all around all around the use of telescopes and education and she currently is working on her PhD in astronomy education yay she has a bachelor's of science in biology from UC Davis and a master's of science in neuroscience from Northwestern University so a huge welcome to you both so we're gonna get started please if you have any questions as Vivian has mentioned you know go ahead and toss your questions over into Q&A or you can toss them over into chat we would love to know what your questions are we know that Gerald and Rachel are gonna answer many of our questions up front as they talk a little bit about their work when it comes to asteroid hunting and when they're done with their presentations we'll actually combine all of your questions into groupings and just kind of do a free-for-all Q&A and with that I'm gonna go ahead and turn it over to you Gerald and let you kind of share your experiences with the group okay great thank you what I want to do is start up a little PowerPoint here so bear with me just a second will I get that set up here hopefully you'll see that in a second here do we see that I see thumbs up okay yeah so let me see if I can get it started now there we go okay so again I'm an astronomer at the Shabo Space and Science Center and I'm the principal investigator on Shabo's Near Earth asteroid tracking program just wanted to talk a little bit about first of all some basic terminology and concepts you'll hear a lot the the term NEO or NEO which stands for near Earth object this can be an asteroid or an old comet orbiting the Sun it's mostly asteroids and the orbit around the Sun and they come within 28 million miles of the Earth's orbit the reason for 28 million miles is because that's how close Venus gets to the Earth when the two are closest to each other so we consider any object that gets closer to the Earth than Venus does to be a near Earth object now there's a subset of that it's actually the biggest subset and that's the near near Earth asteroids or NEA's these asteroids all orbit around the Sun and some of them come reasonably close to the Earth I'd say about a dozen come closer to the moon or closer than the moon about several times a year in fact so far this year we've had a little over 40 asteroids come closer to us than the moon but impacts are actually very rare most of these asteroids just pass safely by us and they're not a concern there is a global effort to find near Earth objects so far as of 10 o'clock last night we have found 20,816 near Earth objects out of those about 2000 are considered potentially hazardous asteroids a PHA is an asteroid that is larger than 140 meters and comes within less than 0.05 astronomical units of the Earth astronomical unit is the distance average distance between the Earth and the Sun so if an asteroid comes closer than 5% of that then it's considered a PHA if it's larger than 140 meters in terms of total population of near Earth objects we think that there are probably more than a million of them out there but so far we've only found a little over 20,000 so there's still a lot of them out there to be found so I'll talk a little bit about how they're found most asteroids are not found by amateur astronomers they're found by survey telescopes professional survey telescopes there are several of them around the world three of them are in Arizona up on Mount Lemmon there's a couple of them in in Hawaii the pan stars used to be pan stars one now there's pan stars two so we now have two of them a new one coming online in a couple years is the LSST down in Chile with and all of these telescopes what they do is scan the sky every night just looking for transient objects objects that might be newly discovered asteroids now they're constantly surveying so they don't have a lot of time to go back and zero in on any one asteroid they spot them as they scan and if they do they submit their data to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center and from there the Minor Planet Center puts out a request that goes out to a whole slew of observatories around the world there's about 300 active observatories working on this program and they do additional observations try to confirm the existence of any new asteroids and they also do tracking of known asteroids and so forth we all submit our data to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center which is in Massachusetts and this is the global clearinghouse for all asteroid data Minor Planet Center analyzes the data does computations trying to determine the orbit and size and it shares that data with the Jet Propulsion Lab NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. So what we do in at Chabot our telescope is not well suited for doing surveys so what we do is called confirmation and follow-up confirmation is where we chase down some of those possible new discoveries made by the survey telescopes. We tried to locate them sometime after the initial discovery and confirm that they're there track them and get data to help characterize the orbit of the asteroid and maybe its size. In addition once an asteroid has been confirmed and that goes on to a master catalog of known asteroids you need to continue observing it to improve the calculation of the orbit and to improve the size estimates so that's what we do we do confirmation trying to confirm new discoveries and follow-up trying to get additional data on known asteroids. So talking just a little bit about how we do that we're looking for two types of data one is called astrometry and that is basically position data the astronomy community uses a coordinate system that's similar to the GPS coordinate system uses right ascension which is the east west position and declination which is north south position and we report those positions to the IA or to the minor planet center we have to use a very exact time system because timing is very critical on these asteroid observations so we have a method of making sure our computers are real precisely synchronized to the universal time. The other information is photometry that's basically how bright is the object in our images and that information is used to calculate a size estimate for the asteroids. So the way we do it is we just point the telescope at a given part of the sky where we think there might be an asteroid we take three or four sets of images so this is just for examples right here and some of you are probably looking and saying well I think that's the asteroid or maybe that one's the asteroid but we have a much better way of doing that. Now one of the things you'll notice about these images is they're not nice clean pretty looking images of the night sky they're kind of dirty and there's a reason for that and we're looking for asteroids asteroids can be very faint so we need to be able to see very faint objects in our images so we use a technique called stretching where we make the image kind of look kind of blotchy and the background is not black it's kind of a model gray but by doing that we can bring out those very very faint objects. So anyway we take several pictures like this and then we have to use a process to kind of get them ready for tracking the asteroid. To do that we have to precisely locate each of the images so there's a group of stars in the images we compare those stars to a master catalog of known stars and there are several different catalogs that we can use and we're using software to do this and we try to identify all the stars in the image get their exact position in terms of right ascension and declination and then use that to create a formula that equates the pixel position in the images to the right ascension and declination coordinates that we use for astronomy. Once we've done that with all the images it's just a matter of blinking through the images to see if we can find the asteroid so what we're looking for is a star that moves the word asteroid means star like and as you can see there it looks like a star except it's moving and if you can't find it visually you can always look for the blue arrow in the sky that'll help you find it. Okay so once we've located it in the images we go back to the each individual frame and we spot the asteroid in each frame and then we do some additional processing again we're using specialized software to do this. There's several different software packages out there. The one that's probably used most commonly is called astrometrica and with the software you just click on one of the asteroid images and it gives you a bunch of data. Now a lot of the data that you see here is just quality data letting us confirm that we do in fact are looking at an asteroid or a real object. Images are often contaminated with hot pixels or cosmic ray strikes and things like that but by using this quality data we can identify what's real and what's not. Once we do that we get a set of data you see some data that's in the red box there that's the critical data that's the exact time of the image down to a fraction of a second and the right ascension and declination of the asteroid in that image and also a estimate of its brightness. Once we do that for all four images we then put it together and into a specially formatted email. The Minor Planet Center has a prescribed format for these emails they have to be text only and everything has to be formatted exactly the spacing and so forth. These emails are sent to the Minor Planet Center but you're not sending it to a person you're sending it to a computer. The computer automatically processes it sends you a response telling you whether it's been accepted or whether there's problems with your data and then they combine this with observations from other observatories to develop the initial orbital elements and eventually after two or three nights they assign it the permanent designation excuse me. So after we find an asteroid and after we've it's been assigned a permit designation we're not finished. We have to do some additional observations what's called follow-up observations and there are some limitations we can only do that at night which means we can only track the asteroid when it's in a position we call that opposition which means it's on the night side of the earth. That means the discovery window and the observation window can be very short. Initial observations during the first few days the orbit calculation can be pretty uncertain so you need more observations in order to better characterize the orbits. The longer you wait for those follow-up observations the greater the uncertainty is about what the orbit for the asteroid is. In fact most asteroids especially the PHAs are are eventually lost because there isn't enough follow-up observations so we really need to have a lot more follow-up done. For potential impactors this is especially critical because we want to determine what the probability is of a future impact and as you initially do a set of observations your your uncertainty window is very large and if the earth is within that window then you you have some probability of an impact. As you get more observations that window shrinks but if it still contains the earth then the probability of impact actually appears to go up but as you continue to make more and more observations eventually you reduce the probability window to the point where the earth is no longer in it we hope and then you can no longer consider that asteroid a threat. So that's the basic process that we use. A couple of pieces of information I wanted to share with you these are some websites that relate to asteroid tracking of course the Minor Planet Center they're the ones who collect all the data they post the list of objects that need observation they determine the initial orbits and so forth. The software that I use is Astrometrica it's developed by an astronomer in Austria and it's very popular it's used all over the world. If you want to learn a lot of good how-to information you can go to the Great Shefford Observatory this is run by a private amateur astronomer in England and he has some very good information and tips about how to do asteroid observation and then if you just want to see some good data you go to the Jet Propulsion Lab Center for Near Earth Object Studies and they have tables of upcoming close approaches and lots of other good information. So that's about it. Awesome thank you so much Gerald can I ask a quick follow-up question something that piqued my interest so it got my little educator juices kind of flowing. Can you go back to the screen where you actually have the gif of the of the asteroid tracking? Sure hang on just second here sure let's see which one was that this one you'll have to hit the share button oh I'm sorry that's okay let's see this one yes but I think the one before where it actually shows the the animation okay hang on a second here sure thing this one yes this one all right so we're related to your your comment about if you wait too long to make your next observation I think there's actually there's possibly a graphing activity that teachers could engage in with their students in the classroom that's related to that could you speak just a little bit more about you know if we waited to make the next observations what kind of observations could you potentially run into? Well if you look at this track you look you can see the movement of the asteroid and just by visually looking at it you can see where the asteroid's going to be say half an hour later but if you were to draw a line through the three points that you see here and extend that line outward say several days that line is no longer a line it becomes a cone if you will and so our ability to know where the asteroid is going to be farther away decreases and so you can reach a point where the the uncertainty around the asteroid's position actually exceeds but one minute of or I'm sorry one degree of arc and most people don't have the ability to see the sky in in one image a total of one degree so you know you you think think you know where it is but it turns out it's off by a half degree or one degree and so you can't find it anymore and so you lose it so so is it so a lot of times we probably are as observers we're confusing this thinking that it's kind of when we observe it appears to be kind of just in two-dimensional space but that's actually three-dimensional it could be moving away or closer to us and affecting that the way we're tracking correct correct and also because you can only do this at night you only have a limited time in which you can observe the asteroid because as the asteroid orbits around the earth eventually it's going to get into position where it's no longer in our night sky and then it could be two or three years before it reappears in the sky and if you've waited two or three years and you've had a lot of uncertainty from your original set of observations you may not find it at all right okay perfect thank you so much for describing that i just wanted to make sure that the teacher's on the line i wanted to be able to connect those dots for you that if you wanted to be able if you're looking for a good graphing exercise or prediction exercise this might be a way to be able to pull in some really cool relevant content for students and in those in the math capacity so just thank you so much for for answering that question we do have a couple of questions that are in the chat but i think we're going to wait until after rachel and then we'll combine all of our questions together and you both can respond to the questions that that the group have sounds good awesome thanks so much jerald all right rachel we'll go ahead and turn it over to you okay thanks um wow that was really interesting and an exciting talk and my brain is now very excited about like i want to sit down with you and go through this whole process of tracking asteroids and and you know integrate this into what i do so let me tell you guys a little bit about what i do i'm going to share my screen here uh let's see here okay can everyone see the screen that says robotic telescopes in education yeah okay so what i do um is i try and get students anywhere from eighth grade up through undergraduates involved in astronomy research because it's possible now with the telescopes and remote access and all the technology we have and it's such an amazing way to learn science to learn how to um how science is done to actually do real science participate in data collection and analyze data and to learn how to communicate how to present your research how to write for publication and that's a really big component of what i do so um these are students that i work with uh in june of this year but mount wilson observatory collecting data on uh we actually used the hundred inch historic telescope there and collected data and they're finishing writing papers from that so um let's see here i can go to the next slide so i co-founded the institute for student astronomical research and so if we have educators on the line here um i'll tell you i started this because i was in a high school astronomy teacher and i wanted my students to do to have the opportunity to do research but um didn't have the tools and the background necessary to do it and it was very frustrating and i couldn't find the resources so i've over the last four to five years been building those resources and so now i teach people around the country and around the world how to get students involved in astronomy research um so we have this non-profit organization now we had national science foundation funding and we're really expanding and it's exciting so we have developed the small telescope astronomical research handbook which is sort of our textbook um and it's you know how not only how to do astronomy research and the science but how to write a paper for publication how to work in teams sort of all these things that go into doing research that maybe aren't part of a normal science course actually usually aren't and we have a whole online learning management system set up that can actually just be copied and made your own if you're interested in canvas um and we teach classes on this so uh i also make video tutorials lots of these let's use astro image j it's another image processing software to do our astrometric measurements gerald measured mentioned astrometry which is the measurement of positions of things and that's what we do mostly um looking at double stars and looking at you know their historical observations so we can you know contribute to the orbits that have been calculated from observations from the past 150 years we also do exoplanet transits and um variable stars and we're going to get beginning into asteroid you know lucky finding following up on those asteroid measurements because that's so important um so we have all kinds of resources and one of the other things i do is i help coordinate and put on international conferences around robotic telescopes and one of the coolest things that has come out of that is um the last company's observatory is a network of they have i think 24 telescopes around the globe in all northern and southern hemispheres and the ones shown here the little green dots these are they have 10.4 meter telescopes that after our first robotic telescope conference in 2017 they made accessible for education so there are 22 partners around the globe that have access to these telescopes and it is amazing and this would be really great for doing um asteroid follow-up because you can follow these things for longer you can follow them 24 hours a day since we have telescopes all around the globe so that would be really fun to implement so um we use telescopes there the sky net robotic telescope network we use these telescopes we have access to all kinds of telescopes which is so much fun this is exactly what i wanted for my students and now i get to help other people um access these and use these and um we there's also um oh micro observatory if you work with younger students this is a really great place to start what's really cool now though is a lot of like organizations like micro observatory and sky net they're developing these browser-based image analysis tools um an astrometrica i've i've opened it i haven't used it for measurements but i don't know if it runs equally well on any kind of computer or not or if i think you download it but um sometimes that's difficult in a classroom setting so uh there's these browser-based tools where you can do exoplanet photometry so measuring the change in brightness as that exoplanet goes in front of its star and process all your images so we um there's also my uh micro observatory that people can access and by the way all these things are close to free the only story i've mentioned if you become a global sky partner with less cumbersome observatory through a proposal process and you get free access to these telescopes and a micro observatory free free programs where you can use these little telescopes to introduce students to research and and um the comic three and the tools the real tools of astronomers um i mentioned uh writing for publication is a really important part of our work and this is one example this is the journal of double star observations um from april of this year and i had to break up the page but you can see here all the ones with stars on them are papers published by students um at different branches of the astronomy research seminar that i teach so what we do is we try and help other institutions create their own astronomy research seminar so we teach them all the tools and usually we'll have instructors take our research seminar either with students or or just on their own and they go through the whole process as if they're a student and end up with a publication um and then they can start their own and i'll give i'll you know provide support over a couple of years to until they're comfortable running their own research seminar so um it's kind of exciting to see that students are really contributing to this small field and i i like this field because while it's sort of simple astronomy it's it's real astronomy and it's something manageable within a semester for sure um and i love this uh the contribution from the students to to the real data in within this publication they also publish elsewhere and i'll get to that in just a second but these are the number of the graph on the left the number of seminar articles in the journal of double star observations per year and started out slow down there a couple per year for a couple years and then um i joined the team around middle 2000 end of 2014 um we tried some stuff and then by 2016 we were like oh my gosh 30 something publications from students it went crazy we have this online component um and it's exciting and 2019 uh this number is going to probably double you know in the next publication that comes out so and then the graph on the left on the right shows the percentage of journal double star observation articles contributed by the seminar so notice that students are not contributing a third more than a third of of these papers and that these measurements of positions and angles uh and uh separations in position angles of double stars and it's really fun um the other thing that's going on is students are going beyond what we initially expect them to do and especially if you have students that know coding can do python coding they're just doing these amazing things like developing new tools this is now um this double star's query is an a browser based tool to help select double stars that you can access with whatever telescope you're you're using and that is so cool because before we were using a couple different tools and even work on this system or that system and now there's this really beautiful one that a student created another thing another student use desmos if you're familiar with this online graphing tool um to study the orbital parameters there are seven orbital parameters that go into these double star orbits and they can all be manipulated um in this program so that you can get a really great sort of visual sense of what goes into an orbit and how we figure out orbits based on perhaps a hundred years of measurements that may or may not be so accurate um so that's exciting uh the other thing I want to mention so students published in the jdso students published in some other journals that are available and I also now um we all know as educators the value of of presenting your work and interacting with an authentic audience so I go around the country and put on workshops where I bring in amateur astronomers professional astronomers teachers students everybody into these workshops where they can learn about this astronomy research and students who have done the research already will present their research and it's such an amazing experience for them this is these are my favorite pictures so far I've done five or six of these over the last few years this one was in new york in april um at the northeast astro imaging conference and this shows some students presenting their research and I here's the one of the papers titled investigation of 11 charter systems etc but the people in the audience oh my gosh you guys the guy in the blue shirt is astronaut don pettit who's in line to go either up to the moon or back up to the international space station where he's gone three times it's his favorite place in the universe to be um uh and these students he's sitting there in the audience listening to these students the other person here is um arnie hendon here was the uh executive director of the american association of variable startups reversed for 20-something years I believe and so these students are really interacting with the people that know this stuff professionals and then they get to hang out with them and it really adds meaning and value to their work and there and changes their sense of sort of being part of a community in a really big way so that's this is some of what I do um we here's more examples of students presenting at different places here's um mount wilson observatory we had two different times this summer we had student groups go up there and use these historic telescopes that were used to discover um you know like the andromeda nebula is actually a galaxy outside our own galaxy you know and students are using that telescope to collect data and and write papers on and that's really exciting and these are just more students presenting at different conferences that I hold around the country and um it's really fun for me that the astronomy research seminar last year 2018 these were you know we're we're spreading from our original location in in uh san luso-bispo california um uh to quite a few other locations that now I'm teaching a course where it was going to be instructors and students colleges mostly college instructors um some high school and then some students all around the country and then um Gerald mentioned the international astronomical union that has the minor planet center last week I was in unik germany for the first biennial international astronomical union astro edu conference so asterisk education conference so international astronomical union has now created this new body to talk about education and help you know improve astronomy education globally so now I had to make a new map because there are people in portugal and italy that are also in in my research seminar now um and these are instructors that want to bring it to all of the teachers within actually their countries so that's really exciting I do research on the impacts of this kind of research on students uh looking at you know what are the benefits how does it affect their trajectories in in um education and careers you know does it change their identity their sort of self identity as scientists it's very exciting work um I was I always think it was really funny that astronomy was sort of not even close to the most important thing that students got out of the astronomy research seminar um even one quote from a student because I interviewed them was like yeah I learned how to write and work in teams and blah blah blah I wasn't really in it for the astronomy but that was fun too so um and here I put on global conferences uh our next one is gonna be gonna be in melbourne australia in december where it's all about bringing together the network telescope network um folks with the educators and science education evaluators just bringing sort of the whole community together to expand the programs and and help bring this most amazing astronomy to everyone we can and this is one of my favorite pictures from the conference because on the left is wane rosing the founder of las cumbres observatory telescopes um so there that's the biggest network of truly sort of global network of telescopes um and they do a lot of they do actually both lco and um sky net networks do gravitational wave follow-up observations so these are what the professionals are using they're doing cutting-edge research and so this is wane rosing of las cumbers observatory meeting dan reikert of sky net telescope uh network and it was kind of amazing because it's basically the merging of the two major telescope networks so that was really fun um and that's that's what i do and we're going to be doing asteroids really soon because asteroids are amazing and i work with a lot of amateur astronomers who uh do asteroid research um who have telescopes that can be dedicated for you know two or three months at a time especially for things like studying binary asteroids which need this sort of more constant observation so astronomy is amazing love to interact with everyone and thanks for listening awesome thanks rachel i think the primary question that i saw coming through during your presentation was regarding the age range of the research group do you also do high school students or is it just uh university oh absolutely high school in fact that's yes i love working with the high school students that's almost that's almost like that is my preference because this is accessible to high school students and it really gives them a better taste of science there's research that shows that one of the reasons students don't go into science is because the science that they get in school is not actually anything like science so they don't really have an understanding of science so this is an opportunity to change that a little bit okay great thank you so much all right so let's take about there are a number of questions that are here in the chat so let's take maybe 10 15 minutes and just kind of go through them and you both can kind of answer the questions that you feel most comfortable answering i think the first question that we had was regarding cost of telescopes can you give us kind of a sense of how much these telescopes i'm thinking more ground-based how much the ground-based telescopes typically cost well i can maybe help out a little bit there your typical amateur telescope fairly good quality can cost you anywhere from 500 to $5,000 but you want to get not just a good telescope you also want to get a really good mount and mounts can cost as much as the telescope i was working with a guy the other day who has a very high-end telescope it's an amateur telescope and a mount and all these associated software and everything and he's easily into it for $20,000 now most amateurs don't go quite that extreme but it's not unusual to spend several thousand dollars on a telescope and a mount so that you can do astrophotography and you can get some data that's useful so of course then you can get into the much higher end stuff where it costs you know upwards of $100,000 but for an amateur you can get in probably for two or three thousand dollars pretty easily great so the next question is regarding pha's and the question is kind of around predicted timelines so what they're really what they're asking is what's the predicted time when a million large potentially hazardous asteroids will be discovered i think that's more related to the rate like at what rate are we discovering those well we discover probably close to 2,000 new asteroids a year now they're not all near-earth asteroids but just to give you an idea of the the numbers that we're talking about we get buzzed if you will by asteroids several times a month so far this year since january 1st there have been 42 asteroids that have come closer to the earth than the moon out of those 42 only two of them were considered pha's the vast majority of asteroids out there are small they're too small to be a serious threat anything smaller than 30 meters is probably going to burn up in our atmosphere and the vast majority of near-earth asteroids are in the 30 meter or less class in terms of finding them one of the requirements that nasa is working under is a requirement that they find all asteroids larger than 140 meters they were supposed to have it done by 2020 i think the the goal was 90 percent by 20 the year 2020 we're nowhere near reaching that goal they also had a goal of finding 90 percent or more of asteroids larger than one kilometer those are the extinction level events and we've actually achieved that goal so we know we now found more than 90 percent of the one kilometer or larger asteroids but we've got a long way to go before we find the 140 meter or larger asteroids and again most of the ones we find are much smaller less than 50 meters let me ask a quick follow-up related to that not in the chat but i know there's probably out there with these questions how do you know that you found 90 percent of those well it takes a little bit of mathematics there's a kind of a long example that i hear once in a while if you have a bucket full of beads and some of them are red and some of them are green and you randomly just reach in the bucket without looking and start pulling out beads and marking them and then putting them back in eventually you start pulling out beads that are already marked and so you know you're starting to see roughly what the percentage of the total amount of beads is for a given color and the same thing is true for asteroids when we start finding the same asteroid over and over again in the same size range that sort of gives us a hint at what their percentage is of the total population for a given size of asteroid so yeah it's it's some mathematics and some statistics involved but it does work pretty well and it does you know as we do actual observations we're finding that it's it's pretty accurate that that was a beautiful analogy i loved it thank you um so the next question is regard regarding research so does your team's research involve any sort of artificial intelligence and if so where in the research and what is its purpose um i assume that that my student research programs we don't use artificial intelligence because it's regular intelligence and Gerald do we use any artificial intelligence the minor the minor planet center is using a little bit of it i mentioned earlier the large synoptic survey telescope lsst which is going to come online and i think they're going to actually start doing real science around the year 2023 and they will be using artificial intelligence they're going to find so many transient objects out there that they have to have a way of sorting through them and picking the real objects from you know the hot pixels and the cosmic rays and so forth uh so they're going to be using artificial intelligence to do that great um so the next question is what other factors besides gravitational fields are considered when predicting the course of an asteroid well i can answer that there are a couple of factors uh gravity is of course a dominant factor for determining orbits but asteroids are subject to some other forces most notably something called the jarkovsky effect all asteroids rotate some rotate fast some slow as they are rotating and orbiting around the sun the side of the asteroid that faces the sun is heated by the sun as the asteroid rotates that heated side turns away from the sun and then starts to radiate heat back out into space that heat radiation actually creates a very small but measurable force on the asteroid that slowly changes its orbit so you'll hear when you study asteroid orbits you'll hear a lot about the jarkovsky effect also smaller asteroids can be affected by the solar wind and of course then there's the occasional collision that changes everything so there are a number of other factors but primarily it's the gravitational pull of the sun and the planets they all kind of work together great and i want you to know that most of these questions are coming from tenefly high school so and they're asking fantastic questions i'll keep asking questions because we still have about another seven eight minutes that we can talk um all right so our next question is what are some of the latest ways to use telescopes to solve the problem of identifying asteroid compositions tough one i'm giving rachel a chance so i mean i guess that would be um spectroscopy right in large part right right and we're um you know there's a lot more more spectrographs coming online on these telescopes but that allows you to determine in large part the elements so are we using are we using ground-based telescopes for those or those mostly things oh really yeah both ground-based and space-based telescopes you know there's a lot of different ways you can do good science on asteroids you know i focus on tracking the asteroids and finding their positions and how bright they are and so forth but there are other amateurs who work on things like asteroid rotation rates getting light curves on asteroids to see how fast they rotate there are astronomers who work just on spectroscopy of asteroids to try to determine their composition so there's a lot of different things you can do and in terms of asteroid research you don't just need to be tracking them okay um so i'm gonna actually combine oh i'm sorry go ahead rachel oh i was just gonna add one little thing to that which is sort of the the sort of new field of wide binary asteroids these are much harder to detect but they're very cool because they're giving us insight into the behavior and you mentioned the Gerald mentioned the Yarkovsky effect and and that has has a role in this where as these asteroids they can they can get spun up by these effects and then break apart but then they're still gravitationally bound and so they'll come depending on the masses of the two pieces then they'll come back together and form a contact binary and in fact i think the one that we landed on recently um was that contact binary we learned a lot from that um and that we can also learn about the the composition of these asteroids because you have to sort of know what is it that's allowing them to sort of stick back together and all that um but these wide binary asteroids are something that to take they're really hard to to observe or to find so it was i think almost fortuitous that people were doing these long observations and sort of saw a secondary period in addition to the the rotational period of an asteroid and then oh there's something else here anyway so there's lots of cool science in there absolutely and even to follow on with the binary um if the people on the line don't know when we got to baneu you know the plan the plan was to do this sample return where you just kind of take this canister and you just kind of touch the surface and it would collect up what we thought was going to be dust and as a matter of fact when we get there it's just kind of like a big ball of just rubble just kind of stuck together and it just kind of poofs out and then goes back and it's it's weird yeah it turns out that a lot of the asteroids are what we call rubble pile asteroids they're just collections of rocks and gravel that are just loosely bound gravitationally and by static electrical forces and easily broken apart and not so easily sampled but on the other side those are also things that should they enter earth's atmosphere yeah they break up break up real easily right so a little less little less of the scary type of asteroid so related to scary asteroids i'm going to kind of combine a few questions together around that um so there's questions about the what are the next steps so when you identify these phas these things that are on a on a collision course with earth um you know what are the next steps you know what do we what do we do as a nation what do we do as as the globe world to try to um you know do we build anti asteroid weapons you know what do we do what's the plan well there are actually a number of proposals some of which have been tested and some of which are going to be tested real soon um one concept is called the impactor concept where you go up to an asteroid take a spacecraft up to an asteroid and you basically fire a bullet at it but it's a large mass and it hits the asteroid and it bumps the asteroid changing its orbit another concept is the gravity tractor where you take a massive spacecraft put it in orbit directly in front of the asteroid the mutual gravitation between the spacecraft and the asteroid allows the spacecraft to change course very gradually and pull the asteroid along with it so there are ideas like that you can uh one kind of uh weird uh suggestion is to paint the asteroid white if you paint it white it changes its reflectivity and that means the that Yarkovsky effect changes and that can deflect the asteroid but any of these concepts has to be done not a week before impact it's going to be done years before impact because if you do it years before impact it takes a very small change in the orbit to cause the asteroid to miss the earth if you wait a week or so a month even a month before impact and try to do this you're just not going to be able to deflect it enough to avoid impact but the really important point is impacts are extremely rare they don't happen very often especially impacts by large asteroids so uh you know we've got that mother nature working on our side making sure that for the most part we're really not in that much danger from them okay and we're going to end with this one last question which is looking into the future so how do you see the field of asteroid hunting and imaging changing and evolving in the future um LSST is going to change it a lot LSST is the large synoptic survey telescope it's going to be able to spot a million transits per night so it's going to be a huge amount of data and like i said before they're going to use artificial intelligence to sort through that and get the real stuff from the the not so real stuff but still it's going to be a tremendous amount of data and we're going to have to be able to process that process that data follow up on all those observations so it's going to be a major game changer awesome thank you so much and with just a few minutes left i think it's time to make our big announcement here over at Infiniscope so for those of you that haven't been around since the beginning or you're new to Infiniscope and you haven't heard um our very first learning experience that we designed here is actually called where are the small worlds and it's an asteroid hunting game um and so what you do is you actually uh use you kind of use Kepler's third law you kind of just don't know you're using it um in order to identify where these are in the solar system so you based on the speed of the object you determine whether or not it's a near earth object whether it's a main asteroid belt object or if it's a kuiper belt object and honestly the kuiper belt objects are very very difficult to find because they move so terribly slow in the night sky so our big announcement let me uh do a quick screen share here is that officially as of last Thursday we have released a new updated version of this game called women in STEM so when you play this game um just like the just like our original game you actually start out with an introduction from Lindy Elkins Tanton who is the principal investigator of the psyche mission and she is based here out of ASU I actually am going to hit the end here so I can show you a couple of other things if you have played this game before what you'll notice is that we've actually updated the stars the night sky so it's a little harder and easier to see the objects which is a really weird thing so you can you may or may not be able to discern it on your screen because we are in fact sharing by a zoom and it doesn't do a great job of showing but these objects are moving on our screen and I'm going to go ahead our mission and we start to explore for these small worlds that has been explored by a woman in STEM you get to meet her you get to learn a little bit about her past uh what she's done with that particular with a particular mission to explore that world and you'll also earn a gold coin instead of a silver coin for finding her world so I will leave you with the big challenge of head out and start playing with the women in STEM version of where the small worlds and see if you can find all of the gold coins that are hidden out on those 15 worlds we've hidden there so with that I want to say personally thank you all for coming to this webinar we do have it recorded Vivian has done a fantastic job of making sure that she'll be sending that information over I will send a follow-up email to everyone with all of the resources and make sure you have access to anything and everything that you've been asking for and also one final thank you to Gerald and Rachel thank you for taking your time and sharing your world with us so that we can better educate the people that we work with my pleasure thank you all right thank you all and we will be in touch