 Coming up. Orbital ATK reveals a cis-lunar habitat. NASA observes a magnetic reconnection, and I explain what that is. I'm really glad he does. And we talk about planetary defense as our main topic, all that more coming up on this episode of Tomorrow. Hello, and welcome to Tomorrow, episode 9.18 here for May 21st, 2016. And before we get started with our show, we are going to go take a look at the patrons of Tomorrow. Specifically, these folks who are our Tomorrow Premier members. Now, these wonderful people, they have donated more than $10 per episode on Patreon for us. And we're very glad to have these people here. And they get access to everything, the whole Enceladus, if you will, with what they get. Yes. We get early access to After Dark, early access to the show, Google Hangouts, our Slack channel, our Citizen's channel that we have on Slack. So you could see, this morning, you could have watched myself and Dutta and Space Mike trying to figure out how Photoshop works and all those other fun things. Hey, I know how it works. Basically, you could have watched me try to figure out how Photoshop works this morning on our Slack channel. So these Premier members, they get access to everything. And we are so glad to have them on board with our show today. And of course, we would give a big thank you to all of our Patreon patrons who will note some of you a little bit later in the show as we go on. If you would like to donate, you can go to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. And now coming back to here, my name is Jared Head. I'm going to be your host for today because Ben is on the East Coast doing itar redacted. So we cannot, unfortunately, say, neither confirm nor deny what Ben may be working on today. Of course, to my left, your right, if you're watching on the air, or your left, if you're watching from the Southern Hemisphere, is the beautiful, the lovely, the talented, the not my wife, Carrie Ann. Carrie Ann, thanks for coming today. Yeah, thanks. I live here. Yeah, that's right. I just remembered that. As I said that right now. Thanks for coming, Jared. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. I don't live here. And of course, just a little bit further to your left, the right of the viewers, we've got Space Mike all the way from the mythical heated lands of Erezune. How are you doing today, Mike? Pretty good. It's pretty hot here. Yeah, I would imagine. It's actually kind of nice here in LA today. It's like the first time we've seen the sun in a couple of weeks. You're right. Yeah, because it's been so weird. Well, why talk about the sun when we can actually talk about space? Can we go to the sun? So, I wish. I wish. I wouldn't recommend going to the sun. But let's go and get the show started off with a rocket launch. And Space Mike, you're going to tell us about this rocket launch. That's right. We have a really awesome Chinese launch that actually took place last Sunday. Check out the footage. And this video is actually very short. This was a Long March 2D rocket that launched on Sunday, May 15th at 243 coordinated universal time. And this was from the G-Quan Space Center in Northwest China. And this mission launched the Yao Gan 30. Officially, it's a remote sensing satellite that will be used for experiments, land surveys, crop yields, and disaster relief. However, the spacecraft reached an orbit or a high point of about 653 kilometers and reached a low point of 625 kilometers. And it's in a sun-synchronous orbit due to the inclination that it's at. And what this means is a lot of people suspect that this is not just a reconnaissance satellite, but also an intelligence satellite or a spy satellite. And as is kind of the custom with the Chinese launches, whenever they don't announce a launch, it's usually a military launch. So, like all space hardware there, everything is dual-purpose for both civilian and military purposes. So congratulations to China. And they'll be having some very exciting launches coming up very soon, later on. Yeah, and they're getting ready to do a whole new rocket and a whole new spaceport, if I remember correctly. That's right. Coming up, so I'm very excited to see about that. So, woo-hoo, good for them. Now, we're gonna move. It's funny that the chat room was like, ah, yummy yellow smoke. Yes. Yeah, do not breathe, big poison cloud. Yeah, we'll let that one go. I always love those, because I love seeing, I don't know, I always think it's interesting, nonetheless, but anyway, go on, Jared. We're actually going to move from Earth to the outer solar system, because New Horizons is still going, and it's still sending its data back, but it has not stopped the science since after its Pluto encounter, it's actually continuing to do science while it's out there. And in fact, this is a science image that's brought back to us of this Kuiper Belt object. It doesn't make the best socks ever. Yeah, look at that, isn't it, great? Can we get that printed? So, I think we should at Forever 21. Right. Now, this Kuiper Belt object has the wonderful name of 1994, JR1. Wow, what a great place. It's approximately 135 kilometers wide, and it's orbiting about 5 billion kilometers from the sun. Now, the imagery here was taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager Instrument, and you can actually see the reflection of the primary mirror up in the top, what's, what is that top left? That top left corner with the hole in it? That's actually the reflection. It's not a UFO, don't worry. We're fine. So, I know the internet, well now the internet's gonna take that run with it now. But there you go. This image was specifically taken on April 7th and 8th at a distance of 111 million kilometers. Now, they did look at 1994 JR1 back in November at a distance of 280 million kilometers. Combining the observation, they've now been able to triangulate the distance of 1994 JR1 to within 1,000 kilometers of accuracy. So, its orbit has become even more accurate in now how they are studying it. So, this rules out a previous hypothesis that it could have actually been like a quasi-moon of Pluto, and that's very, very cool that they were able to do that. They've also used that imagery to find out that it has a very fast rotational period. It rotates once every five hours, 28 minutes. So, that's gonna make you a little dizzy if you're out and on it. And of course, observing it keeps the operators and the spacecraft operations very sharp for their upcoming fly by of the aptly named Kuiper Belt Object, 2014 MU69 on January 1st, 2019. So, that's gonna be great. As you can tell, the Kuiper Belt just a wonderful place of great names out there, you know? It's just, it's like, somebody wrote a beautiful novel and named everything. That's incredible. The chat room is wondering how many football fields that is. And of course, the chat room, thankfully, is adding all their answers. I'm sure doing the math very quickly, where Mini Elon says it's probably 42 and Vax Hedrum adds it's 2.8 zillion. Yeah, I think it's 2.8 zillion, is the correct terminology. And if you want it in imperial units, you can figure it out yourself. There you go. So, yeah. So, very good stuff. Now, of course, we can bring it back from the outer solar system to somewhere a little bit closer. Space Mike, tell us about some plants that somebody has decided to talk about publicly. And that's right. This is about some plants to develop a four-person habitat around the moon. And this is, in particular, orbital ATK's proposal. And we have a photo of their kind of early initial design when they were first contracted. This is a NASA program called Next Step, which they were selected for last year to study the initial version of a CIS lunar habitat that would evolve over time into a much larger research platform with many of the capabilities required for a human mission to Mars. And for this study, that's part of the Next Step program, it's kind of based on the same sort of public-private partnerships like the Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo program. And with this, they have lots of different ideas for how they'll be able to use this as a proving ground. And this picture's kind of misleading because it has Mars in the background. But we do have new photos of their kind of new ideas for what this potential space station would look like. And the chat room is really freaking out. They're like, that's no moon! Sorry, Mike, go on. Oh, no problem, no problem. So the cool thing about this is that NASA has goals of establishing a space station in either a stable lunar orbit or the innermost Earth Moon Lagrange point to prove out several of the technologies needed for the trip to Mars, as well as to gain experience. So the chances of this public-private partnership achieving these goals is actually really high. And something that I like about this is that with their Cislunar Habitat proposal, it's built on, of course, their Cygnus spacecraft. And the pressurized cargo module is built by Tails-Alenia space based in France. And judging by their different artist depictions, I'm assuming that Tails-Alenia space would build either the spherical node in the first proposal, or that more kind of traditional node with multiple docking ports or birthing ports for station expansion and visiting spacecraft. This is kind of an alternate configuration here with a kind of a longer route instead of doing a more modular approach. But with this whole thing, the part that lawmakers liked the best about this was Orbital ATK's proposal relied heavily on the space launch system and Orion to deliver cruise. And if selected, it would give Orion more near-term missions in Cislunar space aside from the test Orion shakedown cruises and the asteroid redirect mission, which we'll be talking about later, before being used for Mars missions in the 2030 to 2040 timeline. And in total, four companies, Lockheed Martin, Bigelow Aerospace, Boeing, and Orbital ATK, were selected to study these potential habitats. And all of them, except for Bigelow Aerospace, are kind of subcontracting Tails-Alenia space for their pressurized modules since they have the most experience in that, which I find really interesting. So we'll hopefully get a lot more information as this program evolves over the years and hopefully we will see a space station in lunar orbit somewhere. Nice. Yeah. The chat room immediately looked at the first couple of pictures there. And every day astronaut says, space kegs. Sir Gamelott says, yeah, those definitely look like beer kegs to me. And then Harrison apparently was taking up some issues with the lack of windows, saying that Harrison feels as though they would be claustrophobic without them. I can totally see that. And the same time, like, what's the use of being stuck in a beer keg out in space? If you can't see where you are, you might as well just be in a beer keg down on Earth, yes? Well, I mean, if you do have a beer keg in space and are imbibing from it, then it's not gonna matter what you can see. But unless you're inside of it, if you're stuck in a bunch of beer kegs, a series of beer kegs, if you will, much like a series of tubes, it seems to me that you would want some windows on that thing. So Harrison, I'm with you on that one. Oh boy. What I find kind of interesting is that both the Lockheed and Boeing proposal proposes putting a cupola module, like the one that's on the International Space Station, on one of those node modules. So that's because everyone wants to drive the Millennium Falcon. You know that. Yeah. That's all it is. It's just a ploy to make that happen. That's so funny. It's Star Wars land in orbit. So, all right. Yes, agreed. Yes. Well, talking about things that are happening in the area around Earth, there has been a very interesting discovery that has occurred very recently with one of NASA's missions known as the Magnetospheric Multiscale Spacecraft Mission, or MMS. Totally easy to say. Which is so much easier to say than the entire thing together. Now they fly through the invisible storm of particles that interact with the Earth's magnetic field, both from the sun and interstellar, intergalactic sources, and all the other fun stuff that our magnetic field interacts with. And they specifically flew through something called a magnetic reconnection. Now this mission is four spacecraft flying in formation to study the Earth's magnetic field. It looks super Star Trek. Yeah, it does look a bit Star Trek, doesn't it? Yeah. Now the magnetic reconnection is what occurs when two lines in a magnetic field realign with each other, connect, and then send jets of high energy particles off. And this is actually one of the leading sources of space radiation. So that's why they really wanna study this. Now it flew through a magnetic reconnection on October 16th of last year, 2015. Now they were taking data from the heart of the action there, and those instruments on board take data at a fast enough sampling rate that they were able to observe that magnetic reconnection in great detail because it usually only happens in a matter of seconds. It's something that it's, woo! You know, it happens very, very quickly. Now the formation of the spacecraft that they're flying in can be adjusted. It's in a pyramid shape, which clearly means it's the Illuminati flying the spacecraft. But the spacecraft, they could fly further apart to help view the paths of protons with their instruments, or they could fly closer to each other to help view the paths of electrons. And they were flying very close to each other when they went through their magnetic reconnection. And it turns out that they think, now that they've actually gotten data from one, that electrons are very, very important to that high energy particles flying out during magnetic reconnection. So they're gonna continue to do that. The spacecraft have flown through five magnetic reconnections since then, and they're going to continue to go through that. It's already flown through the Earth's boundary layer of its magnetic field about 4,000 times. So giving us some great data, especially in terms of what we need to know in terms of radiation and protection from radiation. And speaking of that, of course, when you go to Mars, you gotta think about radiation and protection of that. And Space Mike, you've got something about Mars to tell us about. It's a good segue, I like it. That's right. Yes, very good, very good. This is another proposal from Lockheed Martin, but this is not for their lunar base. This is something they're calling Mars base. And we have a little bit of eye candy for you of their proposal. With this, they recently released a concept of how they would like to send humans to Mars by 2028. And with this idea, it would be an orbiting science station that sets the stage for human landing missions in the 2030s. And from the orbiting science stations around Mars, astronauts can perform real-time scientific exploration, analyze Martian rock and soil samples, and confirm the ideal place to land humans on the surface. We have an infographic that kind of shows a little bit more of its different subsystems. And with this, it's especially being able to teleoperate rovers without a delay, I think is a good justification for this idea. Now, this plan would utilize the space launch system and Orion capsule and would be built upon the habitats from their own next step program, which, as I said before, would be built by Tails, Elenia Space, as well as they would have solar electric propulsion for this vehicle. Now, I don't know about those kind of large conical habitats from their concept photos, but almost all of the other pieces of the station exist today. So this is something that they could do. Although this is just a concept and giving Lockheed Martin's pattern of not really doing missions unless the government pays for it, this probably won't come about exactly like this. But it's still a good idea. And I, for one, am happy to see more missions for the space launch system in Orion and seeing ambitious plans coming from space companies, even if it doesn't necessarily materialize in this way. The goal for NASA right now is to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, 2040s. So we will see something, hopefully something like this, even if it's not Lockheed Martin's proposal. Yeah, still a very interesting proposal. And I mean, even though we have the proposal from Lockheed Martin for Mars and the proposal from Orbital ATK for the CIS Lunar Habitat, it's good to have these proposals coming out because the more players you get in the game, the higher your chances are of actually succeeding in the game that you're trying to play. In this case, interplanetary travel with humans. And the more the merrier, I'd say, with everything that we get out of it. So very, very cool stuff. Ben Credible says, this does look nicer than the hashtag lunar keg. And VoverSpace.com says, they can get great orbital views of the five-year anniversary party for SpaceX's Mars colony, which is just mean all the way around, but hilarious nonetheless. Increase factor, actually, to go back to Jared's story, if you don't mind, was running if MMS found positions at the edge of the magnetosphere. A positrons. Oh, yeah. Which is a form, it's anti-matter. Gotcha. I don't think they have yet. That would be a very big announcement to be made. And I don't believe that's been found yet. In fact, I'm not sure if the instrumentation on board of MMS actually can detect positrons. But, you know, I'm probably wrong. And if I'm wrong, someone in the chat room will definitely let me know about that. So, very cool with that. So. Yeah, no, that's very cool. Yeah. Ben Credible says, think Lockheed will start out of pocket missions now that other space companies like Boeing and SpaceX are sort of doing that. I mean, maybe. I mean, I guess there is a chance, but. Itar redacted apparently. That was really bizarre. We completely lost Mike as soon as he said, but, and then static. No, still no Mike. So we will try to figure that out in a minute, which is hilarious considering that, oh no, Jared, you've got the next story. So I guess we can just go ahead and continue with that. We'll just transition on into this after that little Itar redacted moment, which we're gonna go to the International Space Station real quick and talk about some upcoming crew rotations. Perfect. Which is that the new crews for the upcoming International Space Station Expeditions have been announced. And we are very happy to see that Alexander Gerst, who is a European Space Agency astronaut from Germany, will be embarking on a second mission to the International Space Station of May of 2018. And very, very happily, we are happy to say that he will take command of Expedition 57 on the station in September, 2018. So he will become the first German spacecraft commander in history. And that is awesome. That's really cool. So you've had an American, you've had a Russian, obviously. I believe there was a Japanese astronaut. I was just gonna say, right? His name is escaping me at the moment. And of course, Chris Hadfield with Canada, and now we've got- Dan TC24 in the chatroom says, first attractive beard. Yes, I know, right? Can we go back and look at him real quick again, Dana? Oh, that was hilarious. Because, can we? Is it possible? Because, I mean, if the chatroom likes his beard, we can continue to look at his beard, look at that. He's a volcanologist, by the way. He actually studied volcanoes here on Earth. So, pretty cool stuff. And yeah, he's definitely not a sight for sore. Oh, oh, oh. I'm just gonna sit over here. All right. Yeah, we'll just- Yes, Koichi Wakata, no? Yeah, there you go. Thank you, Aspen, in the chatroom. Thank you so much. Perfect. Yes, he was the commander of the space station as well. So, very, very good. Excellent. Oh, yes, and Frank DeWynn was Belgian as well, commander of the International Space Station. My gosh, this is why I love our chatroom. If we don't know it, the chatroom knows it, and the chatroom lets us know it for sure. So, it's fantastic. Oh, I love it. But we're very good. I'm sure Alexander was thrilled to hear that, and Vundaba for everybody. It's happening right there. So, we are gonna go ahead and take a break. And when we- See if we can get Mike back. Yeah, see if we can get Mike back. And when we come back, we are going to be talking about our hashtag that we have planetary defense. Oh, is the Earth safe, and can we save it if there is something headed our way? As long as Bruce Willis is still alive. Oh, wait. Oh, spoilers. Anyways, we will be right back after this quick break. And we're back. Glad to be back with everybody here with just one launch coming up. Are you back, Space Mike? Yes, can you guys hear me now? Yes, we can. Well, I forgot to do this before we went to break. But, yeah, actually, let's do the Patreon Slates first before we go back into this. So, of course, we like to thank our patrons that contribute to our crowdfunding here at Tomorrow on Patreon. And now, we are going to be thanking not just our premiere members who get to see their names multiple times throughout the show. We also are going to thank our producers as well. And our tomorrow producers, these are folks who have given anything from $5 to $9.99 per show. And you helped crowdfund these shows. This is why we are able to do these shows is because of your generosity and your awesomeness that you have thought that we are so good that you want to see more of these shows happen. And we are able to do that by allowing you to contribute, crowdfund our shows at patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. So a big salute to all of you, all of our patrons on Patreon. We're very glad that you contribute. Now, this is what I forgot to do before the break, which is that here in Los Angeles today, external tank 94 is being moved from its, I guess, what would you call it, the dock that they dropped it off at? Yeah, I suppose it was from, it was set up in Marina del Rey and now it's making its way through Los Angeles to get to the California Science Center. So that's really exciting for all of us here. It's any shuttle huggers know how we're feeling right about now. Unfortunately, don't have the picture of the two of you, but from when the shuttle came through the city. Yes. But you can imagine a gigantic external tank if you hit up any social media, Twitter, I'm sure you can see pictures and how completely ridiculous it looks going through the city. But really, really cool, a lot of fun going on down there and a lot of people out there. My favorite shot was seeing it go over the bridge of the 405. Yes. For those of you who don't live in Los Angeles, the 405 is an infamous freeway that it will take you just prepare to camp if you're going on the 405. It's a major artery of Los Angeles. And it was so funny, because I mean, you live in LA and all the traffic and everything and you realize the external tank is probably moving faster than the people are on the 405 right now. That's probably true. Yeah, and also there is a photo out there of myself pre-Mohawk and Dada when we both helped out on moving Endeavor back in 2012, I believe it was. So it was pretty cool stuff. And I should note that that photo was taken by Mars Rover driver Scott Maxwell. So there's some serious nerd cred involved in that photo there. But why talk about serious nerd cred when we can talk about something that we need to do here on this planet, which is that something out there in space has our name on it. Okay, as Ben likes to say though, space is trying to kill you. Yeah, that's the best way to put it, space is trying to kill you. And we kind of have to defend ourselves from something like that. And you might remember the celli events meteorite and all the other fun things that have happened over the past couple of years that have sort of woken up people to the idea of maybe we should do something to try and prevent our extinction as a species, just a little bit. So there's lots of things that are actually on the table. And one of those very instrumental and important things for planetary defense is going out and studying asteroids, especially in extremely close detail. And that is where a mission like Osiris Rex, which we will probably talk about a little bit later as it gets towards its launch date. But yesterday, it was actually delivered to the Cape to get in preparation for its launch in September of this year. And it's gonna go out and it's actually going to reach an asteroid named Benu, I believe. Hey, just like Benu. I knew it's Benu. And I was like a little bit sad that it wasn't Benu, but that's okay. It's gonna go sample Ben for us. There you go, so you wanna prevent Ben from hitting the earth. Yes, I do. And it's gonna bring back those samples for us. And there's other things as well. Space Mike, what are some of those other things that we have to do for planetary defense? Well, something that I should mention is we've discovered over, especially over just the past couple of years, that there are hundreds of thousands of near earth objects. And these range in size from large asteroids that are extinction level events if they hit the earth to something small that would just burn up in the atmosphere and possibly have kind of a violent explosion like a cell you've been seeing Russia a couple of years ago. But with this, ground observations obviously are very important to see if we can find anything different. But there's lots of other spacecraft as well that are monitoring these types of things and going out. One of the big spacecrafts, my favorite, is WISE, now called NeoWISE, which looks in the infrared spectrum and has been probably one of the biggest discoverers of a lot of these near earth asteroids and has kind of woken not just NASA, but even lawmakers up to the fact that this is a problem, we need to do something about this. So there's more spacecraft that are in various phases of construction that'll be launched in several years to look at more of these things and several other spacecraft that are gonna be going to these asteroids and trying to figure out what the best way would be for us to move something out of the way. Now, a really good idea that I like is a Boeing proposal. And I think a lot of general people would be able to get on board with this because this is kind of like an Armageddon-style idea. And with this, they would send a spacecraft that would be loaded with missiles that would be launched at an incoming near earth asteroid to either blow it into pieces or depending on its size, just nudge it a little bit to move it out of the way. And this is called their asteroid deflection mission and is one of their proposals for a potential payload for the space launch system. And this is also built on the same type of satellite bus that NASA is working for for their asteroid redirect mission. And on the asteroid redirect mission, the plan is to send a spacecraft that is powered by solar electric propulsion to go to a nearest asteroid and remove just a boulder off of it. In fact, we actually have an animation of NASA's plan to do this if we can roll that. And with this animation, it shows kind of how they would go about this. Originally, their plan was to go to a small asteroid and move the entire asteroid, but the plan has since changed to just be able to have something that would, like I said, just remove a boulder off of the rock. And the really cool thing about this is they have developed something called a gravity tractor, which no is not a technology from Star Trek. It's actually just a pretty simple physics trick, I feel like. What they would do, which you'll see coming up in the animation in a moment, is once they have removed a pretty large-sized boulder from the asteroid, it would enter into what's called a halo orbit in front of or really in any direction around this spacecraft. And this halo orbit, with the extra mass of the boulder that it would remove, plus the mass of the spacecraft, would be able to have a gravitational effect on the larger asteroid. And by having this mission go for several months or maybe even several years, they could be able to move a potentially hazardous asteroid that could kill all of us and all life on this planet out of the way, so that it would be safe. And the whole thing with this plan is this is kind of the only official missions that are booked for the space launch system. The robotic mission hasn't been booked as so far as I know, but the missions to test out the Orion around the moon and then to send the Orion to go and recover this boulder that has been extracted from the asteroid would take place. And with that, this spacecraft, after it's done with the whole gravity tractor removal, or excuse me, maneuver, it would go into somewhere in stable orbit around the moon or possibly even in one of the Lagrange points so that astronauts could later meet up with that spacecraft and take samples and do any other type of science that they want to do from that. And I feel like this could potentially pave the way for potential asteroid mining techniques. And as you can see in the animation here, this is how they would do that halo orbit to be able to slightly move the larger asteroid to a safer trajectory. And yeah, that's a really good plan. I'm a big supporter of the NASA arm mission, the asteroid redirect mission. And this is something that we absolutely have to do. If we do not protect the Earth from some of these potential asteroids, we could all be dead. And just one asteroid that I know of in particular, Apophis, still has the potential to kill all of us in the 2030s. So we have to do something about this. The biggest problem I have with this animation, and it's like a four or five minute thing, by the way, is they go down, they see boulder, they grab the boulder, they go away, they kind of spin around for a little bit. And then they like go over to Lagrange point, like you were saying, and then, and this is the part I sort of have a problem with. They send astronauts from Earth up to the unit that has the boulder. Then astronauts have to do an EVA or an extra vehicle activity. They have to get out of the capsule. They have to climb a board. Then they have to take their own fricking samples. And then they're gonna pack that up neatly, nicely. Literally in the animation, they show them taping it down, putting into the thing, getting back into the capsule and then coming back down to Earth, fiery ablaze and everything, all the parachutes, they land, land in the water. So we still gotta go out and get them anyhow, which is awesome. I don't understand if this is just a fricking rock, why we can't just do that. I get the whole idea, like we don't want it burning up in our atmosphere and all that other fun stuff. But then we get it back onto land and then we look at it for a while and we sort of poke at it and we try to figure things out, et cetera, et cetera. This is like a 10 year fricking process to like get this thing up there, over there, do the thing, get the stuff, come back over here, then send humans to it and then send humans back down and then other humans have to look at things and try to figure stuff out. I'm like, if we have a fricking asteroid coming at us, and I know things are not like Armageddon, but if we have an asteroid coming at us and we know that in 10 years it might be dangerous. How did, there's not enough fudge room in that for me. Do you see what I'm saying? Like I feel like we can- Your margin of error is very small. Right, because then at that point, once we go, yeah, this could be dangerous, then what do we do? Because Bruce Willis, man, he's getting up there. Okay, he's not gonna be alive forever. We could be really screwed. So I don't understand. Like can somebody explain this to me? Like where, I don't, do you see my disconnection here? Yeah, I kind of see it. Where the idea of moving an asteroid doesn't seem like it's really gonna do anything. Yeah. Okay, so let's say that you have a spacecraft and you kind of go up to the asteroid and you've got, and once the spacecraft gets to the asteroid, there are six years until it hits the earth. Sure. Okay, is that a fair amount of time? You just like, you can do the gravity tractor thing where you literally just park your spacecraft here right by the asteroid and because the asteroid wants in the gravity of the spacecraft, interact with each other. It pulls them closer to each other, but the spacecraft, you know, it's got thrusters. So it fires and it literally will pull the asteroid with the gravitational interaction. Okay, but if asteroid this big, spacecraft this big, spacecraft be able to move? If it can. If it can, that's the part of it. Okay, go on. Yes, if it can. Let's say that it moves it, that after a couple of weeks, we've got it moving at one centimeter per second. Sure. Off, so we're going this fast. Right. Off from it. Uh huh. One centimeter per second, does that sound very fast? No. But there's a lot of seconds in a year, right? Sure. So if you've got six years of seconds, that's a really big distance that you get it to miss the earth by. Okay, thank you. So things are fine. Obviously you would want to increase the speed at which you are moving, you know, your asteroid out of the way, but that's, you know, there are other options if you don't want to do it that way actually. The way I've been able to make sense of it and correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I feel like it's almost like title interactions, kind of in the same way as the moon is orbiting around us. It's, you know, pulling the waves and having interactions on us and everything. Since it's in a halo orbit, it's not just parked in front of it, moving, you know, doing some sort of tug-of-war. It's in a halo orbit. So as it's halo orbiting around it, or rather in front of it, those interactions as it's rotating are going to have an effect and, you know, move the boulder ever so slightly and that's what's going to cause it to kind of wobble and follow it along as it's doing this whole maneuver. Okay, so then my next question is? Yes. So we move the asteroid. It's no longer a problem in theory. Fine. So then we do this weird sending humans to the place to get the sample thing, which I still think is really bizarre, but whatever. Okay. And we still are doing that because we want to know things about the asteroid that's no longer going to kill us? Potentially. Yeah, because I mean, go for it, Mike. The way that I look at it, I mean, the robotic part of this mission makes total sense to me. You know, we need to protect the planet. Human part of it is just kind of like a cool science-y thing, but I think one of the big things that they would want to find out is whatever, for particular types of asteroids, we could mine them. You know, we could harvest the water ice and convert that into rocket fuel. You know, we can use the materials if it's made out of a lot of silicates. You know, I'm thinking that we could do some sort of in-suitor resource utilizations to be able to make that a raw material that we could start doing 3D printing with. However, the question is with some of these potential asteroids that we're looking at is whether or not they'll even hold together. If we go up and barely poke it with something, is it all gonna come apart in a big pile of dust? Are we even gonna be able to take samples off of it? Those are questions that need to be answered before we undertake any type of asteroid mining plans. And even though NASA isn't doing any sort of asteroid mining, at least as far as I know, there are lots of private companies that do have partnerships with NASA that could see a lot of potential benefits of being able to mine asteroids. But that's a question that needs to be answered, but in my opinion, isn't a question that needs to be answered by humans that could be answered by robots? Yeah, I think the human element involved in it is that the joke has always been in the inner circles of the industry and space science and other stuff is that if you sent a geologist to the surface of Mars, it could do everything that has been done since the Viking landers up to curiosity in 20 minutes. So that's always been the joke with that. So I think the idea of sending humans is that you can send somebody to go like a geologist who knows exactly what you want to get from that sample as opposed to a robot, which is just going to have to assess what you're looking at and then figure out, okay, maybe I wanna do this. Also, I think with the human element involved, you can bring a bigger payload back than you would with a robotic spacecraft. I think Osiris-Rex is bringing back less than a kilogram of material from the asteroid. And if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me. I think that, Isra, and I think they're hoping to get as much as 4.4. Okay, yeah, well, there you go. I give them out. You know, they can't guarantee that because of the way that... Yeah, the design. Right, because that's the one where the arm goes down and it goes, and it hopes that crap comes up into the collection. Yeah. Okay, I know stuff sometimes. Yeah, I kinda like that Japanese mission where they hoped to get a lot of it and all they brought back was a speck of dust. Was that Hayabusa? It was Hayabusa, yes. Still, speck of dust is a lot more than we had before, so very important with that. And Hayabusa 2, which is a mission that the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, has zipping around the inter-solar system right now is on its way to intercept a asteroid. It's going to drop a lander on that asteroid. It's also going to drop explosives on an asteroid to both detonate and take samples of the freshly exposed area. They learned a lot of good... They learned a lot from their mistakes. Yeah, the Hayabusa mission is just riddled with problems and the fact that they were even able to do anything and still get samples back from that mission is amazing. I feel like you can make a movie about that mission because there were so many problems with it that they still were able to do a completely successful mission with it. So I just want to answer some things that I see in the chat room, which is that DanTC24 has quite a few questions about how you can do that orbit. So has a halo orbit ever been demonstrated? Yes, absolutely. We do them with spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. Like, Discover, one of the missions that's currently doing space weather and other stuff is doing a halo orbit around one of the Lagrangian points between the Earth and the Sun. So we have done that. Rosetta, the European Space Agency spacecraft, is in a halo orbit around comet Churuyamov-Gerasiminko, or 67P, if you don't want to call it that. So yeah, you can do that. And those orbits are possible not because you need a high level of thrust. It's actually the opposite. Those orbits are possible simply because the gravitational pull from an asteroid is so minimal, you could literally just float there right out in front and not have to really do much station keeping other than, you know, maybe I want to go down here this time. And in fact, a really cool thing that I learned from one of the scientists who works on Rosetta is that they don't really orbit the comet. They actually fly like these triangles around the comet. So they don't necessarily do a circular orbit around, and in terms of a halo orbit, because that would use too much propellant. They literally just fly lines around in a halo orbit if you will, so, which is pretty cool. So yeah, halo orbits definitely possible, so. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, there was a couple of, let's see. Johnny Spacer does say that Osiris Rex is the coolest name for a spacecraft ever. I agree. Yes. It's pretty good. Although, with the Rex- But not even confirmed. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of, here, I want to look up the actual, the actual what it stands for because it's definitely a back, it's a back random for sure. Okay, you guys ready? Yes. Osiris Rex stands for the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer. Nice. Nice. Wow. At least the background name is a cool name. Yeah, it still sounds super cool. Yeah, and the planned launch for Osiris Rex, by the way, is September 8th on an Atlas V in the 4-1-1 configuration. So, very interesting, only one solid on it. And it will arrive at Bennu in September of 2019. And then it will, as you just said, it will pull two kilograms up from the surface and its sample will return on September, 2023 at the Utah test and training range. Nice. So, where Stardust and Genesis dropped off their capsules as well after that. So, so. Yeah, they're hoping to obtain between 2.1 ounces and 4.4 pounds. I apologize. So, you know, could be a certain, somewhere in between that. Yeah, that'd be really cool. Pretty cool stuff. Now, there is the option which is, Craig V.G. in here says, Jared, I just want to nuke it. Can we nuke it? Yes, we can. If we absolutely must nuke it. You can, you can, you can. NASA's actually done a study where they, where Mike, they did use Apophis as a, as sort of a stand-in for a asteroid. But they assumed that it had a much lower density and they assumed that it was on an orbital impact trajectory for the Earth in the year 2029 in this study. And they said that as long as you get out there, sometime in the 2020s, and you can have six nuclear weapons on board. And we're talking somewhere in the range of about, let me see what it is right here. Somewhere in the range of approximately seven megatons of nuclear capable explosive, I guess it's the way to go. You should have enough energy to knock it out of the way with that there. So something I feel like I should mention too is that the whole reason why we're doing this whole thing of sending humans isn't just because they want something nice to do. This was the president's directive for NASA back in 2008 when he canceled the constellation program going back to the moon for the purpose of going to asteroids. He didn't really talk about going to Mars. He said, yes, that'll be a nice, eventual thing. But under my administration, we need to send humans to asteroids. And he even mentioned Apophis. He didn't say that we're gonna go to Apophis. He said like Apophis. He just used that as an example of potential dangerous asteroids. So that's the whole reason why this whole plan has come about, regardless of whether NASA wants to do it or not. Yeah, and it's really important to do something like this as the Chelyabinsk impactor showed us, which is that just because you think you know where everything is, doesn't mean that you actually know where everything is. As we like to say up at Griffith Observatory, there's two things we like to say. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And also asteroids and comets are nature's way of saying, hey, humans, how's that space program coming along? Because unlike the dinosaurs, first of all, not only do we have longer arms, we actually have the technology to prevent our extinction if we have enough time. Now, if we were to find something that was like two weeks away, like in Armageddon, yeah, I don't think. All the time? What? Which happens all the time. We discover objects that are like a week out or two weeks out all the time. Absolutely. That's between like the Earth and the Moon. Most of them are just small little rocks that that's why we didn't see them before is because they're so small, but that happens all the time. It's scary. And you don't necessarily have to do the gravity tractor or blow up a nuclear bomb right next to the asteroid. You could do a kinetic impact. So you literally just aim a spacecraft at the asteroid, put as much mass in that spacecraft as you can, get it going as fast as you can, and then boom, hit it and move it off course a little bit. And NASA got to demonstrate that their deep impact mission, where they had both an impactor and a fly by spacecraft that hit comet temple one to both study it and see if you could actually hit a target very precisely. So that was very cool. There's also the idea of like focusing a laser beam down on the surface of an asteroid or focusing sunlight and generating heat in a certain area where it vaporizes material off of the surface and that acts like a little thruster. And over time, the little bit of thrust adds up to a very large distance moved away from it. So there's also ideas where you just basically like land a rocket engine on the asteroid and just light it up. Here we go. So it's very cool that we have all of these options. It's just that we really need to test all of these options. And that's especially helpful for the asteroid redirect mission. Because that's gonna be nice because you can see whether a gravity tractor really will work, which, you know, the physics says that it's gonna work, but it's always nice to just make sure, especially just in case something really is gonna hit us. So very, very cool with that there. Yay. Yeah. All right. Very cool stuff. All right, I think we're done talking about planetary defense. So we're gonna go ahead and go to a break when we come back. Comments from you guys from last week's show about Mars none, one, excuse me, and we will see you right after this short break. We've always looked to the stars. They guide us. Give us comfort. Help us find our way. We see ourselves out there. When we look up, it inspires us. And we long for something we don't yet know. We yearn to go there. So we venture forth. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize the quality of space here, the ego and land it. That's one small step for me. Exploration of space will go ahead whether we join in it or not. Many think we stopped exploring, but we know our journey didn't end. We've only just begun. Come with us and explore tomorrow. Oh, that video always gets to be a little bit. Welcome back to the last segment of our show that we're having today. I mean, it really is an incredible video that Ben put together. So Ben, thank you so much. It makes me cry every time. All the feels. I shed a tear every time. Not even once. Anyways, let's go back to our Patreon patrons because of course, we always like to mention our tomorrow premiere members. They get to be mentioned three times in the show and of course they get access to all the goods because they've given us $10 or more per episode. And then we've also got our tomorrow producers that we have as well. And these folks get mentioned two times in the show and they have given us anywhere from $5 to $9 and 99 cents per show. And they get access to a whole bunch of fun stuff. We also have our tomorrow, or excuse me, our Patreon plus subscribers that we have as well. These folks have given us anywhere from $2 and 50 cents to $4 and 99 cents and they get access to things like our Google Hangouts and all the other fun goods that come with it. And if you don't have that kind of money, it's okay, we got you covered because we just have our Patreon patrons as well. As little as one penny gets your name on the show. So if you would like your name on the show, you can give us anywhere from $1 to $2 and 49 cents. That's all it takes in order for you to do that. And we are of course always so glad that you are willing to crowdfund this amazing show for us because frankly, we can't do this show without you guys. Bottom line, we just cannot do this show without you. So it's always unbelievably appreciated. We are so thrilled that you think this is worth sharing to the world and I'm always just a loss for words as to what to say to all the amazing people who help crowdfund us. If you'd like to help crowdfund us, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O and we will be more than happy to take it there. So we're back. We talked about when Dada and I helped move to the space shuttle endeavor through Los Angeles back in 2012 and we talked about the missing photo. We have the photo, here's the photo that was taken. You're going to get it, it's so cute. Yeah, look at me, so young, so fresh, so lacking in hair with it there. And then of course there's Dada on the right side. Just above the Tamara logo you can see him. Oh, that's funny. When you said a picture of the two of you, I was thinking like the picture of the two of you. This looks like Dada walked into your frame. Yeah, I don't think so. It kind of is how it works because Dada is behind the scenes with lots of things. So it's pretty, I think it's, and of course, like I said, it was taken by Scott Maxwell who you can find him on Twitter at Mars Rover Driver and he's quite prolific in the circles of the spaceflight industry because he worked on Spirit and he did a daily blog about it. And I think he's still updating it with all of his stuff because he kind of wrote everything down. It's an amazing blog if you ever get a chance to read it. So highly recommend it. But of course, let's go on to comments because we always like to hear from you about things like asteroid redirect. And in fact, as I should have said five minutes ago, don't forget to comment and tell us how you would redirect an asteroid. Would you use a gravity tractor? Would you use a nuclear bomb? Would you build a Taco Bell on the asteroid and the inevitable consequences of eating that Taco Bell would help you move it? Yeah, just figure it out somehow with that there. So Capcom, moving on to you. Yeah. Let's get this started. Last week, we had on the Mighty Ginge, who is a Mars one, I will say contestant contender. I'm not sure what the word is. Contestant. One of the finalists. Finalist. Yeah, we'll go with that. He's going to roll the wheel of Mars. I'm sure I'm going to hear about it later. Anyway, with hashtag Mars none. And we had quite a few comments. Of course, like always, most of them are coming off of YouTube, so I appreciate that. This first one comes from Martian Colonist off of YouTube saying, Josh is a fantastic ambassador for space exploration. The greatest impact of Mars one to date has been reminding the public of the allure of exploring the unknown, inspired children, a new generation of scientists and engineers. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. 100%. Yeah, and it was great to have Josh on. I thought he was a really good interview. And I really appreciate him taking his time out of his day. Yeah, and that was great to have him on, too, because we had such a nice discussion about things, especially when he talked about going to see kids and telling them about going to Mars and the process of it and getting kids inspired. Because I know when I was a kid, I was told that people would be on Mars by 2019. And that really inspired me as a kid to get involved. Interesting. In spaceflight. And of course, that's not happening. But still, all aside, it's still something that's very important, which is that if you want that future to occur, you have to help inspire that future in order to make that future actually happen. Space loss in the chat room saying Mars one hopeful. Yeah, I suppose that's also a good way of putting that. I really do hope that Mars one gets it together and actually is able to do what they want to do, even if they're not first, even if they're like seventh or eighth, I'm from the camp of more is merrier in terms of everything involved in spaceflight. So I really hope that they do have as much success as we would hope them to have. So very cool stuff. All right, Capcom, where shall we go next? So this one also came off of YouTube. This was from James Harkness, the clueless DIYer that I sometimes have called Jack Harkness. I apologize. That's a compliment amongst most circles. I know. And this comment was actually in response to the last comment, but I wanted to include both of them because I liked what both of them said even individually. So James says, my sentiments exactly. He was honest about Mars one and because of that, I actually have more respect for them, whereas I previously did not. Great job, Ben, on getting into come on. I really enjoyed the very in-depth and realistic conversation. Mars one should never shy away from doing interviews with tomorrow is every time they do, it seems they gain more respect from the community. Yeah, well, I believe one of the previous episodes, like way back, I don't know how many seasons ago, you guys interviewed three. Yeah, I mean, a couple, yeah. Something like that. I don't remember either. A while ago, though. Yeah, a while ago. I'll just say that. You had the gentleman who founded Mars one or the guy who's running Mars one? Baz Lerman, yeah. Baz Lerman. One of the guys, of course, associated with the Mars one activities from the very beginning, we'll say. Yes, that's a good way to phrase it. Yeah, no, so I mean, I appreciate, on behalf of tomorrow, I appreciate that you think that we're doing a good job with that, but I think in general, the Mars one, people who have taken the time to come on to tomorrow have really given it some levity, I believe, so which is sort of nice. It's always nice to hear the honesty from them as well. Yeah, no, exactly. Very good. Exactly, you guys in general are really, really nice and respectful, which I always, again, appreciate out of our entire community, so that was really cool to see. Yes. Yeah, Baz Lenthrough, what did I say? Baz, did you say? Did I say Lerman? Sorry, not the guy who did Mulan Rouge, although another Baz, really great guy, like him, too. Thank you to the chat room for correcting me. Wow, that was a good one. Hey, it was the L, Baz L. Come on, you gotta give that one to me. Anyway. Anyways. Moving right along. Now that we're totally confused. Exactly. This next comment also comes out of YouTube from Smora. It says, too late, I'm taking apart my microwave oven now. No! Don't! Stop! What are you doing? Why would you do that? Why would you do that? As soon as I saw that, I was laughing so hard. Yeah, it's pretty good. That was a good start. Yeah, that must have been a reference to our shows, our multiple shows that we've had on the EM Drive, which uses microwaves. Don't tear apart your microwave. It's dangerous. You could irradiate yourself. Just don't do it. I mean, we put it in all caps on the internet. That's how serious we were. I think the only, I mean, right, we're very serious. And we weren't trolling. No, we're serious. And we weren't trolling. I think the only acceptable way of taking apart your microwave is in an office space style sort of smashing, if you will. Yeah, complete with the West Coast Gangster wrap behind you with it. So that's the only way to destroy things, honestly. I think so, in slow motion. Yes. This next comment comes off of Reddit, actually, from bz922x. Let's see. Says, quote, you don't have to change your nationality. Space is a purview of all humankind. End quote. That was, of course, from Josh Richards from our interview. Says, that statement made me tear up, thank you, Josh Richards. Yeah, I thought that was a great quote as well. We should probably put that on a t-shirt somewhere before he does so that we can still, like, money off of it before he does. So, Josh, capitalize on the idea now before carrying in. Quick, copyright it. I just want everything on a t-shirt. Like, that's just my schtick. That's going to be OK, right? Oh, boy. Oh, my goodness. All right, and this last comment comes again off of Reddit. This is one is from Brandon Mark, directed at Dutta. Dutta, this is for you. I fully support the new plan of using a different transition for each comment discussed. Probably should put it at the top. But either way, I still put it at the top. Yeah! There we go. And then just soiled himself. That's the best part, isn't it? We can only get away with those things when he's not here. Yeah, that's, of course, very good stuff. Anyway, as always, we enjoy reading every single one of your comments, concerns, complaints, no matter where you decide to put them, whether it be on Twitter, tomorrow.tv, Patreon, YouTube, Facebook, I'm sure if you comment, we're going to see it, because at some point, it all filters through Reddit, of course. I go back and I read the comments and I reply to some of the comments, too, from my own stuff. So, yeah. Yeah, actually, you guys have all been doing a really great job. I've been sucking at it personally, but Ben has been doing a great job. Mike, Jared, even Lisa has been responding to your comments wherever it is, again, that you guys leave them, so that's really great. We love bringing you into the conversation. It's so much fun. That's what I really love about the show of tomorrow is our community that we have. You guys are awesome. Just so you know, you guys are awesome. You guys are so great. Oh, we love you guys. Massive feels. Yeah, exactly. Feel it right here. All of it. I'll get it, you guys. Feel it right here and right here. That's a different thing. Yeah, that is. So, I think that's it for this week, yeah? Yes. Like, you got anything else? The whole Mars One thing. I mean, of course, I hope that they eventually are successful and their finalists do get to go to Mars. But if it's not successful, I feel like what my takeaway from that show was that they are inspiring people, and especially people like Josh, is doing a very good job of representing space, not just Mars One. And if it doesn't work, I hope that it just kind of goes away quietly and there isn't a big controversy about it because that would just hurt more space enthusiasm. But despite that, what they have accomplished up to this point is inspiring people and getting people who aren't already interested in space, at least looking at it, so. Yeah, I feel like Mars One is putting the money into studies, and studies are very important things to do, especially with working with Lockheed Martin and, you know, maybe there might be something to do with that announcement with Lockheed Martin, trying to turn to Mars, at some point, potentially. So just, I'm just gonna throw that out there and let the internet run with it or something like that. So, I love it. Yeah, and I, just before we go off, I just wanna say something because I totally screwed up last week, and I'm going to say it right now, which is happy 81st anniversary to Griffith Observatory, where I work at, opened on May, just splashed myself, very good with my drink. May 14th, 1935, we've been in operation for over 81 years. We've had over eight million people look through our telescope, and it's just a joy to work there, and it's so amazing that we have been a public institution for astronomy for that long. Here's to you, and thanks for the paychecks. I love it, so next week, Ben will be back. As far as I'm aware, I will be here, Mike will be here, but Jared, you will not, is that correct? No, I will not. I'm going to the Riverside Telescope Makers Astronomy Conference, so I will be up in the woods, in the dark woods for an entire weekend of sleeping through the day and staying up all night doing observations. Nature's just trying to kill you. I'm so excited about this, I will not get my jeep stuck this time. Now, Jared, will you be here the week after that? I will, and Carrie Ann, do you know if you and Ben will be here the week after? As far as I'm aware. Yeah, because I'm possibly plotting on coming over to California so that we can do a show with me actually in studio. I'll be in the same spot behind the counter over here, but you know. Oh yeah, no, we're definitely going to like throw you in the kitchen or something. We're going to put you back there. You can sit on the desk actually, is that okay? That's fine. Yeah, I will not be here the week after that though, because I'll be going to LDRS, which is large, dangerous rocket ships. So I'm going to have so much fun. In fact, I just got my high power rocket this week, which I would like to make the first rocket of spot, if that's okay with you guys. Five by me. And I suppose I should bring it in two weeks from now so that we can all take a look at it on the show. Yeah, everybody can sign it and all that. We need like a tomorrow stickers or something that we spray paint with. I would like to do that for the rocket. So that'd be pretty cool. I'm sure we can figure that out. Awesome. Yay. All right. Well, thank you all for watching this week's episode. We'll see you next week. I won't. Goodbye. Bye, thanks everybody. And we talk about planetary defense as our main topic. All that more coming up on this episode of tomorrow. Because I hate it when he does that thing and he screams in the camera and you don't understand what the hell he's saying. And he's not Vince McMahon. It's so super annoying, seriously.