Asteroids

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Speaker 11 You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 If you're in the UK, the full series is available right now. First on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 14 Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 12 I'm Robin Inks, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now, my favourite is 624 Hector, while Brian's favourite, I believe, is 4179 Tutalia.

Speaker 11 Go on, what are you talking about?

Speaker 12 I am talking about

Speaker 12 anyone know what that is?

Speaker 12 Oh, there we go. What do you reckon? Because Brian, you haven't got a clue, have you?

Speaker 17 It is the arcade game Asteroids.

Speaker 12 Now, I was not intending to do the noises. We were going to use a recording.
But it turns out, Atari are very litigious, even with their games from 1979.

Speaker 12 So I've had to end up becoming like a cheap version of Michael Winslow from Police Academy.

Speaker 14 It's genuinely true.

Speaker 11 We were told the BBC cannot afford the licensing fee of the beeps.

Speaker 13 So I literally,

Speaker 14 when we were writing, I just went, what, we can't afford the bew, bew, boo, bo-coo, bo-coo, and they went, that'll do.

Speaker 11 So, yeah, asteroid, my favorite, by the way, my favourite asteroid is 18610 or 18610, Arthur Dent.

Speaker 12 That is such a guy.

Speaker 16 Arthur Dent.

Speaker 11 Three and a half kilometres in diameter, middle of the asteroid, belt, dressing gown.

Speaker 12 He's a 85 Bieber box one, which is like a twin asteroid going around themselves. Yeah.
So, what are we going to be asking today?

Speaker 11 Well, today we're asking what are asteroids, what is their composition and history of formation, and what can we learn from them about the history and formation of the solar system as a whole.

Speaker 12 And of course, we'll also be talking about whether they will be the ultimate death of civilization, possibly within two to three years.

Speaker 12 That's because the BBC said that people listen to shows more often if there is a greater sense of jeopardy. So that's not scientifically accurate.

Speaker 12 It's just for the nature of storytelling and it's also for any fans of Armageddon, obviously.

Speaker 12 Again, we were going to have a bit of Aerosmith there.

Speaker 14 I'm going to play.

Speaker 12 They're very litigious as well.

Speaker 13 So the best we can. Loving an elevator!

Speaker 21 Litigant in Armageddon.

Speaker 12 I'll admit, it's not the one in Armageddon, but I think it's better, Loving the Elevator. I don't like their ballads.

Speaker 11 Well, to guide us through the asteroid belt, we're joined by a professor of planetary science, an astrophysicist, and perhaps most importantly of all, a Time Lords companion. And they are.

Speaker 22 Hi, I'm Alan Fitzsimmons.

Speaker 24 I'm professor of astronomy at Queen's University Belfast.

Speaker 25 And my day job is studying asteroids and other things orbiting the sun out there beyond the Earth-Moon system.

Speaker 29 And over the years, I've looked at and discovered asteroids that come close to a planet.

Speaker 27 And I'm kind of thinking that if there's a silver lining to an asteroid impact, it would be that we'd never again hear the phrase X, formerly known as Twitter.

Speaker 32 So true. So I'm Professor Sarah Russell, and I am from the Natural History Museum here in London, where I study meteorites.

Speaker 32 So most meteorites come from asteroids, so they're the objects that Alan studies when they're floating in space, when they've landed on Earth.

Speaker 32 And I think the silver lining to having an asteroid crash into the Earth would be loads of new meteorites for us to study.

Speaker 33 I'm John Bishop, I'm a comedian. I used to play a computer game called Asteroids, and I'm a big Aerosmith fan.

Speaker 33 And I think if there's a silver lining of an asteroid hitting Hair, it'll mean that we never have to watch another film where an American who's got a dubious personal life going on somehow saves us from an asteroid hitting the earth.

Speaker 15 That's an extra!

Speaker 12 So, let's start off with, we will start with the definition, which is what is an asteroid?

Speaker 12 Because I think people think of so many, you know, when you think of asteroids and meteorites, and we think of meteoroids, and we think of shooting stars, and we think, and I think people get very confused by all this thing.

Speaker 12 So, what is the definition of an asteroid?

Speaker 31 Well, an asteroid is really anything that's smaller than a planet made of rock orbiting the Sun.

Speaker 36 Now, that means we can go from the largest asteroid, which is the asteroid Ceres, that's 933 kilometers in diameter out there between Mars and Jupiter, all the way down to about something about a meter across.

Speaker 28 Anything smaller than a metre across, if you can't put your arms around it, it's probably not an asteroid anymore.

Speaker 41 It's just a boulder or meteoroid or something like that.

Speaker 27 We've got over a million of these objects now discovered by astronomers all between

Speaker 28 those two planets.

Speaker 25 So most of them are quite far away and because of their size they're quite small.

Speaker 38 So the word asteroid comes from star-like and it's because even with a decent telescope the asteroids just appear as points of light.

Speaker 23 You can't see any details on them.

Speaker 29 It's only with the largest telescopes we have on Earth that you can see anything else than just a star-like object.

Speaker 11 So Sarah, are all the asteroids in the asteroid belt?

Speaker 32 No, they're not. So most of them are in the asteroid belt, but some of them are closer to Jupiter, and some come into the innermost part of the solar system.

Speaker 32 So there's this whole group of objects called the near-earth objects, and these are the ones that we have our eye on as potential impactors to the Earth. And they can potentially make meteorites.

Speaker 32 So a meteorite is any extraterrestrial natural object that falls onto the surface of the Earth or another planet.

Speaker 11 And are there any further out than Jupiter?

Speaker 32 Yeah. The further out you go, you get to something called the snow line, where things get colder as you go further away from the Sun.

Speaker 32 So they become more and more icy, and then they sort of morph into this other kind of body called the Kalperbelt objects, which sometimes come into the innermost part of the solar system as comets that we can see with the tails.

Speaker 11 So where's the edge? If I said to you, where is the edge?

Speaker 11 Where's the edge of the solar system?

Speaker 11 How far do you have to go before you say we're no longer in the solar system?

Speaker 40 Yeah, probably about a tenth of the the way to the nearest star, but we have what's called the Oort cloud.

Speaker 27 And knowing that structure of the solar system from where the asteroids are in the inner solar system out to the cometary region, that's how we

Speaker 28 decipher what's happened to our solar system over the four and a half billion years.

Speaker 35 We used to think that the solar system was kind of regular.

Speaker 27 You had all the eight major planets and Pluto in kind of

Speaker 27 fairly regular orbits and then a lot of flotsum and jetsum.

Speaker 23 But it turns out that by looking at that flotsum and jetsum, particularly the asteroids, we now now understand that the early solar system was mad, basically.

Speaker 27 The planets were going everywhere. Jupiter moved in, Jupiter moved out, Saturn moved in with with

Speaker 27 Jupiter a bit of a lobstick that moved out.

Speaker 45 And all of those processes through the the gravitational pulls of the planets went into sculpt the solar system as we see it today.

Speaker 33 Well Sarah, you mentioned the the asteroid belt.

Speaker 20 Now is it

Speaker 33 is it a belt?

Speaker 33 Is it like a sphere around Saturn? Is it thin? Is the asteroid belt everywhere? Because can you fly past it, basically?

Speaker 32 Yeah, well, it's shaped like a doughnut.

Speaker 32 But even though, you know, when you watch kind of Star Trek and stuff, when you go through an asteroid belt, everybody's like getting kicked around by these rocks. It's not really like that.

Speaker 1 It happened to me and Doctor Who.

Speaker 13 Very shaky.

Speaker 32 Yeah, but actually, even though there's a belt of rocks, they're actually millions of miles apart. So, several, like lots of spacecraft have been through it, no problem at all.

Speaker 11 But then we've got the Oort cloud, which is not a belt, it's a cloud. So, why is the Oort cloud a cloud, which is basically more spherical? And the asteroid belt and everything else flat?

Speaker 49 Well, there's two reasons for that.

Speaker 27 First of all, when the objects in the Oort cloud, which there are probably both asteroids and comets out there, when that was created, it was created by Jupiter and other planets, throwing material out there in the the early days of the solar system.

Speaker 29 And amazingly, once they get out there, they're traveling so slowly they can be affected by the gravitational field of the Milky Way galaxy as a whole.

Speaker 30 And that spreads them out into more of this spherical cloud surrounding the solar system as a whole.

Speaker 38 But that's a long way out.

Speaker 27 And to be honest, it's so far out we've never seen it.

Speaker 46 So we're kind of taking what we measure in the inner solar system and projecting what it's like out there.

Speaker 11 It does raise the question, doesn't it, John? Like, we've never seen it. I don't know.
But it's a big

Speaker 33 structure. I listen to this podcast, and the amount of times you have people on talking about stuff that no one's ever seen,

Speaker 13 to be honest with you.

Speaker 33 It's the most made-up podcast

Speaker 13 in the world.

Speaker 12 Oh, I don't know if you hear some of the ones about economics, you might find out.

Speaker 11 So, Sarah, how do we infer that there's this giant structure? As you said, the tenth of the way up to the nearest star.

Speaker 16 How do you infer that?

Speaker 32 Yeah, so occasionally, objects from this Oort cloud come into the innermost part of the solar system. They can have quite an eccentric, chaotic orbit.

Speaker 32 And when they come into the innermost part of the solar system, we can see them as comets.

Speaker 32 And then when we look at the trajectory to see where it's come from, we realize it's come from way out of the solar system. But just an answer to John, I would say

Speaker 32 the great thing about asteroids and meteorites, which are mostly from asteroids, is that they are a part of astronomy that you can actually see and hold and measure in the lab. So

Speaker 32 it's a very sort of

Speaker 32 we can visit the natural history museum, John.

Speaker 33 So when you say you can hold them, like from your experience, what was the first one you ever picked up and what did that feel like?

Speaker 32 I was at university and I had just been to a lecture about meteorites and was told this was four and a half billion years old and it absolutely blew my mind that I was got a chance to hold something that was older than the Earth and not only that but they contain tiny grains inside them that are older than our whole solar system that they formed in stars that were ancestors to our solar system.

Speaker 11 I just wanted to ask Sari you gave a very specific number there, a date.

Speaker 11 So you said these things that we find on the ground here that we have in the Natural History Museum are some of them are older than the Earth, and there are grains in there that are older in the solar system.

Speaker 11 How do we know?

Speaker 32 These are very, very tiny grains inside meteorites. They're only.

Speaker 12 You can't actually see them, and we're still not sure.

Speaker 32 You can see them, actually, Robin,

Speaker 32 if you have an electron microscope. So, yeah, they definitely do exist, and they have isotopic compositions that match what you would expect a red giant to produce or a supernova to produce.

Speaker 32 So, they have compositions that are just way beyond what we find in our average solar system.

Speaker 11 So you see a small grain and it has essentially the composition of an exploded star.

Speaker 32 Exactly. Not a form.
Oh, you explain it so much, Prada Brunt.

Speaker 13 No, I do. Exactly.

Speaker 11 And how do we put the date on these things?

Speaker 32 So we can measure the age of the meteorite really accurately and we date them by looking at radioactive isotopes inside them.

Speaker 12 And when I think of how many people seem to have a problem with understanding the length of the life of the universe or indeed of the existence of the solar system, there is something, isn't there, in having something tactile and having something that you can hold?

Speaker 32 A lot of astronomy is kind of very kind of conceptual and it can be quite difficult to grasp, but if you have something that you can literally grasp in your hand and think this came from space, I think that's very powerful.

Speaker 11 How many fall to the earth every year? It's relatively common, isn't it? Good shit. We've got a lot of them.

Speaker 32 We've got about 70,000 in our collections around the world. About a dozen or so are reported every year, but there's a load more than that that fall that are not collected.

Speaker 33 What would be the common size of something that actually lands on Earth?

Speaker 32 Well, the vast majority of material that lands on Earth is actually in the form of dust. So every time you see a shooting star, that's a tiny

Speaker 32 sand-like particle that's coming through our atmosphere and just burns up. And we think that about 40,000 tons of material every year comes to Earth that way.
So the Earth is still growing every year.

Speaker 32 it gets bigger because it's getting all of this extraterrestrial material. But the larger ones, long ones that are big enough to pick up, that happens only a few times a year.

Speaker 12 The number of samples you've got at the Natural History Museum. And there must be times where you break someone's heart.
There must be times when you go, I think that must be from next door's patio.

Speaker 12 And you're obviously not getting on with your neighbours, they're throwing things, they're getting the cat out of the garden or whatever.

Speaker 32 I can't tell you how often I've had that conversation. So we get loads of people all the time who think they've found a meteorite.

Speaker 32 And yes, sometimes it is like half a brick that obviously their neighbours have thrown, tossed over the fence or whatever.

Speaker 32 The worst or most heartbreaking times for me is when people come and say, you know, this has been in our family for generations.

Speaker 32 My great-great-grandfather's a lot of people.

Speaker 13 This is like the anti-gold shop.

Speaker 32 Yeah, it's awful. But yeah, the real meteorites don't happen very often.
So one fell in the UK in 2021 and that was the first one for 30 years. So it doesn't happen very often.

Speaker 11 Was that the one in no which was one the Cotswolds?

Speaker 32 Yes, exactly. That was Winchcombe.

Speaker 11 Made a dent in someone's drive, didn't it? It did. And scattered all over the land, but it was in lockdown.

Speaker 13 So all the pieces.

Speaker 14 Well, why did it get such a silly name?

Speaker 13 What's the name?

Speaker 32 Well, it's called Winchcombe, so all meteorites. Just give the name of the town.

Speaker 13 The BBC.

Speaker 13 The BBC. John, you know, how often I go to Cotswold, the BBC would like to apologise to everybody.

Speaker 19 John's agent went, we've cancelled the gig in Winchcombe and also Cheltenham and Gloucester.

Speaker 43 Just to be safe, John, just to be safe.

Speaker 32 Meteorites are always named after the place where they land. They're always named after the place that they land.
So they're like wombles, they have geographical names always.

Speaker 33 Could I just ask, you know, when you look at.

Speaker 13 I never realised that about wombles.

Speaker 12 Oh, I love it in a series where I really learned something.

Speaker 33 You know, when you look at them, is there anything within the structure of meteorites that is not identifiable as anything relatable on Earth?

Speaker 32 It has all the same elements as on Earth. So the periodic table is the same everywhere.

Speaker 32 So it has the same elements, but they can combine together to make different minerals because they formed at different pressures and temperatures.

Speaker 32 So they often contain minerals that we don't find on the surface of the Earth. And also, they tend to contain a lot more metals.
And

Speaker 32 that's not because they have a lot of metals, it's because the surface of the Earth doesn't have enough metal because it's all sunk to form the Earth's core.

Speaker 11 Alan, what can the composition of these objects tell us? Why are we so interested in them scientifically?

Speaker 27 Well, the important thing for asteroids out there in space is that when we look at the asteroid belt, there is what we call a compositional gradient.

Speaker 27 That if we look at asteroids in the belt closest to Mars, they are pretty stony.

Speaker 35 If you pick up a stony meteorite, one of Sarah's stony meteorites and compare it with a rock from Earth, it's not that dissimilar.

Speaker 35 It feels a little bit heavier because, as Sarah said, it has more metals in it.

Speaker 42 But you've got to have a practised eye to actually tell the difference, as we've heard.

Speaker 35 But as you go further out in the asteroid belt, as you approach the planet Jupiter, we find that their makeup changes.

Speaker 27 We see that they have progressively a lot more lighter elements, such as carbon, in them, and so they progressively become darker.

Speaker 29 And that's telling us something about the structure of the planetary system in its first days of formation.

Speaker 10 That nearer the Sun, we had very generally denser elements because all the heat from the newly born Sun was actually driving away the lighter atoms.

Speaker 35 But as you go further out in the solar system, you managed to retain more of those lighter elements.

Speaker 54 So you get a much clearer idea of the primordial composition of the material from which our solar system formed.

Speaker 27 And that's that's pretty important when we want to go back in time and find out exactly what was the process by which our solar system came into being and what was here at that time.

Speaker 27 So, actually, seeing these different types of asteroids and linking them to the types of meteorites that Sarah studies is actually really, really important.

Speaker 37 It gives us this global picture of the current structure of our solar system and what it was like back then at the solar system formation.

Speaker 11 And what are the specific questions?

Speaker 11 We're going to talk about these two missions that you're both involved in, which are going to asteroids. So, what are the very specific questions you ask?

Speaker 11 When you're planning a mission, you say, Right, we're going to go to that region or that particular asteroid. What are the questions that you want to answer?

Speaker 27 Well, a lot of the time it can be linked to that formation and origin process.

Speaker 29 If we're going to an asteroid, how did that asteroid get there?

Speaker 10 And how can we explain its structure and its composition, given what we think we know about the history of the solar system?

Speaker 45 So to give an example, the asteroid that

Speaker 27 recently had samples returned from it, asteroid Bennu,

Speaker 30 and Servas part of that analysis team, that's an asteroid with a lot of carbon in it.

Speaker 40 So we believe that that asteroid originated further out in the solar system.

Speaker 35 And so it's given us a much clearer idea of what the material, what material was there when it wasn't affected from being too near the sun?

Speaker 11 Could you talk about the OSIRIS mission a little bit? Because it's quite an ambitious thing to do, isn't it? To go to an asteroid, get some stuff, and bring it back.

Speaker 32 Yeah, it's been an amazing mission, Brian. So, this is a NASA mission that launched in 2016.
It went to visit asteroid Bennu, which, as Alan said, is a carbon-rich asteroid.

Speaker 32 And Bennu is only 500 meters across, so it doesn't have very much gravity or anything. So, it's basically the spacecraft was kind of flying with Bennu rather than in orbit around it.

Speaker 32 And it spent some time going around Bennu, getting lots and lots of data.

Speaker 32 And then it did this maneuver called the touch-and-go maneuver, where this arm came out into the surface, grabbed some of the rubble on the surface of the asteroid, and then brought it back to Earth.

Speaker 32 So it came back to Earth in September 2023.

Speaker 20 Who picks where to grab?

Speaker 33 Because we've all grabbed in the wrong place.

Speaker 32 Speak for yourself, John.

Speaker 12 It's the first time we've directly had a cancellation in the show, isn't it?

Speaker 33 But seriously, you know, if you were to say, just grab a beach,

Speaker 51 you could grab something worthless or something.

Speaker 12 Well, you were thinking of those grabber things, aren't you?

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's what we know.

Speaker 12 I thought, you know, in the end, it came back with a soft toy. I've been hoping it was going to get that bottle of wine with the tenor wraps around it.

Speaker 32 There was an amazing amount of debate in the team to decide where to actually sample.

Speaker 32 So engineers always want to go to like the safest possible place and the scientists want to go to the most exciting place and then they have to find something.

Speaker 33 But within that 500 meters of mass.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 33 What's so different about that small space?

Speaker 32 Well,

Speaker 32 we got there, we were amazed. So first of all, we thought that the surface was all going to be sort of powder, like

Speaker 32 the astronauts walking on the moon walk on this sort of very fine-grained powder. But actually, it was full of boulders and it was full of craters,

Speaker 32 and there were darker bits, and there were lighter bits, and there were like these big veins of white stuff going through it. So, there was loads of interesting stuff going on.

Speaker 32 It was also what we call an active asteroid. So, every so often, some stuff would spurt out of the center of it and just go into space.
So,

Speaker 32 it was a really interesting asteroid.

Speaker 33 Did you know what the white stuff was?

Speaker 33 Was that part of the grab?

Speaker 32 We do have some white stuff that we have grabbed, yeah.

Speaker 33 So not every sentence as this is going to sound as scientific as it is.

Speaker 1 Someone's just tearing it off.

Speaker 33 It sounds like we're talking about washing powder, doesn't it?

Speaker 32 What is it? What is it? It's not classé drugs.

Speaker 13 What is it, actually?

Speaker 32 Not class A drugs. Oh, sorry.

Speaker 12 No, no, no, that's fine. Because I can imagine it's, you know, you're going to get bored.
You've got a lot of waiting around, isn't there? You've got to keep the energy up.

Speaker 12 And that's another cancellation on the show. I wasn't expecting two in a row quite so fast.

Speaker 32 Yeah, so the white stuff, we realized quite quickly there was a lot of this material called carbonate, which is a rock that forms

Speaker 32 under the action of water. So the cliffs of Dover are made of carbonate material.

Speaker 32 But one of the surprises when we got the material back is there's another white mineral in there, a phosphate mineral, so we're still trying to work out what that means.

Speaker 32 But it also probably formed through the action of water.

Speaker 27 And one of the most beautiful things about this mission, which is like all space missions, is that it discovers things that you didn't expect or didn't predict.

Speaker 27 So, when Osiris Rex went down to do its grabbing,

Speaker 18 what they found out had happened afterwards was that

Speaker 35 when the sampling mechanism went down to touch the surface, it didn't stop.

Speaker 18 It just went straight through as if it wasn't there.

Speaker 49 And if it hadn't been pre-programmed to fire its thrusters, the whole spacecraft could have just buried itself in the asteroid.

Speaker 26 But that actually tells us something about the structure of this asteroid.

Speaker 31 It tells us it's very porous and it's almost, well, what we call a rubble pile asteroid, in that it's composed of little bits of smaller asteroid that really are very weakly held together.

Speaker 27 And you better be careful if you want to put on a space suit and jump onto an asteroid, because you could end up just going straight through it and out the other way.

Speaker 11 This is really strange, because you're painting a picture of of this, as you said, a rubble pile. How do you get liquid water in a pile of rubble?

Speaker 32 Because it wasn't always a rubble pile, so we think it was it was it had a parent asteroid, or maybe more than one parent,

Speaker 32 probably out in the outermost part of the solar system or beyond Jupiter originally.

Speaker 32 And there there could have been liquid water, so it wouldn't have been quite so porous. But then that got disrupted and

Speaker 32 probably was hit by something and then re-accreted into this loose.

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Speaker 38 Sprubble pile.

Speaker 33 People have hypothesized that the asteroids could be a stepping stone to further space travel because if you could land on one, there'd be enough water resource to be able to take off.

Speaker 33 Or is that just science fiction?

Speaker 32 Yeah, no, that's absolutely not science fiction. So,

Speaker 32 yeah, one of the aims of the Aceris-Rex mission was to investigate asteroids for use as a potential resource.

Speaker 32 And although it doesn't have liquid water anymore, it still has water trapped in its minerals. So it's mostly made of a clay mineral.
So it's basically like a mud, and it's got about 10% water in it.

Speaker 32 So that's something that you could use as a gas station if you're going through space and you needed to stuff.

Speaker 33 Did you say mud, clay-like mud? Yeah. So you could take a kiln as well.

Speaker 51 And once you were all

Speaker 20 in a little vase to take home.

Speaker 33 So I was always under the impression until I started looking at the asteroids that the water is a rarity in space. But what it seems to be that it's it's everywhere except

Speaker 33 where we've been looking on Mars and people.

Speaker 13 Those dowsers weren't as good as we'd hoped they'd be sent up, were they?

Speaker 32 Yeah, absolutely. So H2O is two of the most common elements in the universe.
But yeah, Mars has kind of dried out though, unfortunately.

Speaker 11 Well this brings us to future missions, and also maybe you could talk a bit about the DART mission, because Robin was talking about Armageddon moving asteroids that they're coming towards the Earth.

Speaker 47 Well, DART was the

Speaker 28 first experimental test of a technology we might use to deflect threatening asteroids in the future.

Speaker 27 Really, instead of darts, maybe it should have been called billiards, because we know that if you hit something with something else,

Speaker 41 that something else will move.

Speaker 23 The whole point of DART was seeing: Could we deflect an asteroid to change its path? Now, we could try that with an asteroid just orbiting by itself around the Sun.

Speaker 54 But then you've got a problem about measuring exactly how much did you move it.

Speaker 35 It's much easier, it turns out, if you move the moon of an asteroid

Speaker 27 that's going around it, because then you can actually see how that moon's orbit changes.

Speaker 27 And also, you don't have the problem of maybe knocking the main asteroid onto a collision course with the Earth.

Speaker 37 All you do is change the orbit of the Moon, which is a good thing.

Speaker 33 If the big thing that we're worried about is an asteroid hitting the Earth and everyone accepts that that's what killed out the dinosaurs, did that asteroid strike change Earth's orbit?

Speaker 47 It may have done, but at such a small level it would have been immeasurable.

Speaker 27 All the effects of the dinosaur killer 66 million years ago were really on the surface of the Earth. The Earth as a planet didn't really notice.

Speaker 31 It was the poor things living on the surface of the planet that actually did notice.

Speaker 27 You know,

Speaker 39 they didn't have a very good day of it, to be completely honest.

Speaker 41 Now,

Speaker 26 but the important thing is, of course, dinosaurs didn't have a space program.

Speaker 13 We do.

Speaker 27 So that's why DART was launched by NASA to do this first test of could we move a small, even a small 160-meter diameter asteroid.

Speaker 36 And by gun, they moved it.

Speaker 35 It was a fantastic situation.

Speaker 11 Just to set

Speaker 11 the stage, so 160-metre asteroid coming in at the right angle.

Speaker 11 What kind of a threat would that be?

Speaker 1 Okay, well, let's play that favourite game then.

Speaker 40 Let's have the

Speaker 40 asteroid have a projected impact point of, say, BBC in London.

Speaker 11 You work for the Daily Telegraph, yeah.

Speaker 1 So you lose the BBC,

Speaker 28 you lose London,

Speaker 25 and you lose the home counties.

Speaker 38 Really?

Speaker 20 That would be.

Speaker 1 Interesting to notice it had an effect there.

Speaker 13 Didn't care about Berber.

Speaker 32 The BBC, didn't care about London.

Speaker 13 Berkshire. Tumbridge.

Speaker 21 Oh.

Speaker 53 So that's a massive reduction in the sale of Gillettes.

Speaker 13 And that's the strangest.

Speaker 12 The good news is Winch comes safe.

Speaker 26 And that's the strangest thing about these movies and TV shows about asteroids heading towards the Earth.

Speaker 31 The asteroid that participated in the extinction of the dinosaurs was only 10 kilometers across, and it had global consequences.

Speaker 10 We believe the threshold for global consequences is an asteroid only one kilometer across.

Speaker 29 And because these things are traveling so fast, it's the kinetic energy of the asteroid.

Speaker 23 Imagine something the size of a small mountain moving at 15 kilometers per second, 10 miles per second.

Speaker 27 What happens basically is that when it hits the ground, it gouges out a crater on the Earth's surface, and all that material that used to be on the Earth's surface is thrown up into the stratosphere and immediately starts global cooling, disrupting the food chain.

Speaker 28 And the last simulations I saw that was that if we had a one-kilometre asteroid hit the Earth,

Speaker 31 then it's a possible mortality rate of 25% of the Earth's population within one year because of just farming is not happening anymore.

Speaker 42 So that's the bad news.

Speaker 20 That's lifted the rumour.

Speaker 23 There's good news.

Speaker 27 The good news is we've pretty much found all of those one kilometre and larger asteroids over the past 20 or 30 years through dedicated astronomical surveys, and they're not coming towards us for at least the next hundred years.

Speaker 41 So we don't have to worry about it.

Speaker 11 100, 200, 300 meters would be devastating for a city or a country, a region. So of those,

Speaker 11 how many do we do we think we have?

Speaker 40 There's a number of ways to calculate this number using the telescopic surveys we've been doing over the past 20 or 30 years.

Speaker 31 And both of those techniques really converged on the same number that

Speaker 18 for the

Speaker 22 going down to about, say, 120 meters across, because you do the calculations and it turns out that if you're smaller than 120 meters, you might or might not make it to the Earth's surface, depending on the composition of the asteroid and its structure.

Speaker 27 Above 120 meters, no, it's going to make it to the ground and make a crater.

Speaker 28 And

Speaker 54 out of those, we've probably found about a quarter of them so far.

Speaker 33 Has anyone staked a claim to the mineral wealth that's out there?

Speaker 12 Well, that is, Sarah. I mean, that is a a a big question, isn't it? Which is I presume that private money is now kind of gets more and more interested the moment that you start talking about minerals,

Speaker 12 about phosphates and all of those things. And that is one of the big questions, isn't it, in terms of when do we get that who owns what in space?

Speaker 32 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 32 So there are billionaires now kind of planning their next big adventure of mining asteroids, and I think at the moment it's pretty much find us, keep us, but obviously that's going to have to change.

Speaker 32 So we're going to have to really kind of rethink our ideas about who owns what in space. So, at the moment, the laws are governed by the Outer Space Treaty, which was from 1967.

Speaker 32 So, it's way out of date and really predates all of our explorations.

Speaker 13 I'm not doing at the moment.

Speaker 33 I love the fact that there's an outer space treaty before space 1999 was even on the telly.

Speaker 11 In terms of

Speaker 11 the mineral wealth, because it sounds like a lot of trouble to go to to do some mining. So what are we talking about out there? You know, as you said, it's very difficult to get out there.

Speaker 38 What turn this?

Speaker 47 Well, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 NASA last year launched a mission called Psyche, which is going to an asteroid called Psyche.

Speaker 45 They didn't think much about it.

Speaker 23 But it's the largest metal-rich asteroid we know about in the asteroid belt.

Speaker 38 And I think the estimate is that if you could take all the metal out and somehow get it back to Earth, it's, what is it, it's $100 trillion or something?

Speaker 32 Ridiculously silly number.

Speaker 50 It's more than the BBC license fee.

Speaker 12 Oh, yet again, the undercover telegraph agent

Speaker 12 pipes up with his agenda.

Speaker 33 On a serious note, I mean, it is science fiction mining an asteroid.

Speaker 17 So you're talking about metal on an asteroid.

Speaker 29 The initial plans for using the resources in the asteroid belt go back to what we talked about previously, which is water, because when you take water, you can make rocket fuel out of it.

Speaker 27 And the idea is that if you're going to explore and exploit the solar system, one of the problems is taking the fuel with you.

Speaker 10 If you can create your own fuel for your engines out in the asteroid belt, then things do become a lot cheaper.

Speaker 48 So it is initially this idea before we get into bringing back all the lithium perhaps and the rare earth elements that we might need for you know the future technologies.

Speaker 57 Well well you said the word there, that's perhaps a bigger question. You said the word exploit.

Speaker 57 Is it right that we as what we know to be the only beings in the universe have the right to go and exploit or change the balance of it?

Speaker 32 I don't know. What do you think, John?

Speaker 12 Welcome to the moral maze.

Speaker 33 No, it's just that we've not been that great at looking after where we live. Are we making life better? We just go into space so that we have more stuff because we don't need more stuff.

Speaker 33 I think, in fact, one of the things I would bring out is a rule that says no one's allowed to invent anything for the next five years whilst we all learn how to use the stuff.

Speaker 12 I mean, but it is what I was thinking all the way through: is that bit where you people in Yorkshire, Nottingham, and Derbyshire, and other places going, yeah, we had all the mines closed in the 1980s because they weren't financially viable.

Speaker 12 So now they're mining in the solar system.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 11 I just wanted to ask, we've run out of time, but I just wanted to ask very briefly about the HERA mission because you've got a lot of badges that all say HERA.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 what does that mission?

Speaker 35 And perhaps just a very brief summary of the future missions that the HERA mission is the follow-up to the DART mission because the DART mission moved this small asteroid moon but in the process destroyed itself.

Speaker 31 So all our views of what actually happened there came from our Earth-bound telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope and so on back then.

Speaker 31 And we really want to know how did that asteroid move, what happened to that asteroid.

Speaker 46 So if we have to use this technology in the future

Speaker 40 then we'll have a better idea of what's going to happen.

Speaker 38 So here is the follow-up and it will launch in October this year.

Speaker 10 It's an an ESA mission.

Speaker 26 And rather than going directly there at high velocity, like the DART mission did, it's going to take just over two years to rendezvous with the binary asteroid.

Speaker 27 And it's going to spend at least six months there flying alongside, measuring exactly what happened to that moon.

Speaker 38 Even

Speaker 40 basically, what shape is it now?

Speaker 24 All our simulations imply that what the moon will see when we get there isn't quite the moon we saw from Dart because we gave it a pretty big wallop.

Speaker 17 And while it's there, by the way, it will release two little CubeSats.

Speaker 1 There'll be three spacecraft there. It will arrive at the system in January 2027.

Speaker 54 We're going to have six months of amazing images, finished by both here and at least one of the CubeSats landing.

Speaker 30 on those asteroids and themselves.

Speaker 31 So it's going to be great fun.

Speaker 35 And then beyond that, we've got a whole bunch of other missions, of course.

Speaker 27 We have a Japanese mission, the Hayabusa 2 mission, which has already returned

Speaker 35 a small sample of the near-Earth asteroid to Earth, and it's en route to another two near-Earth asteroids.

Speaker 43 OSIRIS-REx, oh this is brilliant, OSIRIS-REx is now called Osiris-Apex

Speaker 42 because in 2004 astronomers discovered an asteroid called Apophis, which is named after the god of chaos.

Speaker 1 Because we know that this fairly sizable asteroid, it's over 250 meters across, is going to regularly approach our planet.

Speaker 31 And the next approach will be on Friday the 13th

Speaker 27 of April 2029, when it's going to be so close that you can go outside in a clear, dark sky in England and watch it fly past the Earth with your eyes as a faint star.

Speaker 48 And Osiris Apex will be pretty much there at that time.

Speaker 27 And a couple of days later, we'll rendezvous with the asteroid to find out exactly what that close approach to the Earth did to Epophis.

Speaker 29 The Earth's gravity will change the orbit of Epophis dramatically.

Speaker 27 We also think it's going to change its spin, the way it's spinning as well, and it may even move stuff around the surface. So, this is just an amazing mission.

Speaker 24 And there's a whole bunch of other stuff because what we've understood from all the asteroid missions we've done up to now, again, is that every time we go there, we find something

Speaker 27 new, something unexpected that we didn't expect.

Speaker 54 And we think that's going to continue for many years to come.

Speaker 12 I love that test, the fact that it's Friday the 13th. That's almost the way of whittling down the team, isn't it?

Speaker 54 Oh, not Friday the 13th. That'll be unlucky.

Speaker 12 You're out of the science group.

Speaker 13 Sorry.

Speaker 32 Yeah, and there's just so many exciting things coming up as well. So, as well as all the missions that Alan was talking about, my favorite upcoming mission is

Speaker 32 the Japanese mission called MMX, which is going to visit the moon of Mars called Phobos, which might be an asteroid, or it might not be we don't we don't know what it is so that's going to be really exciting it's going to bring a bit of that back to earth in a few years time I always felt I'm sure like other people did that asteroids were an accidental bit of rock rubbish in space you know they were just in the way on the way to all the planets and and I just think now that they are themselves a whole world that I or a whole system that I knew nothing about a whole science that I think is exciting well that's it again that's exactly exactly what we hope: is that you look at things and you go, wow, that's that each thing has such an intriguing life and

Speaker 18 intriguing existence.

Speaker 12 Anyway, we asked the audience as well a question, and we wanted to know: if Earth needs to be saved from an asteroid, who would be in your crack team to save civilization? I've got here my wife.

Speaker 12 She's always right, so no one would dare argue. And her glares are powerful enough to change an asteroid's trajectory.

Speaker 17 Thank you, Donald.

Speaker 33 Who would be one support in charge of saving the the earth? Anyone except the dinosaurs?

Speaker 1 Bad track record.

Speaker 11 Freddy Flint off a few beers and a bat.

Speaker 33 Ian McKellen, as we would want the asteroids to pass.

Speaker 11 Wait, weren't you just playing Ian McKellen's husband?

Speaker 33 I was playing Ian McKellen's husband, yes. I he he was uh he was mother goose, I was daddy goose.

Speaker 33 That sounds worse when you say it out loud.

Speaker 53 But that's effectively what happened.

Speaker 13 That was your thing.

Speaker 34 It wasn't a play, he just kept on calling me that.

Speaker 12 Oh, I don't like this one. Brian, because I would love to see him in a little spandex suit.

Speaker 12 I'll tell you what, if you go on to OnlyFans, it's quite expensive, but you find him there.

Speaker 33 Right, I've got Dwayne Johnson, as there isn't a celebrity named after its natural nemesis paper, the rock would at least guarantee a draw.

Speaker 33 God, that's a long gag, isn't it?

Speaker 11 Rishi Sonak, he knows all about missing targets.

Speaker 11 This one says, My mum, she writes a good letter of complaint, but I don't see that would help, would it?

Speaker 13 Again, very radio 4.

Speaker 11 I will write a very strongly worded letter to this asteroid.

Speaker 12 More Brian Coxes, Brian Cox, because he could smile sweetly at it and it would coyly avoid hitting him.

Speaker 12 Professor Brian Cox all naked and stuff.

Speaker 13 Well, that's all we have to do.

Speaker 13 There we are.

Speaker 20 Thank you.

Speaker 11 Thank you very much to our panel. Professor Alan Simmons, Professor Sarah Russell, and honorary Gallifrean, John Bishop.

Speaker 12 Over the last few series, some of you might have noticed that as the series go by, there seems to be an increase in murderous intent in the subject matter, including, in fact, how to do the perfect murder quite recently.

Speaker 12 So now, in fact, we're going to continue with that. Next week, what we're going to do is we're going to learn about poison and how to do it.

Speaker 12 Which I'm really sure, I'm not sure we should do that or not.

Speaker 11 That's going to be very carefully handled.

Speaker 12 It will be very, very carefully handled. So we are going to leave you to think about next week's episode of Poison while you're enjoying the warm milk that your partner brings to you every evening.

Speaker 12 Tastes of almonds, I don't know why.

Speaker 34 Thank you, darling.

Speaker 12 Good night.

Speaker 21 In the infinite monkey cage without your trousers.

Speaker 15 In the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 22 Now nice again.

Speaker 3 Hello, Russell Russell Kane here.

Speaker 49 I used to love British history. Be proud of it.
Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians. Obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

Speaker 49 That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

Speaker 49 Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed. But if, like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Speaker 49 Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Cain. Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

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