Instant Genius - What asteroids can tell us about our Solar System

Episode Date: August 8, 2018

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Are they bad or are they good? You know, they might have brought life to earth, but actually in the future they have the potential to kill us all if one were to collide with us. So this is partly why we want to study them, because if we can understand what they're doing, what they look like,

we can prevent one colliding with us. But then they have the potential to be worth a lot of money and in terms of resources be very useful for us in the future if we want to explore beyond Earth. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Jason Goodyear, the commissioning editor at BBC Focus magazine. This week, the Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak, and anybody looking up into the night sky can expect to see shooting stars is meteors burn up in the planet's atmosphere. But what exactly is happening here, and what can these big rocks in space tell us about life on Earth? In this week's podcast, Natalie Starkey, author of the book Catching Star Dust,

explains the difference between a comet and an asteroid, how they can help us understand the origins of life, and why we shouldn't be too worried about one colliding with Earth. She speaks to sciencefocus.com online editor, Alexander McNamara. So I'm Natalie Starkey. I have a PhD in geochemistry, and my undergraduate degree was in geology. So I've always been fascinated with rocks,

and then since then, for my postdoctoral work, I've been looking at comet and asteroid samples. So I just moved from rocks on Earth to rocks into space. And what I want to do is kind of analyze these rocks to understand their chemistry. And the idea for doing this is to look back at how our solar system forms. So we're sort of looking at massively big questions. And because I love this subject so much, I actually also wrote a book on it called Catching Star Dust. Because I just want everyone to be excited about comets and asteroids and what they can tell us about where we came from and how even our planet formed, how water got here, how life got here.

they've got so much to tell us. So the obvious thing there is what actually are asteroids and what are comets? It's a really good question, actually, because I think a lot of people think they know roughly what they are. They're these small objects that sort of fly about the solar system. But classically, we would say that they're very different objects. So we'd say if we go back years ago, we would have thought, okay, the comets live really far from the sun in places that are called like the Ork Cloud and the Kuiper Belt. really far from the sun further than any of the planets. And therefore, they're very cold. They're

formed of ice. And they sort of preserve the very earliest ingredients that formed our solar system. So the very earliest gas and dust and ice, they actually formed before any of the planets form. So they're pretty much 4.6 billion years old, the same age as our sun. Now, the asteroids, on the other hand, formed much closer to the sun. And they now sit between Mars and Jupiter. And we think of them more like the rocky objects of the solar system. They're basically the left over building blocks of the planets. So they're made of exactly the same stuff as the planets, but whereas the planets have evolved since then and formed themselves into these really large objects, the asteroids stayed small and they just collected together in the asteroid belt,

and they sort of preserve the conditions of when the planets formed. So both asteroids and comets are really useful because we can use them to sort of go back in time to see where we came from, where everything in our solar system, what it all started out like, and then also what the building blocks of our planets look like. Now, I say that that's like the classical view, and I should just put a caveat on that because we're now finding out that actually there's quite a lot of overlap between these objects, because things aren't that simple when you're forming planets and a solar system. We kind of wanted to make it very simple and say, okay, these things formed here and these things formed elsewhere, but actually it's a lot more

complex and objects moved around the solar system a lot at the beginning because it was a very chaotic time period. You've got these big planets moving in and out and throwing things everywhere. So some of the asteroids actually that form close to the sun ended up living with the comets now. And vice versa, in fact. So we sort of have a lot of overlap between these objects. But you can kind of think of that basic classical definition as quite accurate. And then we have some stuff that kind of falls in between. And when astronomers and other cosmochemists look at these objects, we have to take a bit of time to decide whether we think it is really an asteroid or whether it's really a comet.

So, yes, it's not a simple answer. but that's sort of in a nutshell what they are. So if we're deciding which is which, what makes a comet a comet and an asteroid, an asteroid? Okay, so what we'd want to see, generally we want to see a comet being active. And the reason we say active, and that means that when it comes into the sun or it comes anywhere near the sun, it gets heated up.

Obviously, all objects get heated up near to the sun. Now what happens with comets is that because they contain a lot of ice, this ice gets heated up, and it sublimates away, it turns into gas, gases and it drags away some of the dust with it. So basically, you get these beautiful tails from comets, and that's what we call an active comet. Now, if a comet goes via the sun lots and lots and lots of times, it continues to get heated up. And eventually it's going to lose all of its size and we call it the volatile material, the stuff that kind of evaporates very easily.

And all of that's going to get lost. So gradually, a comet is essentially going to turn into an asteroid, although it's not really, but it's going to stop being active. So basically a very old comet that's been going around the sun a lot of times, it's going to lose its activity. So this is the stage where we start to look at them and go, oh, is this an asteroid or not? Because it's not showing activity. Now, on the other hand, we've got some asteroids, like I just mentioned, those ones that might have formed really far away from the sun and then happen to find their way into the asteroid belt. And if they're on the outer edge of the asteroid belt, it's actually very cold there.

So they actually still contain ice. So sometimes these asteroids get knocked into the inner solar system, like any other object. can do. They go via the sun and they also show activity. So we have asteroids that show cometry-like activity. So this is where this kind of definition does get a bit skewed because we're looking at objects that are rocky and they look like they live in the asteroid belt, but they contain ice. So when they go via the sun, they're active and they produce a tail, a cometry tail, which is kind of confusing. But that, we've started only to discover that in the last kind of maybe a couple of decades, maybe just the last decade really. We've been like

observing these objects because we've not really been able to have the scientific equipment to see them before that. So it's really opening up the field. We have to reset our brains and go, oh, okay, right, we need to have a rethink about how these things formed and where they formed. But that's kind of what's so exciting about this subject. There's still so much to learn. And so with the forming of them, is that, had they been around for so long, like, since the beginning of the solar system, essentially? Exactly, yes. So they both formed.

I mean, the comets formed very first. They formed with the sun. So when you're forming a solar system, you've got this cloud of gas and dust. It's called a molecular cloud. And gradually it starts to clump together and we form a star in the middle of it. And that's a very dense portion of that cloud. And then around it, the stuff that doesn't get swept into that star just starts to kind of be dispersed out around the star in a disk of material. And from this disk of gas and dust, we start to form all of the plants.

and all of the comets and all of the asteroids. And actually 99.9% of the mass of the solar system is in the sun itself. So that just kind of shows you how large it is and really, like it really dominates the solar system. And all these other objects like Earth and Jupiter, all these massive planets, they're not very important in the great scheme of things in terms of mass. And then you've got all the comets and asteroids. So they were the first things to form out of that, out of that disk of gas and dust. And then the planets formed just after. But we're talking about kind of one million years.

it all happened in. Although that sounds like a very long amount of time, when we're talking like geology and geological timescales and formation of stars and everything, it's not very long because our solar system is four and a half billion years old. So just a million years is nothing. It didn't take very long to form all these objects at all. It must have been quite a busy time up in space at that point. Yeah, exactly. And actually, we can look at other star systems at the moment, when we use telescopes, we can look out at exoplanetary systems and we can see this phase of planetary formation happening right now. So it's really exciting because these new telescopes are just fantastic because we've never been able to see this time in our solar system. The only time

way we can go back to it is by studying the comets and asteroids, but we didn't really have any way of knowing for sure what was going on. And actually, we can look now out to other exoplanets and we can see them forming right at the moment. We can see this cloud of gas around around the young star and we can see planets starting to form. It's absolutely fascinating what we're learning at the moment. So if we were watching, you know, if we could stare and watch that for another million years, we'd sort of see planets similar to ours in a way? Exactly. So we're seeing these planets kind of excavating their way, their orbit out of this cloud of gas and dust. And it's a very chaotic time. You know, we've got to form all these objects and nothing is kind of happily sitting in

its orbit at the time. So you've got planets like the big planet Jupiter in our solar system. It moved around a lot. It didn't just sit where it sat at the present day. And actually, because it's so large, its gravity just knocked everything out of the way and caused complete disarray in the early solar system. And this is why we ended up with some of our comets and asteroids being scattered out, completely out of the solar system, in fact. We lost some of them. And others would have got thrown into the sun, and a lot of them ended up colliding with other planets. So if you look at the moon, the surface of the moon today, it's obviously absolutely covered in craters. And part of the reason that happened is that all those comets and asteroids that Jupiter threw about the solar system

ended up colliding with the planets. Now, also plant collided with Earth. But we have plate tectonics, which kind of resurfaces the surface of our planet so that we actually lose that cratering history. But thank goodness we have the moon, because we can then look back at that and say, oh, look at all those craters. This is a phase of planetary history that's been preserved really nicely on the moon that we don't actually have evidence for on Earth anymore. more. So we can learn a lot by looking at the surfaces of other planets. So like on the moon, are we able to tell, you know, what things hit the moon at and what period in Earth's history? Yeah, so we can date those objects. So one, there's many different

ways to date the craters on the moon. Lots of different methods. One of them is to count the number of craters and then kind of try and age them. And the other ways, we obviously have samples from the moon because the Apollo missions are collected a huge amount of samples from the moon. And we can date those using laboratory techniques. We can understand exactly how old those rocks are. And we can start to understand how old the craters are on the moon. And it turns out a lot of them around four billion years old. So that was kind of the phase of solar system history where it all went a bit chaotic again. You had the first few million years, which is very chaotic. Stuff settled down for a little while. And then Jupiter decided to start moving around. And then

we created a second phase of chaoticness. And that is all marked on the moon now. So the other planets all have a lot of craters as well, but Earth is the only one that doesn't really have them just because of the plate tectonics. We've just lost all of that history. Our surface is much younger than most of the other planets. So although it makes us geologically more interesting, we get lots of different volcanoes and oceans and things. We lose the history of what happened four billion years ago. It's, you know, but humans are on this planet or not on the other, so there's some upshots too, I guess. Exactly, exactly, yeah. We don't want to be on Venus because or Mercury, they're all too hot for us. With this busy period, so you said that there was one busy period of about a million years,

four billion years ago, how do we know, I guess we're not in a busy period now, and if that's the case, would we expect to see way more asteroids and comets floating through our atmosphere, if it were? Yeah, so I mean,

if we were sitting on Earth four billion years ago, and there's a possibility there was actually some life around at the time, but probably nothing like human, But that's debatable. We're not sure exactly when life started on Earth, in fact. But at that time, it would have been absolutely crazy in the solar system. We would have been bombarded by objects all the time. Now, scientists are currently debating on whether it was the asteroids or the comets that bombarded and when exactly they hit us. And that's still a bit unknown. But we know that probably both objects are likely to have hit us. The debate centers around where our water came from and where life came from. Because during this phase, we want to understand what things hit us to see what they might have brought with them. So if it was the comets, they could have brought a lot of water with them, because obviously I've mentioned they're pretty much formed of ice and gas.

They also contain organic matter in them, which just forms. It literally just lives in interstellar space, which is the area of space surrounding the solar system before it forms. And there's organic matter there. Now, this doesn't mean life. It just means carbon and hydrogen and oxygen bonding, and it's the precursors for life. It's what we need if we're going to have life on a planet.

So we want to understand which objects collided with us to understand what they brought here to try and work out when life started and where our water came from. Because we think water is hugely important. In fact, it's probably the main thing we need for life to even start. So the thing is that asteroids also contain water. So understanding how many asteroids hit us is also important. They're not all dry, rocky things. They actually contain quite a bit of water in them as well. Some of them do anyway.

And also quite a lot of organic matters. So the problem for scientists at the moment is unpicking the detail, trying to understand what hit us and when it hit us, and then trying to work out what it brought with it at what time, and then trying to figure out whether that could represent where life came from. Because it's a big question. We do sort of want to know how we got here, because it's a fascinating subject.

But we still don't have the answers at the moment. So this is part of the reason we need to study more comets and asteroids to see what's in them. And then we can figure out if they might have brought life to Earth. Is that why we're sending spacecraft out to asteroids and comets now? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's one of the reasons. And obviously, it's one of the goals that, you know,

as just as general humans and the general public, we're interested in. So when we send a mission like this, we get a lot of public interest because we go, oh, we might be able to find out where life came from. And certainly we might be able to shed some light on it. We won't necessarily know the answers, but we will edge closer to knowing exactly where it came from because the problem is we really haven't studied many of these objects up close. We get mitrites on Earth.

So mitrites come from asteroids and comets. They're little pieces of them that would have got knocked off in space during collisions possibly billions of years ago. These little pieces of asteroid float about space and eventually end up colliding with another planet. So when we pick up a meteorite on the surface of the planet, it's just a rot from space. And so it's a free sample of an asteroid or a comet,

But the problem is we don't know exactly where it came from. So when we send a space mission up to an asteroid or comet, we know exactly where we're going. We know a lot about the object. We've been able to look at it with telescopes. And then we send a spacecraft there and we can study it in immense detail. We can see it in its natural environment, which is really important. We see the whole object, what the whole thing looks like, how its structure is put together, and how exactly it behaves as it goes around the sun, which is also really important.

We can see how much volatile material it has. And then there's two missions actually this year. They're going to be arriving at two really exciting asteroids. Now, they're called carbonaceous asteroids, meaning they've got a lot of carbonaceous material in, so they're organic rich. And so in some ways, they're very much like the comets. They're very primitive. We say they're very primitive, which means they're very old objects.

They're some of the first to have formed. And they've remained very pristine since. They haven't been heated up in the sun very much. And so they preserve their very early solar system materials really, really nicely. So when we can go and look at these, we want to grab samples of them, and we want to bring those samples back to Earth. Because then we've studied that object in space, been able to fly around it, have a look at it, got lots of images, do some initial experiments up there, and then collect some sample and bring it back to our laboratories on Earth. And we can compare those samples with the meteorites we have. So we can learn a lot more about these objects by picking them apart in detail in the lab.

We've got those samples forever now, because, you know, once we've collected them, we've got them on Earth. and that's one of the beauties of the Apollo missions. Those samples, there's still loads of samples available at NASA. They're available to scientists forevermore. They're very careful about giving them out because they don't want them to be wasted. But it means that any future technological improvements we make in laboratory equipment, we can reanalyze those samples or we can learn even more about them. So sample return missions, I think are one of the most important things we do

because it really allows us to learn much more about these objects than just by looking at them with a telescope. Is there anything specific that we expect to get? So I think the two missions you mentioned are Hayabusa 2 and Osiris Rex. That's correct, yeah. Is there anything specific that those missions are looking for that once they grab a sample of the asteroid, they can go, okay, brilliant, we've answered this specific question. Yeah, so, I mean, there are a lot of scientific questions they're set out to do

because obviously these missions are hugely expensive and we want to get as much science from them as we can. So it's not just about learning about those objects by photographing them. And it's amazing what we can learn just by getting images of these objects. You probably saw the New Horizons mission to Pluto. We'd never really seen this object before. And as soon as we've got images of it, scientists can suddenly start working at how it formed. And we started to find things out that we just never knew before. And we didn't even get a sample of it.

We just had a look at it finally, an up-close look. So it's amazing what we can learn when we get really close to things. But collecting the samples isn't really important because then we can analyze them in a lab and find out if they've got organic matter, what it looks like? Does it look like organic matter on Earth? That's very important. Or does it look like some other form of it that maybe couldn't represent life on Earth? And they're both going to be looking at all of those things. But we also want to understand how those objects came together. So do they look like other asteroids? Did they look like other meteorites we have on Earth? How did the rocks form?

Exactly where did the rocks form and under what conditions? Because this allows us to really work out how our solar system itself came together. There's so many unanswered questions still, which is a good thing because it means that, you know, future scientists have a lot of work to do. But these missions are so important for bringing back material that we can then look at in so much detail in laboratories. Sort of thinking about that where did they come from.

I mean, it's speculative, but say, for example, they examine the examiner and then they find that it doesn't match anything that we've got in our own solar system in a way. Are there things like coming in from outside of the solar system that could be sort of invulrating our solar system? That's a really good question because it can happen. So, I mean, these two objects in particular, we're pretty certain, you know, almost 100% certain they are from the solar system because they're on an orbit that looks like the other objects in the solar system. And it will be hard for an object from elsewhere to get onto that orbit and to be sat happily here.

But I mean, you never know, but the chances are that these ones formed within our solar system. But as I mentioned earlier, when a solar system is first forming, and you've got these large planets that kind of disrupt everything sometimes, objects are thrown out of the solar system. So for sure, some comets and asteroids that formed within our solar system are now elsewhere. They are now traversing interstellar space, and they may one day end up in another star system or pass through it. Now, this year, actually, it happened here. We had this amazing, I think there's still debate over whether it was an asteroid or a comet. I think currently people think it might be a comet. It was this kind of distant visitor.

It's a foreign visitor from another star system. It probably formed billions and billions of years ago. And it got ejected from its solar system. And it's just been traveling through interstellar space. And sure enough, this thing passed by us and it went via the sun. It was going so fast that it didn't even get caught by the sun's gravity because it's got such a speed on it from where it's left from. So it just passed through our solar system. And so it didn't get caught up into an orbit around our sun, but we got to see it. And I think they called it a Muamua, which I think

is, I probably pronounced it very badly. It's Hawaiian, I think, for something like foreign visitor, I think it translates to it or something like that. And we didn't obviously get a sample of it. We didn't even know it was coming. It just suddenly appeared because it was a relatively small object. But it just passed through. And actually, it's probably happened before that we've not had the technology to see these things before. So it would be great one day if we could actually see this thing coming and go up there and get a sample of it because that would be absolutely fascinating. It would look probably very different to anything in our solar system. And we could learn a lot about, you know, the galaxy in general. So hopefully one day and the future we'll be able

to do that. But this is the first one we've seen. And so yeah, it has caused quite a lot of excitement in my field. It's amazing. I'm just thinking now about these these you know we didn't see this one is that a mua mua I don't know if I'm saying it just imagining a mua mua came in and we didn't know about it and we didn't see it and actually you say it's gone very quickly how difficult or simple is it

for us to sort of recognise and spot these things because obviously you see movies like Armageddon or Deep Impact and they probably have not a particularly nuanced view of asteroids in your opinion but But obviously, you know, we've got telescopes looking out of the sky. Why can't we see them? And, you know, should we be worried about that?

Yeah, I mean, it's not something that we need to lose sleepover. But luckily, you know, we do have a lot of scientists working on this problem. And I'll call it a problem. It's not really a problem. They're trying to map out all of the objects in the solar system to understand where they are, what their orbit is and where they're going to be at any point in the future. So it's not a trivial task. There are literally trillions of objects out there.

Most of them are going to cause us no problem because the ones that are sitting out in the or the orcloud or the koipe about, which is where all the comets are, actually we don't even know some of them are there. They're sort of hypothetical objects. We think they need to be there to kind of balance out the mass of the solar system. But we haven't even seen some of them. They're so far away that they're just too small and too,

and the sun doesn't reach that far. So we can't see them. We just think they're there. But the ones that we can see, like most of the asteroids, the problem is the way we see them is if they give off light. And if they're very small and very far away, it's hard for us to see them because they don't give off light. So the only chance we do get to see them is if they're knocked into a trajectory that brings them into the inner solar system. And then those are the ones that we need to worry about. Because if they're just sitting in the asteroid belt, we don't need to worry.

They're just going to sit there for now. But the ones that are kind of traveling around outside the asteroid belt are the ones that, are potentially hazardous to us. And they're called potentially hazardous asteroids or comets. And it's those that we need to understand in more detail, and particularly the ones that are over a kilometer, because that's a massive asteroid. In terms of if it were to hit Earth,

it would cause us a lot of trouble. So we want to understand those ones. Where are they? Where are they going? Are they likely to hit Earth at any point in the future? And therefore, we would want to do something about that. And that is a big area of science at the moment. It sounds like science fiction.

because it is very much like Armageddon or those kind of silly sci-fi movies, which are based on science and are not always that correct. But we do want to understand where they are so that we could launch a mission one day if one was heading for us so that we could maybe divert it or detonate something on it to explode it before I got here. And it sounds crazy, but we are actually looking at these possibilities at the moment. But it looks like we're safe for at least for 100 years that we know of. we're pretty certain nothing's heading for us at the moment. So we're all safe at the moment,

unless you're planning to live a lot longer than 100 years, then we're going to be fine. But obviously, we want to worry about our descendants. We don't want to leave our planet in a dire straits for, you know, the future generation. So we do want to do work now to try and help them out. Because I think there's a high chance at some point in the future, we will get hit by a comet or asteroid that is large enough to cause us some trouble. So we just don't know when. It's one of those annoying scientific things. We were like, yeah, it's going to happen, but we can't say when. It's like volcanic eruptions or earthquakes. We always say, yeah, yeah, they're due, but we don't know when. So I think it's like, we need to worry about it, but, you know, don't

lose sleep over it. So how do you study a hypothetical asteroid? So, well, this is not my field exactly, but it's astronomy. And it's fascinating. They can use telescopes to do surveys of the skies and try and spot these objects. But when I say we're spotting them, it's literally like a little fleck of light in the sky that they can't really tell, you know, what it is exactly until it gets a bit closer to us. But they study these objects over time and they can see how they're moving gradually. And they can also do some basic science on them to find out kind of what composition they are. And this is related to what kind of light they reflect. And we can tell whether they're, you know, made of rock or whether they've got ices in them and things like that. So then we can try

and say whether it's a comet or an asteroid or whatever. And that's important. We need to to understand what they're made of because if you imagine a big ball of dusty ice that's not very well held together, which is a comet basically. If you imagine just scooping up some snow, it's going to be held together kind of like that. It's not very well consolidated, is what we say. So imagine that flying towards Earth. That's probably not going to cause us quite as much trouble as a big lump of metal and rock, which is an asteroid, because that probably is going to get through our atmosphere and not burn up and probably make it to the surface of the earth. So we sort of need to understand whether we've got something that's going to break up anyway

and we don't need to worry about it or whether it's really this solid object, which is going to cause us a lot of trouble when it gets here. So, you know, trying to understand what the objects look like from far away is incredibly difficult. And we have lots of different telescopes that can look at them. And then we've got missions, obviously, that go to them, like Osiris Rex and Highbooster two, that allow us to learn even more about some of these objects. And obviously we can then apply those findings to others. We study just two, but then we can start to, you know, apply it to other things.

And that helps us work out what they're all made of. So thinking about what they're made of, I'd just love to know what would the surface of an asteroid or comet look and feel like, which also leads me on to, you know, how many different varieties of asteroids are there and what can they be made of? Well, exactly. I think any asteroid or comet you look at is going to be different. And they're all different shapes. Now, the thing is because they're small, they don't. don't form into nice round shapes because they're not big enough to have the associated gravity to pull them into a round shape. So the planets are round just because they're large and the gravity has been able to pull all that material around them into that nice spherical shape,

whereas most of the asteroids and comets are just too small for that. So you get these really odd shaped things. I think you might remember Rosetta from a few years ago, the European mission that went to the comet 67P Cherioimovgarasemenko. And that comet was absolutely fascinating because it looked like a rubber duck. When we first, we had no idea until we got there. It was like these two two kind of blobs stuck together. And it was this really cool shape that we weren't expecting. And when you looked at the surface of that, it was fascinating because it had cliffs and it had really fine detail on it and icy patches. And, you know, it just, it looked very different to what we're expecting. It was also very dark. So I loved the images we saw, it kind of made it

look grey. But actually, the scientists involved said it's as black as black toner ink. It's extremely dark because it's made of carbon, basically. That outer surface is all made of organic carbon materials and dust. So actually, if you were looking at in space, it would be really hard to see, but they were able to play with the images so that we could actually find and see the detail on the surface. But every object's different. So when we get to Osiris Rex, well, sorry, when we get to Benu and with Osiris Rex,

we'll start to see more detail about what it looks like. And already highboos, the two, has reached its asteroid. I think it's pronounced Ryugu, is that I've had no idea. I think that's how it's pronounced. And we're seeing all this detail on the surface, and it's absolutely fascinating that we've got all these rocks and it's very fine-grained. It's not like big chunks of rock. It's very small pieces like dust.

And they're all different. So this is what I'm trying to say here. Every object's different. So although we can study one and apply it to another object, really we need to study lots and lots more because their shapes are different. And I think, you know, Raiyu sort of looks like a diamond, it's sort of a diamond shape. It's absolutely beautiful.

But they're all different. So, yeah, we don't really know what to expect until we get there. And that's one of the problems with the telescope surveys. They don't, we don't get to see the shape in any detail. And we don't get to see what the surface actually looks like. So when Rosetta got to its comet, 67P, it had never seen it before. It was heading to this object that it didn't know what it was going to be landing on because Rosetta sent a lander onto this comet.

they had no idea what they were going to land on, whether it was going to be hard or soft. I think one of the main scientists always likened it to, they could be landing on concrete or candy floss. They had no idea what to expect. So when they're designing a lander, they had to go, right, we need it to be able to land on anything. And that's already very complicated. So they learn everything when they get there. So designing these space missions is incredibly difficult because they don't know what to expect until they've arrived. So that makes me think about, so obviously one of the interests we have in asteroids is, mining them for resources.

That sort of suggests we don't know what they might have on them until we get there. And if that's the case, how do we mine them? So we know broadly what they contain. We can do that just from the telescope work. We can say this asteroid is broadly metallic. It might contain iron and nickel and some smaller amounts of precious metals. And we know that from a lot of the mitrites we have on Earth, because we have sort of samples of these objects,

even if we haven't sampled that particular one. And then we know that others are rockier and that others are more organic rich and carbon rich. So very broadly, we'd know which ones we wanted to go to because obviously if we're wanting to mine in space, we want some of the most precious materials like the iron and precious metals like platinum and gold, because we don't have a lot of them on Earth. In fact, I think one asteroid in space could be worth more than all of the platinum and gold we've ever mined on Earth. So if we could get one of these objects, we could fulfill all our needs on Earth. Earth. We can continue developing technologies that rely on these metals, which we're going to run out of at some point on Earth. And we can, you know, meet all our needs. Now, the problem is if you mine these objects and then were to bring all that material back, you crash the market straight away because you're bringing back so much material. But, you know, I'm not an economist, so I'll leave that to them. But when we go to these objects in the future, and space mining is going to happen. I'm 100% certain about it. It's going to happen in some form. And I think within the next few decades, there are, there's great.

headway being made at the moment into this because it's not just the precious metals and it's not necessarily about bringing them back to earth. We could use these in space. We want to maybe set up a base on Mars or probably more likely the moon because that can be a staging post for going out to visit other planets and the solar system more easily. It's really hard to leave Earth. We've got a lot of gravity. So we want to kind of go somewhere else and then we're a bit closer to getting out into space. But if we were to mine these objects in space, we could take them the product to the moon and use them to 3D print. Again, this all kind of sounds like science fiction, I'm sure, to a lot of people, but 3D printing has really taken off and it's something that

could be very useful in space. We wouldn't need to take all of our tools with us. We could actually just make them. If we say, oh, we've run out of a spanner, we broke our spanner, we need a new one. We can just print a new one using materials that we've got from an asteroid. Water is also really important. Water is hugely important in space if we're going to take humans. It could also be used as fuel. It's a very clean fuel. So, we could actually mine these objects for their water, which is probably slightly easy than trying to get the metals out of them. So at the moment, that's sort of what they're looking at.

The space mining phase at the moment is the stage where they're looking at these objects, working out which ones might be good ones to either go and mine or capture. They might be able to capture them and drag them somewhere to mine them, maybe near the moon. And missions like Osiris Rex and Highboosa, too, are sort of like the first step in this process. they're going out there and they're taking samples of these objects.

They're learning a lot. So we're learning how we sample them, how we grab a piece of sample, how we land on them. These are all things that we're going to need to do if we want to space mine. And obviously with commercial industries involved in this process, it could go a lot quicker now. It's all been down to space agencies so far. But if we've got, you know, we've got real companies interested in this process now. So I think it's going to start moving very quickly. And hopefully, Osiris Rex and Hybusa, too, are going to be hugely successful.

And then we'll start to see some of the problems and start to understand what needs to be done in the future. So I think watch this space. I think it is, excuse the pun, but I think it's going to be really exciting. But yeah, the economy of it, I'm not really sure how that works, but the rest is exciting. So sort of like we're the prologue of sci-fi basically, but it's real life. And the next stage will be essentially moon bases built by asteroid rock, which are then being used to send us to Mars, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I don't see why not. I know it does sound crazy, but I honestly don't see why not. It's just, there's obviously a lot of problems to overcome. It's a huge

investment, but as, I mean, when you look at the amount of money that some of these comments, oh, sorry, asteroids are worth in terms of iron and nickel, they don't need to worry. They might be putting in billions of pounds in investment to get to the stage of getting to that object, but they're going to get that back. They're going to reap the rewards later. So sort of, you know, if you've got a few billion spare, then get involved. You know, it's something that you could do and you're going to make a lot more money in the future. I think, you know, I honestly think it can work. And I think it's the best way for us to explore further into deep space because just it's very expensive to launch material from our planet.

Just to get out of the gravity, you have to take so much material in terms of weight in terms of fuel that it sort of becomes a bit ridiculous because there's this exponential law where the more you take in terms of mass of people or, you know, materials and support. lies, you need more fuel. And then because you've got more fuel, you need more fuel because it's heavy. And so you get to the point where it's very hard to leave the planet with a lot of materials. So this is why the current rocket race at the moment is sort of like being able to launch very heavy materials off the planet. Whereas actually if we weren't on the planet, if we were already on, you know, out in space somewhere, it might just be a little bit easier for us to launch materials and not have to take them from our planet. So that's sort of where the problems lie. And it's all to do with rocket science, which is fascinating and which, which

I don't know an awful lot about, I have to say, but it's very fascinating. I'm sure there's another podcast all about rocket science, just in itself. So essentially what we've learned here is that asteroids, although we kind of look at them as just big floating rocks in space, they're way, way more than that. Yeah, they're really, really valuable. They can tell us, you know, so much about where we've come from, how our solar system formed, where life came from. But as I've kind of got over this in my book here about, and I've kind of sort of said, you know,

are they bad or are they good? They might have brought life to Earth. In the future, they have the potential to kill us all if one were to collide with us. So this is partly why we want to study them, because if we can understand what they're doing, what they look like, we can prevent one colliding with us. But then they have the potential to be worth a lot of money and in terms of resources be very useful for us in the future if we want to explore beyond Earth. And I'm not one of these advocates of going to live on Mars.

I really like my planet. I really like Earth. I don't want to live anywhere else. It's a great place to live most of the time. But I think I want to explore further. I don't want to live on Mars, but I would like to go there and have a look. So I think, you know,

being able to use asteroids and comets is going to be really important if we want to go further, further than Mars even. So taking it as back into, you know, our relationship with asteroids and things on this planet, one of the things that we see is asteroid meteor showers. And I just, you know, we got the persides coming

up the height of them. I was just wondering, you know, what's happening there? How come we get these regular yearly shows or meteor showers? Yeah. So actually, the one that's coming up very soon is because of Comets Swift-Tuttle. It actually didn't pass Earth since 1992. It has an orbit of about 133 years past Earth. So it's not passes very recently. But actually what happens is, I mentioned earlier, when comets go near the sun, they get heated up and they just release all their material in a big wake behind them. And it's that material that just sort of sits about in space. And every time Earth goes around the sun and then meets that cloud of material, it passes through it. Some of those little pieces of dust collide with Earth. Now, most of them will burn up in the atmosphere,

and that's when you get a shooting star. And it's just a little piece of four and a half billion-year-old dust just evaporating into the atmosphere. Sometimes there's a couple pieces that will be bigger. You might get a fireball, which is a much more impressive site. And with Comets, with Tuttle, we do get some of those as well. So with the meteor show, you can see a couple of larger kind of fireball pieces. Some of that material could make it to Earth, but it would be very hard to find because it is generally a bit smaller than your normal meteorite size stuff.

But basically, it's just Earth passing through it. So it's actually from about July 17th until August 24th, we're passing through it. So at any time during that in the night, you could see an increased number of shooting stars. But the peak of it, when we go through the densest part of that cloud, is around August 12th. And that's when you're going to get, I mean, they say up to 200 meters an hour. So depending where you are, if you've got a nice dark sky and I think the best time is after midnight. But this year we've got quite a bright moon, I believe, at that time. So it will be a little bit tricky to see them, a bit tricky than the normal.

But you need to go out and let your eyes adjust to the darkness for maybe about half an hour. So maybe take a glass of wine out and just go and sit and look at the stars. And then you should start to see them. And I've done it occasionally. And it does take a while and you get a bit frustrated at first because I can't see any. But sure enough, they will be there. You've just got to look at a patch of sky for a while and something will appear. And I love looking at it because, you know, for me, I study these little pieces of dust.

And it just kind of makes me sad that they're dying and the atmosphere above us and we can't analyse them. But it's a beautiful site. So I think, you know, I recommend doing it if you have fancy staying up for the night. That was Natalie Starkey talking about asteroids, comets, and meteors. Her book, Catching Stardust, Comets, asteroids in the birth of the solar system is available now. You can also read more about the Hyabusa 2 and the Cyrus-Rex missions in the August issue of BBC Focus magazine, where we also celebrate NASA's 60th birthday and ask why we haven't developed a male contraceptive pill yet. And of course, there's much, much more inside.

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