Off-Nominal - 125 - The Ball Pit

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Alec Maestas, OSIRIS-REx Systems Engineer and Real-Time Operations, to talk about the asteroid sample return mission on the eve(ish) of sample arrival.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeOSIRIS-REx MissionOSIRIS-REx team completes final test before asteroid sample delivery - OSIRIS-REx MissionNASA gears up for return of OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample - SpaceNewsNASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is now on its way to asteroid Bennu - The VergeStunning images show NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft stirring up rocks on an asteroid - The VergeNASA’s OSIRIS-REx was so good at grabbing asteroid rocks that they’re overflowing - The VergeNASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe successfully stores small sample of asteroid rocks in its belly - The VergeFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hello, everybody, welcome. The summer is over. We're doing planetary stuff again. All this boring new stuff is gone. Everyone has put their bathing suits away, and we can finally get to work. There's some fun stuff happening. I'm excited for this.

No more human. You did a human spaceflight one. You've been on the human spaceflight beat, but we're back. The real truth is we decided one day, we should check the calendar and see what the things are happening that we should time events for. And here we are with Alec. How's it going? It's good. How are you guys doing? Excellent. I mean, look at Jake's buzzing over there.

I know. I'm so excited. I got a new like Mars sample return IRB report to read. I got space rocks coming back. Planetary's back, baby. Let's do this. Like human space flight's fine. It's fine. But there's like a lot of, just a lot of extra, you know, baggage that comes with that. Planetary, I love it. Little lower risk, a little higher science yield maybe. you know what I think there's just a little bit less politics and when there is it's like usually merited you had that you had that uh independent report coming is what you're saying

yeah yeah yeah they really needed one yeah well anyway we're not going to talk about marce now return today though as much as i would love we're going to talk about uh Cyrus rex because it's coming home this weekend that's uh super big news and so alec here is from Lockheed Martin, a spacecraft driver. He's got a joystick he's going to show us about how he drives to spacecraft. Yeah, you can't quite see it, but it's there, trust us. Maybe shaped like a keyboard and... It might be shaped like a script.

It may be shaped like a script. We'll see. Long lines of Linux code. Exactly, long, long lines of Linux commands. And a big enter key at the end. There's got at least be an enter key, right? Someone's got to put something. Yeah.

Okay. Good, good. Should we do some drinks before we get into this? Who wants to start? Let's go by time zone. Early to late. Early to late in the day. Alex is first.

Yeah, I think that's me. He's two hours back. You're one hour back of me. Yeah, I wish I was fun. I'm drinking tea today because I have to be on console later. I was going to say, it's not like you're responsible or anything for accurately crashing into Earth. Right, right. I have a tag mug.

So this is our tag mug. So this is our official. You know, it's what we gave each other after we did tag the asteroid. So a little bit more exciting than your standard mug. Love it. That's fantastic. Can you fit so much tea in that that she, like, I believe how much tea can fit? You just get at the end of it. Way more tea than anyone thought you could ever get in there. It was the milk prank thing that was going around the internet a while back.

This is what I was. Do you remember this milk? Frank, Jake? No. This is, I don't know what bit this was that people were doing, but they would film themselves in front of like a parent or something with a gallon of milk just filling up a cup, but not stop filling it up until the person reacted. Like, once it starts overflowing everywhere, I don't know.

I feel like I saw a couple snapchats of this and I need to check back in if that was legitimately a meme or not. But that's the Osiris Rex tea mug. So get that in your life. Jake, you're up in the time zone, time zone situation here. For specificity's sake, I am probably the same time as Alec, I'm guessing, but only because of the daylight savings thing. So I kind of count as like a half time zone.

Anyway, I have just a nice, I guess, so I brought that stuff back from Portugal. I've had on the show before, like that cherry liqueur, but you can mix it with tonic and make it kind of like, it's like a gin and tonic, but instead of gin, it's this cherry gin. It's called ginja. So maybe it is gym. I don't know. It's something weird, but nice and simple, gold drink. It's kind of hot today.

Hmm. Portugal. Portugal. I believe a friend of the show, Caleb Henry, was just there before that conference that everyone, all the cool people were at in Paris. Oh, okay. All right. I'll do that.

What do you got? I got a beer called the Slive Fox Hills Lager from, I think it's like in Potsetown or something, where they brew this sucker. What's a Pots town? Pots Town. Potstown, PA, baby. All right. That's just, that's kind of close.

It's not that far. Okay. It's a fun name. It's not where the escape murderer was running around, but it's not that far from Philadelphia. Okay. Another local news story. Did you follow that local, that became national news story, Jake? Look that one up.

This guy escaped from a jail in the most hilarious way possible. Like, it was truly hilarious. You should look at it. That's great. All right. I'll add it to my Google Q. Anyway, back to the functional sample return mission that's actively heading towards Earth now.

Where should we start, Jake? Well, I guess maybe, like, Alex, do you want to just tell us a little bit about what you do and so we can frame this conversation, right? Because I do want to see the joystick, even if it's not real. But, you know, just tell us what you do it and what you're working on this week. Yeah, so I'm a systems engineer and real-time operator

for a Cyrus-Rex. what that means is we build and execute spacecraft activities. We write code for it. So everything you're seeing the spacecraft doing starts off as a long line of really boring line by line code. Lots of just standard issue commands all in a row. And then we send that up and the spacecraft does it. Different from human exploration, we have the advantage

that we get to sequence it or things at a time. So we built them ahead of time, test them at a time. And so I'm one of those guys. guys that builds and test it, you know, make sure nothing is going to break a spacecraft or send us the wrong direction or anything like that. And then the real-time operator part,

I get to send those commands. Like you said, big enter key. It's more of a really janky mouse click. But yeah, so we send those up and, you know, pray that it gets there, you know, through the DSN, and then we watch it execute and, you know, status all of our stuff. So, you know, as a systems guy,

I get a lot of subsystem input. You know, I don't plan all these things myself. I'm not just like one guy flying this, you know, my spare time or anything like that. But yeah, so it's a super cool job, you know, kind of a dream thing for me. But I've been flying Osir's Rex for about the last four and a half years. Wow. That's like, yeah, that's a lot of the mission. Yeah, most of the mission.

2016 didn't launch? Is that, am I getting my dates right there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 2016. Yeah, 2016. And then I'm not sure how familiar everyone is, but, you know, we got to Benu. It looked nothing like we expected it to. And so they were like, we need more people. I used to work military space beforehand.

And then I was like, I absolutely love to work of Cyrus Rex. That sounds awesome. They were like, we got to this asteroid and there's a lot of stuff flying out of us. We think military people would be good at this. Right. Can you come help us? Right. It's really squishy.

It was super weird, man. I remember that. I mean, like, because like it's not even like the shape is stuff. I still think about it. It's like that weird like... Oblongs square way. Yeah, all the like Dungeons and Dragon players, it's like shaped like a D-10.

You know, like it's kind of shaped really, really weird. But... Yeah, yeah. And it's super rocky. The surface was expected to be really, really smooth. And then they got there and, you know, they're seeing boulders that are size of cars.

And they're like, oh, no. We need some extra time. Floating rubble pile for sure. Right. I feel like the last time we checked in on Osiris Rex was shortly after the tag when it was completely overloaded with samples. And before we talk about this later phase of the mission, I wonder if you can provide some insight into like previously on Osiris Rex. Once it was determined that, okay, like we're doing

fine, even though we jam this thing full of too much sample, has that been something that the team's monitored over the years? And is there anything interesting to happen with that? Did any stuff float away? Or do you really feel like it's all fine? It'll be great. Yeah, I mean, that was kind of an interesting time, right? Because we expected to come down. There were plans for, hey, what if we don't get enough sample?

Everybody's worried. We have a limit. We have to get. 60 grams was our contractual obligation. And so we're coming down. We're like, everyone's crossing our fingers. We're guessing. I'm like, oh, I think we'll just barely get there.

And then we finally take a picture of the sample head. And there's rocks flying everywhere. and the moment of panic and excitement, right, of like, oh my God, we way over did our job. Now what? Because we were going to do lots of measurements. We were going to spin the spacecraft around and try to use momentum measurement to try to figure out how much was on board. But we're losing so much sample day by day, right? And the turnaround on that because we had stow activities to stow the sample head inside of the SRC canister.

we had that pushed out. It was supposed to not stop for about two to three weeks, and we had to take all of that and shove it as close as we could to the tag event. So we were moving timelines super quick. I remember at the time, me and another systems engineer, we had a background sequence on board,

and background sequence does your day-to-day stuff. And there was a desaturation event happening, you know, taking momentum out of our reaction wheels. And even that, they're like, if we do that, we're going to lose grams of material in our, you know, PIs, and they're like, stow it now, stow it now.

And so we were like, you know, moving heaven and earth to try to get everything off board and then just like, how are we going to stow this thing? And, you know, as you probably guess,

we stowed it. Everything went great. And then since then, we take images of our, we have a stow camera right next to the SRC. So we take images once a week and we look at it. Haven't seen anything.

You know, it's sealed. So there's nothing we would expect to come out. But it is interesting. Is this a shot from that camera? This is obviously before. it closed up, but just to give people a sense of the position. Yeah, yeah, that is the stokam.

What's interesting is from this point of view, most of the photos, you know, don't look like too different from each other, but you can see there's specs of dust on there that actually do move around if you have a good enough eye. So there was at the time sample floating around the spacecraft. So, you know, we've been trying to track that and say, hey, did we bring any sample with us? That's just been floating, like, a semi-orbit around our spacecraft as we're flying. and we're trending that over time,

but nothing that we think is substantial or really worth mentioning. All right. So after you stowed it, were you able to finally get a measurement? I don't know if I remember ever reading what the final number was. I think I remember it was like two kilograms or something? So right now the measurements I have are about 250 grams plus or minus 100 grams.

So that would tell you about the accuracy of measurement that we are working with. You know, we had a lot of a really, really smart GNC. guys, you know, just from the imaging we took because we took the sample head on the arm and we, you know, turned it towards us, they're able to use that little torque to try to gauge where we're at because, you know, we were supposed to extend the arm out and spin. Yeah. But we thought, you know, any movement at that point, you know, we're just going to leave it where

it's at. And they, based on the tiny middle movement we had, they're thinking about, you know, 250 grams, give or take, you know, significant fraction, but well within the, uh, the 60 gram requirement that we were designing to. We'll be all right. We got enough rocks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other question too is, you know, they're measuring it too. We think there's about, you know, a cup's worth. But we don't really know how dense it is, right? You know, Benu itself ended up looking pretty floaty. The rocks fell apart pretty

easily. So, you know, we're hoping it might be dense. But, you know, I guess we'll find out when it gets down. Yeah. Yeah. I guess because you could, you could go in lots of different directions there, right? Because like as a whole, if you look at like Benu's density as a whole, that can include like a bunch of like porosity, right? There's a whole bunch of like space inside of it that's going to lower the density, even though the rocks themselves might still be pretty dense, right? So you have to kind of like think about how much of the stuff you got is just all stuff or whether it's like stuff mixed in with gaps, I guess. I don't know how that the tags. I mean, the vacuuming part, it probably did pretty well in jamming stuff in there, right?

Yeah, we think so. But I, but I would. will say that, you know, when we designed the mission, we were thinking this was going to be a really hard surface with like a layer of dust on the edge. We talked about Sandy Beach. But when we had the mechanism so that when we felt the surface, we had a pogo actuator that would send us back and then that would kick on our thrusters. We never actuated the pogo. We just flew right into the asteroid. So they're saying now it was probably like a McDonald's ball pit that, you know, all this rock, all these rock are just sitting right next to each other. And, you know, we joke around and say, you know,

I think we probably could have just flown right through if we kept trying. Yeah. Just got a brought big net instead of this whole system. Could have clearly. I can try so hard, you know. Trolling for samples. Just straight up. Oh, wow. Yeah. No, I like forever be a memory for me.

Like a core memory in space of just like just punching into that thing and hungry hippoing all that stuff up there. It was beautiful. That's a fun day. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So yeah, so we scooped up samples. That was a couple years ago now. I want to say, well, 2021 maybe. Almost three years ago. I got to say, this timeline of this mission cracks me up, man. This thing launched in September of 2016. Like, if we could just update it on what happened at Earth since September of 2016, it would make any sense. Like those people that went kayaking down the Grand Canyon in like March 1st, 2020, when they got out 10 days later they had a lot to catch up on. But Osiris Rex has a whole other level of things that happened here.

It got bad vibes about the end of 2016 and just peace out. I'll check back in now and I'll check back in when the killer asteroid is flying by in a couple of years. And I'll see if I should nudge it then. Like, we'll check back in, you know. Yeah, one of the things we tell people is that we tagged during COVID, which was a weird time, right? So, like, all of this happened, everybody was worried about COVID. We're like, hey, we have this also other cool thing. You want to distract yourself for a little bit?

Yeah. No, it's cool. And this is one of the few missions where I've been covering stuff from start to finish with it. Because I remember watching it launch and talking about that. And then here we are seven years later. That's pretty cool. So it's coming home. It's on its way.

Let's see. We're three days out. So where is the space scrap? Three days out. Testing your real-time operator skills. What's the distance to Earth right now? Oh, man. Yesterday we were just over two million kilometers.

So, you know, take that extrapolated out. You know, we're under two million now. And we're on our way. That's pretty close. Actually, it's pretty close. You know, we just, we had our last maneuver, well, last maneuver, coming in, right, a couple days ago. And then we just, we had other maneuvers planned, but our trajectory looks really good right now.

So we are, we're cruising. So, yeah, so you're probably like three, three or four moon distances or so away at this point. That's not really that far. Yeah, we actually, we have our, you know, our modeled solar system. We see the moon. We're tracking where the moon's at because, you know, we're worried about the moon blocking our star trackers and everything. And, you know, our nav guys are like, it's fine.

we promise it's fine and like i still want to know yeah i guess the the relative velocity with earth and osiris rites would not be that much because it's not like we're not talking about some sort of like you know coming in from jupiter or a really like high angle like this is the orbits are like they're just they're kind of just offset from each other a little bit so it's probably not too crazy of the velocity difference hey yeah we're actually um we're kind of coming in right along the side so we're going to enter in and about i want to say it was like 30 thousand miles an hour or something like that. 27,000 miles an hour is the actual number.

Okay, yeah. It's like within the realm of the moon return. Yeah, I was going to say, like, what was the moon return? Is it about that? It was like 25 or something, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. It is interesting.

I mean, that was interesting to follow along in the early days, too, was like the fact that, you know, you think of the orbits and you're like, it's not that far away, but the timelines to get there and back and make sure you can. touched the asteroid was still like planetary time scale. So it's, uh, you know, I feel like people that have done the this mission in Kerbil will understand like what it takes to do the home and transfer still to get out there. But it's the funny thing about, you know, orbital math, right? Is that the moon's pretty far, even though it's right there. And asteroids and Mars are only a little bit further. They're like kind of the same, you know, the same amount of energy. It just

takes a lot longer to get there and back. And we've talked about that, that weird kind of like outcome of the math where if you're talking about like launch windows you know like how frequent do launch windows happen it's worse for the planets that are close to us in orbit right so like the windows come less frequently the closer you are to earth whereas like Pluto it's every you know it approaches a year the further oh you go like a sign or tangent weight whatever right so um i'm doing more of these shapes yeah you're doing that hand motion's been our thing we got the regular thing i mean an easier example jake would be like figure out how often you you can look at Jupiter through your telescope.

It's pretty frequent. You can do that a lot. At least one time per year, you're going to be able to look at Jupiter. Mars, you don't get that opportunity. No, no, never. Good luck, unless you get a really, really expensive telescope. It would be a really legit home telescope.

Yeah, yeah, you need a little more than that. Probably as expensive as Alex joystick. Yes. At least as expensive, yes. Cool. I walk us through some of the timeline then. So we got everything's happening this weekend. Like what do we,

what can we expect to pay attention to and watch and all that? Yeah. So from the outside perspective, they're going to be tweeting about this. NASA is going to be filling everybody in on, you know, what we're doing as we get closer. But really, the main event is going to be on Sunday morning. So 924, we're entering.

We're actually pointing on or assuming everything goes correctly. we're going to be landing at about 1041 Eastern. So everyone will be able to tune in NASA TV to watch that happen. But we actually released four hours before that. So that'll be the send the go. And then we have to wait four hours of, you know, praying and crossing our fingers. And, you know, nothing we can do at this point, you know. Yeah, and the capsule completely past it.

Like, it just flies in and doesn't have any, like, propulsion or anything? Correct. Yeah. So when it separates, we have a. step-spin mechanism that'll spin up the capsule. And then it will, that's to balance it as it's coming in. And then everything else is on capsule itself. We have some batteries that will, that are going to depassivate and they will power the capsule.

We have G-Switch activators that are going to do everything, drug shoots, main shoots, everything as it comes in. So at that point, we can't do anything with the capsule. So that'll be an really scary moment for us. You know, I've talked to the folks who have done the past mission, startups, Genesis, and they're like, oh, yeah, that's the worst four hours of your life, you know. But I'll be excited. I'll be sitting there. I'm like, hey, you know, it's out of my hands.

I can't do anything. They don't like Utah. They're not big Utah fans. They don't like just hanging out. Right. How much like real-time telemetry do you get directly from the capsule? Is it or is it kind of more, like, do you have to bounce through the spacecraft or is it more just like ground equipment kind of watching it and trying to give you some information? Yeah, so when the capsule releases is kind of about the last time we're going to be getting any real telemetry from the capsule itself.

So we'll get battery status, make sure those are good. We'll get when we cut, we'll get telemetry saying, hey, you know, we've cut the lines, we've center off, everything is good. And then at that point, we're using Doppler from the ground. So there are a number of entities out there that I'm sure we'll be happy to watch and test all sorts of capabilities of their own. You know, it's not often you have something reentering that small. But, you know, U.S. spacecom and then will be monitoring. They'll be giving us live footage if they can. And, yeah, at that point, we don't really get a lot from the council.

I mean, it should light up pretty good, given how hot it's going to be, right, if you got infrared Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then, you know, there are, they'll have planes flying around with plenty of, like, really, really complex imaging equipment. That'll be videoing in as it comes. in so that's good yeah is the wb 57 going to be out there is that the nasta one they's bring that out for that kind of thing right oh i i think it's w 57 there's there's like four or

five planes that they've that they've contracted out to do this and it's way out of our bucket at that point you know where there's no expense yeah there's planes coming i was like hope they send us the footage you know then all right so their capsules coming it back in and then we're going to get our first look at the samples, and then what's, what is the process from there to divvy it up and figure out who gets what? Like, we haven't done this for a good bit. It's been a while, like, at least, you know, a career length since this happened in the U.S. to this extent. So, and I think, like, size-wise of sample on the robotic end, this is, other than, I guess, Chonga 5 was a lot. I don't know if a robotic mission really is up in this, you know, several

100 gram range. Yeah. I think the sad I heard is the largest sample outside from beyond the moon ever taken by a spacecraft. By a lot. By like a magnitude or two. Yeah. Yeah.

Does process change because of that that there's so much more or is it still within the realm of like like you said, it's a cupful? So like we'll figure it out based on what we did before. Yeah. So there's a whole entire team. Our PI leads Dante Loretta from University of Arizona. And he's in charge of this. So we have whole curation team that's going to take the sample. So there's a lot of stuff that happens beforehand. You know, we're not just loading up the sample.

And then, you know, Dante runs out and just picks it up and carries it on home. They're going to, they're going to, you know, head out there. It's like the Stanley Gusses lifting it, hoisting it. They're going to be driving out there. They've helped helicopters. They're going to load it up to and fly it back. They have a, they have like a small, on-site in Utah, like tent set up to keep it pure. They're going to put it on nitrogen purge. You know, it gets loaded into a C-17 and Flano back to Johnson Space Center where they're actually do the creation.

And then they have a number of steps because they actually have to open this thing. It's one of the funniest things is talking to the guys who designed the SRC. It is not designed to be open, you know. They wanted it to stay closed. So when they're talking like, oh, yeah, this will take us, you know, an hour to open. They're like, if you say so, like, we've got a screwed. pretty good shot. But they'll be taken apart and taking out everything. They'll be scrubbing the tag Samhead and everything in there to see whatever. If there's dust on there, they're going to get it.

And then after that, it's going to be split up tons of different entities. So University of Arizona gets a huge chunk of it. NASA is going to take most of the sample and actually put it off into long-term curation like they did with the Apollo sample. So somebody in the future will have the ability to sample and test it. We're going to be doing a trade with Jaxa. So Jaxsa had the Hiajabusa sample return, you know, on a much smaller scale. But, you know, definitely interesting to compare to the two asteroids. What's the exchange rate?

Is that one to one? What's the re-invue to Benu exchange rate? Inflation in one case or what? What are we looking at? It's all about scarcity, man. There's much less Hayibusa, so it's worth way more. Right. Right. Yeah, I don't actually know what that exchange really looks like, but I do know that they're going to be sending them a workable amount of sample. And they pulled up the chart one of these days, and there are, you know, hundreds of organizations that, you know, won in on this because this is, you know, the first time we're getting this much of an asteroid sample from this specific body.

So they'll be sending it out everywhere. And then I think there's a certain amount of time that Johnson and U of A have to do their problematic research. search and then it'll be divvied out, you know, as they see fit. But, you know, they've got tons of, you know, PhDs and stuff handling that kind of thing. At that point, I'm, you know, just happy to be happy to be back. I know my people up north are going to get some too because we helped with Osiris Rex. So there's a bunch of it going to Canada. So yeah. Yeah, that's cool. I'm stoked for that. Would you build the arm? No, we built the, is it LiDAR? We put the lighter on it, I think, right? Yeah, Ola, the laser altimeter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or the opportunity. Yeah. Cool. The arguably most useful part of this mission, considering we went into the asteroid. Yeah. I think it broke, though. I can't remember it.

I thought it went wrong with that, didn't it? Yeah, so there were some issues with, there were two LiDAR systems and one of them. But the real key was that we actually couldn't use LIDAR because of the Rocky Asteroid service. Right, right. So they used the natural feature tracking, the like AI imaging, you know, came in and navigated itself down.

But, hey, the lighter still there. It does work, you know. We have it for future missions, so. For Apophis or whatever. Yeah, you'll still get your sample. You'll still get your sample. Just a little less. Like, it'll be only one or two of you.

We were smart enough to put that in the contract. The LiDAR doesn't have to work. We just have to deliver it. We're tricky that way. All right. So you mentioned going. off to doing additional stuff with the mission. Two things. I don't know if we talked about it when you were talking about the approach to Earth, but you're going to drop the sample off,

and then there's a maneuver that has to happen to not hit Earth with the rest of the spacecraft. So when does that happen? You might have mentioned it in your previous thing and whether the details, like where does that put you immediately on track for the next rendezvous, or you just kind of get away from Earth for a second and then figure out what to do from there? Yeah, so the, it's a divert burn will happen shortly after sample release. So we will release and we already have the divert burn actually on board because even if we no-go the release, we do not want to hit Earth. So that would be probably advantageous to get out.

We'll try again later. Yeah, we'll be back. Yeah, so that DeVirrburn actually puts us right back on trajectory. We're going to come back by Earth in two years. So, you know, the guys over at our mission planning area, super smart, they came up with this great trajectory that's going to actually take us, not only by Earth in two years

if we want another stab at this but they'll take us to Opethus in 2020 on its own with some clean up maneuvers here and there but yeah we're actually already on track so yeah yeah it's incredible talking to them I was like I don't know how you found a maneuver

or a trajectory that would do exactly what we want in every scenario right you've seen the prices of GPUs lately no I mean that's I was about to ask question and I think you just answered it because you said like if they no-go the release and I'm like in what what scenario would they ever know-go the release like if if something's not right then like Osiris Rex see you your sacrifice but those samples are coming home but I guess if you do actually

have if you do actually have another opportunity to come back then that would actually make sense that's interesting yeah and I'll be honest from our point of view there's very little that would have us no go the release set you know our PI has already said hey I'm a go no matter what right If Cyrus Rex itself is going down with the ship, it's bringing those samples in. Like, only the last would last, but yeah. Right. That would be a no-go. Really, the only thing we're trending is we have a landing ellipse that we have to land in in Utah.

And, you know, if something catastrophic happened and we were to be outside of this landing ellipse, you know, we don't want to come down on populated areas or an uncontrolled space. You know, we don't want some guy rushing with his pickup truck to try to intercept the sample. if it's not, you know, in Utah, that strange. Good thing this is the Gulf of Mexico has all else said. Yeah. I mean, totally different. Yeah, so that's really the only situation because most of the things that could happen on board, we talked about the SRC being passive.

You know, if it's not giving us a telemetry you want, I don't know if two years is going to fix that. Right. You're screwed anyways at that point. Just let it go and let it do its passive thing. Right. And then it's just a big search, get a big search party out at the range. Yeah.

And the other thing, too, is that trajectory we talked about, the one that brings us back in two years, actually takes us within 0.5 AU sun range of the sun, which the spacecraft was really not designed to operate long term there. So, you know, we've done the studies and the sample will be fine, but, you know, we're talking, you know, this is kind of a new thing for us. So we'd rather not test the bounds of our spacecraft with all the sample on board, you know. No, we don't need to bake the Osiris rec samples. It's preferred on TV. Yikes. Okay. Excellent.

All right, that was more fun. Can we talk about the, is it Apophis? I don't actually know if I've ever said that out loud. I've just read it in a bunch of stupid headlines over the years. Yeah. What's the plan? What's the plan? Yeah, so we drop off the sample.

Let's say everything goes smoothly as we expected to. And we talked about this, this, this perihel an approach this 0.5AU approach that we are doing. That's going to happen regardless. So me and a few people, I'm actually, I love talking about this. This has been caught my life for like the last year. You know, everybody's focused on S or C release and I'm, I'm sitting there like, but what comes next? You know? So we're going to be doing a lot of close approaches of the sun. I think we have six total at about that 0.5AU sun range. Each of them are about three to four months in span. So that's going to be a hairy and exciting time for us. You know, we've developed

a really cool pointing attitude and solar array configuration because we're one of a few spacecraft out there that can actually steer it solar arrays kind of wherever it wants. We have pivoting solar arrays. So, you know, a lot of them are, a lot of the older ones are fixed. And so we're going to reconfigure the spacecraft, fly, you know, close to the sun, see how we survive. And then, do that six more times. And then we're going to be getting out to Apophis in 2029. And then we, if you've looked at the Osiris Rex mission, in the past, we spent two to three years imaging the asteroid. We're going to be doing that again. Proximity operations, we call it, which is also a very exciting time, you know, navigating this tiny body that has no gravity field of its own, really.

So, or a bit being a relative term. Huh. That's wild. I didn't know you got so close to the sun. I'm looking up like trajectory maps now to try and figure out what the heck that looks like because that's new to me. Yeah, it's between Venus and Mercury we're going to be swinging in. Yeah. Can you do, maybe you said this and I was too busy looking at maps, but can you do like any kind of like solar sailing kind of stuff with your pivoting solar arrays because of that? Like getting that close because Meritor intended that way back in the day. That's how they, when they would loft a thruster and they were trying to do the mercury flyby as they ended up just pointing their solar arrays and actually.

actually getting a little bit of propulsion. You know, I don't think we're going to try anything like that, mostly because we're actually using our solar rays to try to protect parts of our spacecraft at this point. Okay. We have, you know, data handling units on board that we don't want to get too hot. So we're actually taking our solar rays, folding them and putting it off the side. So they protect, you know, critical components. And we're pointing out a very safe attitude for us so we don't blind our instruments too,

because, you know, our instruments are right on a point of our, the top deck that if they, look into the sun at that close, they are gone, which, you know, then at that point, what science can you do, right? Yeah, yeah. The old Al Bean, right? Is that Alan Bean that did that to the camera on the surface? Yeah, yeah, you did. You don't want to go full Alan Bean.

Stepped out of the right capsule and pointed it up at the sun and that was it. Right. Huh. That's cool. Yeah, I'm excited that the Apophis extension was like, it's like kind of a wild planetary plan. like in terms of like the operations because like not many get approved for that long of an extended mission like right out of the get-go right but like nine years of of travel that they got this was pretty cool and it's a pretty interesting bit yeah and and to be fair it is awarded in smaller chunks right because yeah you know if it's a nine-year mission and then and then we approach and also

spacecraft comes over and it's you know a pile of melted goo then you know that's that's nine years of funding but but no we you know we we do think that um everything we've looked at, it'll be fine. We just, as engineers, we, we overthink and over-engineer everything, right? Can we talk about the orbiting small bodies thing? Because that's like a really interesting part of these missions. Whenever you watch animations of any of the asteroid missions or dawn or whatever, of like what their orbit looks like is always very curious. Or even the, I've tried to find a video of this.

There's like this map of, you know, the, when you were flying over the land, sites of Benu. It's just funny how it's like, we're in orbit, and then we take a hard right, and we're going the other direction now. And it's so different than, you know, large body stuff. So, you know, I'm curious to hear from a planning and operations perspective, what goes into that and how that is to work with. Yeah. So orbiting a small body, like you kind of touched on is, it's really fascinating because you can, you know, in the normal orbit around like Earth or any other body, you have a hard set direction you're going and you're just shifting, right? you know, you're shifting small or you're elongating your orbit, you know, small little adjustments.

But with these small bodies, you can stop your orbit and go the other way, you know, on just thrust the other direction. And it's from, you know, somebody who's done a lot of astrodynamics work, it's mind boggling. He's like, this is not, these weren't the rules. I was not given these rules, you know. So you can do weird, cool things like going, you know, right over a site or you can, you know, change the direction of your orbit. The weird thing about proximity operations is, you know, It requires like really small amounts of thrust.

And the scariest thing you can do is, you know, take yourself behind the asteroid or something like that. So all of our orbits are, you know, plainer or facing Earth, you know, the plane being constantly being communication. You know, if you drift behind the asteroid, then you can never, you might lose your spacecraft. But this, I mean, it requires, like we are doing maneuvers

two to three times a week, whereas a lot of space missions, you know, some of the Mars missions that are orbiting will do maybe one every few months or once a month. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the Juno, the Jupiter mission is doing like two, I think two every 30 something days. But we were doing them two, three times a week. And so it can get really, it can get, it could be a lot for the team. You know, you're you're building a maneuver and staying up till seven, eight o'clock every night, you know, reviewing, approving, sending, start the next one, review, approve a send. And then that like,

The science teams are like, oh, but we like to look at this. We're like, okay, well, let's put that in the plan. Yeah, yeah. You know, I haven't done any astrodynamics work, Alec, but I can tell you that I don't think those are rules. Like, I think you can do those kind of maneuvers at Earth if you happen to have 15 kilometers per second to start Delta V9 around. Like, I don't think it's a fuel.

You're not wrong, but show me a spacecraft, you know. Just because we haven't invented the right propulsion yet, it doesn't mean it's impossible. Oh, yeah. These drawings and graphics of what orbit was like at Benu, and then, you know, I guess this is probably still relevant elsewhere. Is this like, was this some VOS or is this actually what it looked like? Was it actually like a nice circle? Like, what is the lower bound on getting a nice circle is, I guess, my question? How small of a thing can you do a circle around?

So our orbits were generally pretty circular. Astorite itself, not circular, right? But the thing is, you treat it like a center of mass. And even though we talked about it being a loose clumps of rocks, it did behave like a center of mass. So there was a small amount of orbiting you could actually do. But I mean, if you look at the graphic you had up, the orbit's just constantly shifting and we're doing them so many times a week that if you

overlay them it's not going to look really much like a circle. It might look like a star blossom or something like that over time. But I haven't this approach, this approach graphic too. Is it like zigzags way in on this thing? And it's like, what are you doing out there? Where are you going? Making Superman symbol there. The S from the 90s like that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was just our navigation team showing off. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Trying out the new joystick. But then it's just like, boom, we're in a circle. Now we're in a circle. Like, that's my favorite part of this video. I'll put this in the show notes for the people listening. But like, it's like zigzag, zigzag, zigzag, circle. Immediate. Boom.

Theoretically, you can orbit a circle across any amount of gravity. I think the only thing would really stand in your way would be like if there's a bigger body that's too close and it's really throwing everything off. Right. So I guess like where what's the hill sphere of Beny that can't be that big, right? How far away from it do you have to get before that? You're just in the sun's orbit again. Oh, right? I mean, I think at that point you're always in the sun's orbit, right?

That was the only body. But that is legitimately my question of like what can you can I orbit the ISS if I moved it a little farther away from Earth? Yeah, I mean. Could I personally this is now let's take it here. Me and a space suit. I'm going to Bruce McCann list this. Can I orbit the I. in an EMU.

Physics would tell you, yeah. Yeah? All right. It would be a very slow orbit, Anthony. Just to be clear. Yeah, yeah, I'm game. It would take you a long time to make that circle. I'm totally game.

If Alex got the joystick, I'm game. It's all I'm saying. Like, I'm fine. If he's the one in control, I'm good. Not you, Jake. I would not trust you to keep me in orbit of the ISS. Yeah. One day, this is what we should do with the ISS.

So we should take that due orbit module, boost it real high and see if we can put a person in orbit around it, just to see. We got to know, you know? It'd be tough with the shape, right? This is what my question is, Jake. I don't know, you're telling me this pile of rocks did it, then feel like some well-formed metal can do it. If you zoom out far enough, the ISS just looks like a dot, right?

That's what we're talking about, yeah, all right. We're breaking new ground here in physics. I'm on a podcast. Well, it's just weird. They're weird to think about, like, these missions. I'm trying to remember if it was, I feel like I've seen these graphics before of Dawn and some of the orbits that it took. And I'm like, I know that's orbits the word, but I'm not sure the orbit is that word.

Like, these things always just look so bizarre. And I'm sure the math checks out, but to then, like, commit that to your brain as a possible thing is hard. This is the last thing that our listeners need is another way to debate what an orbit is. Yeah, right? Oh, this is the natural way of space, Jake, is constant gatekeeping, you know? Yes, yes. Was this sample even returned or if we were made out of the same stardust? Like, it's just rejoining.

It's not, you know, like, I don't know, we could find it. We can find the lane here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no pedantry on the show. Just, just for it. That's it. Oh, dear. But anyway, back to the operation side of things, are that the things that you were working on, When at Benu, is that what, you know, the future extended mission is going to look like, whether

it's one or multiple astroids, same kind of operations, or are there tweaks now that you've gone through a host cycle that you could like work into the plan to do things differently or better next time? Yeah, it's going to look very similar. But, I mean, that's, we have six years now. That's going to be our main focus is probably just replanting this mission. You know, a lot of the folks who are around during the Benu mission are going to be often doing, you know, their new things.

you know, Dante RPI is going to be studying rocks. He's probably not going to be as interested in, you know, looking at new rocks. So we haven't, we'll have a new PI on board and, you know, we're going to be, you know, seeing what we can improve on the way in. You know, I think one of the things that was hard about the venue side of proximity operations was it was a brand new thing. You know, they had planned to do a lot of imaging and recon and stuff like that before going in, but not to the extent that they did because of how rocky the surface was.

So knowing that that's likely what we'll be walking into this time, we can actually probably say, hey, you know, we assume it's going to be this bad. We should buckle up for two to three maneuvers a week. And, you know, imaging campaigns are going to be pretty extensive rather than being surprised at the last second and, you know, panicking and trying to figure out how do we do this. But yeah, so, you know, we'll pull open everything and see what we can improve on the way in. Yeah, yeah. That's funny you mention that too because one of my favorite like planetary themes like in that's been happening say the last, I don't know, 10 years is sort of discovering the diversity of asteroids and just how like they're just not all the same rock. They're all weird and different and have their unique little things like they're just in no way are the uniform, right? And I kind of generally think about that in terms of science. But in terms of ops too, that's really cool that you can have to go and you know, okay, so Ben, Ben, it's this weird thing. And it's the first time that you, you know, you know, figure it out. so you learn how to operate at it.

And now you're going to go to this other one and like, who knows what it's going to look? Like, what is the epaphas even going to be, like, is it going to be completely different or like exactly the same or somewhere in between? And then you got to figure out a whole new con op for that too, which is a which is fun. I think it's cool that we're going to get like, you know, different experience and learn different things that we can fold into the model we have of how we explore space. You throw psyche in that too. It's going to get pretty wild over the next. Yeah. Yeah.

He strikes me up too with like the way that, you know, this is the metal asteroid. They all the visualizations around this metal asteroid. And then I have to imagine some people in the team saw Osir's direction. We're like, how confident are we though? Like what is our confidence ratio like unaffected by this? Or, you know, are we still very sure that this is this artist's rendition is what we'll be finding there? I feel like it had to take a couple points off their confidence percentage. Yeah, right.

Yeah. And Lucy too, right? we're going to have all these Lucy flybys. There's a lot of asteroid stuff happening. Lucy's a ton, right? It's like... Seven or eight or something. Yeah, there's like quite a few different targets.

They keep adding more. Yeah, yeah, they do. We got one like... The first one's coming up, too. It's like in November or something. I don't like to get that close, but they're coming up. So, yeah, so that's cool that we're going to be able to build up some interesting experience, kind of operating in really new and novel environments, right?

New planets, right? basically new planets yeah where are we at this is the gatekeeping Jake is this a planetary self-return mission it's planetary it's not a planet though oh wait I thought it was for you whatever not these little rocks nah nah man something's changed here I don't know what's going on that cherry stuff got to you betty was not a planet you heard you here first okay wow ouch anyway Did I have a question in there? I don't know.

I might have derailed you, but. You did, you did, yeah. No, I guess maybe I'll form that thing into a question for you. I like just like what sort of, you know, are there any kind of like weird new things that you were planning, like to try and learn to do with Apophis? Like is there, are you expecting some sort of unexpected, I don't know, the environment that you have to figure out? You know, I think the, I think. like you kind of just said, the coolest part is getting there. We have all sorts of imaging that we can do from the ground that we had for Benu before we got there.

And then we get to see how good that imaging actually was. And then on top of that, how this asteroid is actually behaving, right? So like one of the things that we found at Benu was that Benu was actually ejecting rocks constantly. Right. It was all the rocks on the surface. They were out gassing, ejecting off, you know, as a heated and cooled. you probably heard of the Arkoski effect, creating the propulsion through radiation

from the solar heating and stuff. And that actually, it changed our understanding of how this asteroid was moving around. So we had all these projections of, you know, like, oh, you have one and 10,000 chance of impacting Earth. And then now we're like, oh, maybe it might be lower or higher. You know, we don't know. So one of the cool things about going out to another asteroid

is getting just another sample size and saying, hey, you know, was Benu unique? Or is this something that we'll see at other asteroids? how good is our imaging from the ground? But as far as actual imaging, we have the instruments that we have on board. So we're going to do very similar type of science. So lots of recon imaging.

I know that they have some ideas of how they want to end the mission. Maybe we go down and we air tag the surface to see. This is literally my one question I wanted to ask at this show. It's like, you have an instrument for poking. Are you going to poke it? Yeah, well, and we are so successful in the first tag that we still have two different. gym bottles on board. So you gotta poke it. You have to poke it. I am an advocate of long darting

ourselves in there and seeing what happens and poking and but you have to like this is that I think Osiris Rex the legacy will be you gotta poke the asteroid. It's a requirement. Who knows what will happen? It's so it's so chaotic. It's great. Right. But yeah, those plans are still being decided, you know, our X-Sat a mission is coming in Toronto. So as they, you know, form that more. Right now, we're just trying to focus on getting there. We'll focus first on getting our sample back and then that we can talk about extent of mission more. I mean, that's like many years away.

By then, you'll probably be like mostly in charge of Lockheed Martin, I think. So you should be able to have some. That's how it works. You should have some pretty good decision-making power by the time this happens, as my assumption is here. I'll still be the guy with the joystick like back in the way. It's not letting go. You should totally get a joystick at you just have on your,

desk at all time so that other people think that that's the joystick that controls the spacecraft. You should totally be always having a joystick. Carry around with you, bring it to meetings. You know, you joke, but we have tours that come through and they like to see this area because it's one of the few unclassified things Lockheed does, right? And so every time I was like, I need to bring in my like, fly sim joystick because every time they ask, oh, well, how do you fly it? And I just want to be like, I'm flying it right now. And you need one of the throttle ones too, you know, like the tourists, like my age, just like, we're just going to zip by this asteroid real quick.

I just got a, you know, fire on the thrust here. Yeah, Dodd a Starlink on our way in real quick, you know. Do a barrel roll. We've got to figure it out. Look, if Lockheed ever wants to hire us for ideas on how to make the workplace more fun, we're happy to take that game. Unfortunately, Jake, I feel like there's two people that we know very well that are in that position that would hire us and they haven't offered us that deal yet.

I know, yes. I think it as like, and they're probably like, eh, better on. Something's up there. Yeah, yeah. It's probably because I'm Canadian. It's just an I-tar thing. Yeah, yeah, foreign net. The quality of our work.

That's true. Yeah. Joystick idea, though. That's what we got to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is there a big party planned Sunday night then after everything? over. I know the press conference is at like five, so that leaves plenty of time to go have a drink after or something, right? Yeah. So the tea for something else in the mug. I was going to say,

yeah, this tea will turn into something else, I'm sure. No, so we have our, we have a release, and then we actually have immediately afterwards entry plus one day reconfiguration. So I will be unfortunately sitting there and reconfiguring the spacecraft to keep it safe in that small amount of time. But then this weekend, or sorry, the following weekend, we'll be all going down to Houston to celebrate. You know, the sample will be allegedly there. So our, you know, our PI will give us an update on how that's going, and we can all celebrate, you know, a successful return. I know lots of folks have been working on this program. You know, I feel like I say I've been here for years and it's only been like four years, but, you know, I've talked to guys who've been

working on this program for 15, 16 years. You know, it's really been a long time coming, so I think a lot of folks are very, very excited. So they'll probably cut loose a little bit more than I will. Yeah. You're going to have all those Ryugu bucks to spend. Yes. Let's go far. Rejuga bucks.

You said they're worth more. You told me. So, yeah. Here they are, yeah. Oh, my goodness. Okay. All right. Cool.

Well, I don't know. I think that's awesome. I'm really excited for this weekend. I love watching stuff coming in the atmosphere. Those are always my favorite shot. So I'm like really stoked to see this flaming hot Cheeto just blast through the atmosphere. And, uh, you know. Your Buck's not okay.

But calling Osir's a Flaming Hot Cheeto is fine. So just in case anyone's keep its score. I read the Logging Martin tweets. It's coming in very, very hot, Anthony. a lot of thousands of degrees going to be in play here. All right. Blame in how Cheeto is very accurate. I will say this is one of the few times in deep space where you get to celebrate something like that.

Right. So normally deep space missions, like I'm just sitting there with my cell phone. I'm like, look at this picture of a moon we took, you know, and everyone's like, cool, I guess. But like, this is one of the few times that we have something coming back for deep space missions. So, yeah, definitely. I'm excited about it. I'm excited that it gets broadcast. my family will be watching.

Everybody I know, and I've ever met, we'll be watching, I'm sure. So, yeah, yeah, very exciting. Yeah, I'm stoked. We're not getting Mars samples anytime soon, so. Not for a while. Foreshadowing to my reading tonight. Yeah, right. Like, you mentioned where to follow along with the mission earlier,

but is there anywhere that you would like people to follow you, or are you just going to send them to the, what is it, the NASA solar system, Twitter? down. Yeah, I'll point people towards NASA TV when they want to actually watch the event. They can tune in to any of NASA solar explorations, tweets or Facebook posts or any of those. If anybody wants a larger picture of the mission itself, asteroid mission.org, has everything we did up until return. So they were monitoring all the photos and science and everything up until that point. It's got bios on everybody on the mission, too, so you can go and look at all of art, smiling faces.

and hear all about our pasts and dreams and ambitions too. Beautiful picture of Dante Loretta and his post-COVID beard that he just kept. It looks like amazing. Right, right. I'm one of the few still not rocking that COVID beard. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. I'm stoked.

It's going to be a good weekend. So, yeah. Anthony, what else we got going on? we should remember to plug more than once every other week that our friends at Relay FM are running a fundraiser through September for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital and we set up the little sub-campaign under the OffNOM title, OffNOM.com slash donate. We're at four grand, Jake, so we're up for last week. We've still got, if I do my math, because I didn't take the chance to run and put an extra milestone in here,

but if we're still, what, $1,800 bucks away from doing three space movie reviews, on October 19th, we hit our goal to do two terrible space movie reviews. But a little bit more, and we'll be doing three reviews. And Stephen Hackett from Relay will be coming on to talk about them. The way that Jake described flying around asteroids with a joystick kind of feels very similar to what a lot of these movies will be, I'm sure. That it's feasible to fly through asteroids like that is probably heavily part of these movies, but that's going to be fun.

So offnob.com slash donate. We'll go to that page. Just straight up a St. Jude's donation page. We're not getting any money off this. So don't be weird about it. No. No. But shout out Adam.

Still on the leaderboard, Adam. We don't know which. None of the Adams told us it was them. No. One of our mysteries Adams. So one of the atoms that we have is top of the way. And it ends at the end of September. So you got to get in there in the next few days here.

So we're getting close to the end. So yeah. So appreciate everyone who's donated so far. It's pretty cool. Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah. Next week, what do we got? Next week we have an old friend coming back.

Brendan Byrne is going to join us. And do we figure out what we're talking about yet? I don't know if we have a topic laid out so much as we do a person. Yeah, we told Brendan, you should come back on and not have homework this time. So would you like to come on and just be here to have fun? So I guess that means that we have homework, right? Is that how it works? We do have homework.

I will say here's two unrelated things, just on since we have a minute, on topic. of space. I saw my first Starlink train this weekend, by the way, Jake. I've never seen one because of my latitude. I was never really in the window when they were launching 60 at a time. It was always like, oh, that's over me before it's dark. And got to see one of those. It was pretty sweet.

20 satellites long, so it was kind of little, you know, a little bit short. But I was driving with the family at the time. And my wife was like, what is that? What are we looking at? I was like, oh my God, I've never seen one before. Just like, what is it, though? Tell me what this thing is. And then my three-year-old son was annoyed that he couldn't see them

because we were driving on a bridge at the time and he couldn't see out of his window. So he's been begging me to go out and look at satellites, which has been great because now it's getting dark before he goes to bed. So two nights ago we went out, and he saw his first ISS pass in which he was cognizant of seeing the space station. So I felt like that was cool. And the reason I bring this all up is I remember when I was reading the timeline for Osiris Rex originally.

I was like, 2023, my God, like I'll probably have a kid by then. And I remember having that thought. Like, I guess I'll have a child at that point. And I'll be settling in to watch this thing coming back into Utah. It's going to be great. So I'm pumped. Go out and look at satellites. This is a great time of the year for it, I'll just say.

Because it's getting the dark a little early. and the illumination is really good on these things, so a lot of good magnitude passes. That's my plug, Jake. I'm plugging that today. You got anything else? No, I don't think I have anything else. I'm stoked for this weekend,

going to watch all the videos and stuff, and, uh, wishing, Alex, wishing you and your team, best of luck, but everything works, and, uh, you don't have to no go to the sample drop. My ultimate nightmare, too. I don't want to see that. Thank you. But will you come back on once you poke Apophis?

Well, I, yeah, sure. Just commit to poking Apophis and coming back on this show right now. Make the executive decision. It's the guy with the joystick. Yeah, all right, great. This has been great, everybody. We're glad that you hung out with us, and that's all I got, Jake. Cool.

Okay. Thanks, everybody. See you. Bye. Bye. One, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one, into death.