Off-Nominal - 195 - Dirtiest Thing in the Cleanroom (with Dante Lauretta)

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Jake and Anthony are joined by Dante Lauretta, Principal Investigator of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, and Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Arizona, to talk about—take a guess!—returning and studying pristine samples from Bennu.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 195 - Dirtiest Thing in the Cleanroom (with Dante Lauretta) - YouTubeDante Lauretta | Lunar and Planetary Laboratory & Department of Planetary Sciences | The University of ArizonaNASA's OSIRIS-REx Mission to Asteroid BennuAbundant ammonia and nitrogen-rich soluble organic matter in samples from asteroid (101955) Bennu | Nature AstronomyAn evaporite sequence from ancient brine recorded in Bennu samples | NatureContamination monitoring of the OSIRIS-REx ISO5 asteroid sample cleanroom - NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Sample Reveals Mix of Life’s Ingredients - NASASurprising Phosphate Finding in NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample - NASANASA’s Bennu Asteroid Sample Contains Carbon, Water - NASANASA’s First Asteroid Sample Has Landed, Now Secure in Clean Room - NASAOSIRIS-APEX - NASA ScienceNASA Asteroid Sampling Mission Renamed OSIRIS-APEX for New Journey - NASAFollow 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

DLS and go for main engine start. Hello, Jake. How's it going? A little earlier than your usual. A little earlier. Yeah, it's good to change the time the show starts. Every once in a while, just to keep everybody on their toes. We wouldn't want everyone to get really comfortable with us.

No. It's my fault, probably. I mean, no, it's good. Fall is a bad choice of words for it. Actually, honestly, we do need it because I'm about to, right after the show ends, I have someone coming to look at my house to buy. which I desperately also want to happen. So this is a very helpful hour shift for me.

I appreciate it that you considered it that well when scheduling. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for taking that new account. I'm going to get his driver's license test this afternoon. Oh, man. Okay, excellent. Yeah. What's the, which part of the test is he most nervous for?

I think parallel parking. Yeah. It's always that. Yeah. I want to get you. Yeah. There's a, and I live in Mexico and in the, state I'm in. There's a, the driver's test you can do to to get your local driver's license,

which I haven't done yet. I'm Canadian, and I, I still operate on my Canadian driver's license, but the, the, the legend of this test for, for all the people that are from outside the country is that there's, like, this one old guy that runs the test. And the only thing on the test is a parallel park. Like, you just get into this car and you parallel park, and that's the end of the test. But they, like, make it harder. They, they put, like, they measure your car and then they put the pylons, like, you know, they give you, like, six inches on each side. side. And apparently if you turn your head too far, like if your shoulder check turns into a like, you know, a back look, it's like an auto fail. So it's like this legendary test that

nobody wants to do. Are you just trying to wait them out, Jake? Is that you're waiting for yeah, exactly. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. But yeah. So anyway, we're over here with Dante Loretta, a principal investigator of Cyrus Rex. We're very excited to have you, Dante. We have a lot of questions. Anthony now were joking that we had to do crash courses. and astrobiology before the show. So we only sound a little bit like idiots today, but we'll see. Before we dig into it, though, we should do drinks. I know you've got a fun glass.

Do you want to share what you've got there? Sure, yeah. We're known for our swag on Osiris Rex. So let me see if we get that in the right spot. That's our first edition of the Osiris Rex pint glasses. You know, and it's all about teamwork. So it's inspirational messaging about how successful teams operate. And we put them out for every milestone. So every Osirish Rex team member has a

cabinet full of pint glasses for the different years and the different big things that happened throughout the program. So we love our collector items on this mission. We've got pins, we got stickers, we got patches. We got pieces of asteroids. Yeah, we can't give those away to the team, but you know, simulation. Did you at least on the glasses? Did you put like a little marking of this is how much material we're going to collect from Benu? Is there a little etching on there? Well, we had a poll going, so everybody had their own mark, like where they thought based on how much we were going to bring back. And mine was a glass, you know, full. We didn't quite.

But we got about half full. At least half. Yeah, right. You should have made a lid that can't close on it. That's not nice. Come on. I mean, listen, that's a good thing. That's a good thing.

You get such a good job. You're talking about the sample collector and all the material that we lost. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, listen. That hurts. That hurts. That hurts. Others can't fill their container.

You did so good that you jammed it and you couldn't shut your container. I will take that victory scenario more than the other one. Yeah. Okay. We did lose a lot of sample, but we brought back more than twice and we promised. So in the end, it was a good story. There we go. Now we know.

Yeah, now we know. Now we know the vibes on that one, Jake. Didn't get out there. You always think about the one that got away. Oh, yeah. Okay. There we go. You got anything fun there, Anthony?

Um, it's the same beer I drank last week, which is called field study, but it, that, I looked in my fridge and I was like, that, the name is, uh, too relevant for, uh, bringing samples back. I felt, you know, not exactly a field study, but kind of turns into one once you get it back in the lab. So, uh, it's also delicious and they make it this time of the year. So too good not to finish off the six-pack that's in my fridge. Not all in the show, but. Cheers. I've got a, did you bring your mead? Charo which is a Pilsner and I saw I just saw here yeah great label right wow

it's got World B awards World Beer Awards gold for Mexico so this is a this is a good one gold for Mexico World beer awards I don't know what that is

is that like what we call our league champions world champions is that maybe could be it could be so yeah cheers where should we start Jake this is a

well what We're like, how far off from the sample return, like a year and a half? Is it that long? Yeah, September 23. So a little more, like a year and nine months. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the reason we reached out is because we had some pretty fun results. That was back in February now, I think, is when those big results dropped.

And so. Yeah, we made the cover of nature, which you can see behind my shoulder there, honey. There you go, yeah. So I think that's probably more. In the science world, when you make the cover of nature, you're doing all right. That's like you're the time magazine for a scientist. Exactly. Yeah.

Maybe we could just start there. So can you maybe just summarize sort of what the big deal is? Because, I mean, there's a lot going on. You know, even just reading the NASA press release, it was like there was, you couldn't not bury the lead on this one because there were so many leads. Like there was just so much going on. So I don't really know. I don't want to know where to start and which is most important because, you know,

We're not astrobiologist, but give us the short. Yeah, you bet. There were two papers that came out in February, one in nature and one in nature astronomy. And the nature paper is all about the salt minerals that we found. So basically these asteroid samples came from a wet ocean-like environment with salt water that was interacting with the rocks, turning them into the clays, and then leaving behind these beautiful salt crystals, which we'd never seen before in our meteorite collection, primarily. because they're highly unstable in the Earth's atmosphere, and especially as you pass through the atmosphere, the rocks break along these regions. So we're dealing with a sopping wet environment, and that plays into the paper that came out in nature astronomy, which was all the amazing

organic molecules that we found in the samples. You know, this is an astrobiology mission. The central idea, when we came up with it now, 21 years ago, was that we were going to go to an asteroid that is from the same population that we think seeded the earth with the building blocks of life. And we have now verified that that in fact happened. All the letters of the genetic code, so the things that make up DNA and RNA that tell you how to make a protein and do all the functions that biochemistry needs to do, they're all in the sample. And the proteins are made out of amino acids. We use about 20 of them in life on Earth. We have so far reported on 14 of them in that paper. And we're trying to close it out. Can we find the last six of them or the previous?

There's like a pathway that very easily would produce the amino acids. And basically, these rocks are like a little kit to go build life as we know it on Earth. And that's important for understanding our origins. But another big theme in astrobiology is exploring around the solar system and looking for other biospheres. So all the planets in our solar system got these materials because these small bodies, these asteroids, were crashing into Venus. They were crashing into Mars. They were building the icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, even the outer regions of our solar system. So all of these places got the building blocks. So now the key question is, what happened? How do you take a rock that's full of this organic goop and have something that's

alive, you know, crawl out of it. That's still a huge mystery in science today. We don't know. And all of the planets had that opportunity. Did that happen? That's the next big frontier for astrobiology research. It seems striking to me, too, that like all those things are still on Ben. It's not like Ben, who's a brand new asteroid, right? Like, this stuff has been floating around in space for however many millions of years. And it's all still there for us to billion, four and a half billion years. Okay, yeah, I had a couple more, I had one more comment on my number, but the, that's remarkable to me, that this stuff is still sitting there and it's pristine and it survives,

which I think to me would increase the likelihood that, you know, whatever happened on Earth could easily happen again somewhere else, right? Yeah, these molecules are very hardy. And, you know, not a lot happens. There was this early period of geologic activity where this icy, accreted with carbon, either in the form of carbon monoxide or methane, maybe organic was already there in the protoplanetary disk. You had radioactive isotopes that melted all of that ice. You had all this hydrothermal activity. And that probably all settled down within tens of millions of years.

And then this thing became a time capsule. And there were some impacts in there, you know, if it's on the surface, it's getting hit with cosmic rays. But for the most part, it's an undisturbed rock, you know, and geologists, we have a saying, right, rocks remember. They have a story to tell, and they hang on to their memories really, really well. Yeah. So you go blast them apart and just... Until you can't reiterate this thing. Until you're waiting to track that information, yeah.

Jude, what was your reaction when you saw the sampling event and how chaotic that can get? Especially with the context that was... What was the relative time between that and when we saw the first images of the contact with the asteroid surface and you got to just give a little context here. So we had the live broadcast when we were getting just a little bit of information from the spacecraft, no images or anything like that, just some milestones. The spacecraft said, I'm crossing 10 meters, I'm crossing 5 meters, I'm going in to get the sample.

And that all went well, like the spacecraft was alive at the end of it and talking to us and that was a win. But I had to wait like 12 hours to get the data on the ground. So I was sitting in an Airbnb in Denver waiting and it was coming down one image per minute. And I got the first image right before we contacted it. And I was like, okay, that looks good. The spot looks good. We're about to hit.

And then I got the second image. And that's pretty benign. It's contacting the asteroid surface. And the surface is disturbing. You can see it rippling away. And I played with those two for, I don't know, 10 minutes. Just got them blinking back and forth. And I was like, we got a sample.

And then I saw it go into shadow. And I was like, wow, this thing's drilling down into the asteroid. I wasn't worried for safety at that point because we knew the spacecraft was safe and was operating nominally. And I was like, we dug in at the end of the day, 50 centimeters, which is about the length of my arm deep into the asteroid. So that's why I was the glass full guy. I was like, man, we went so deep into that asteroid. We had to fill that whole thing up and get all that sample back. So I was ecstatic.

And I texted it to the, you know, the administrator at NASA. I was like, look at what we got. This is amazing. So it was a thrill. And it was a huge amount of just relief because, you know, we were on that asteroid turned out to be 17 seconds. We were on the surface. The plan was five, but the depth, you know, added some time to the duration there. And I had been thinking about those five seconds for decades, right?

So to think that we actually did it and it was done and over and I could start thinking about science again was just this enormous relief. and excitement. Yeah. Yeah. It was so much fun watching that. It was like, it was a wild. I remember it's the same.

I mean, it's not the same, obviously, but I remember watching Osiris Rex launch and, you know, the times of these missions is sometimes brutal. If you're just like, if you're on the outside and you're just a fan,

it's like, okay, well, that was a great launch. I guess I'll check back in five years and see how it's going, you know? But it was so it was really fun to kind of like still be around and be a part of of watching that happen.

It was awesome. I have to ask, so how, you know, these results, how much of this is like it confirmed a hypothesis you had going in and how much of it is brand new, like we didn't expect this and it's turning our heads in and now we've got to rethink things. Yeah, the organic molecules, we had pretty good hints that these were going to be there from our meteorite collection. And the challenge had been the kinds of things we're looking for are the full of bacteria. So it was like, you always wondered, was this a contamination event?

something on her. We kind of just got rid of that doubt, but it wasn't like, wow, we never expected that. The shock were the salt crystals and this complete evaporite sequence and the beautiful crystals that are on that cover of nature there, they're just growing into void spaces like a mineral you would go by at a at a rock shop, right? It's just this gorgeous assemblage of material. And we've never seen anything like that. And we didn't expect that. And so that was the real shock. And the fact that it meant this large ocean world kind of body that this asteroid came from really was it's changing the way we think about these early asteroids and how active they were and how much fluid was moving around on these systems. So it's making us rethink the ocean world concept. And to recognize we probably had ocean worlds very early in the solar system, lots of them, not just the one that Benu came from, but probably hundreds of them, if not more.

And that they were gone. They've been destroyed or shattered into these tiny little fragments that make up these small asteroids today. Yeah. That's kind of wild to me because I kind of think of when I think of the early solar system like that, I don't think of like places where there would just be water. I think of these like molten lava, you know, like really hostile looking places. Like we're, you know, foraging planets. And it's a very hot kind of preconception. But the idea that there's maybe all this water hanging around, that's pretty weird to me.

Yeah. Well, that all happens too. you do have those magma oceans, but that's all happening in the inner solar system where you don't have a lot of ice. The ice mitigates all of that. So you are dumping the same kinds of heat sources into the rocky planets and planetesimals of the inner solar system. But when you do that in icy objects, you get the mitigating effect of the ice kind of maintains the temperature. And as soon as you can start convection, then you can start moving heat and getting it to the surface and radiating it out of space. So you never really get to the molten stage if you've got a substantial amount of ice in the body. Would that make that I'm doing my thing when I start hypothesizing things that are probably already known to all of you.

But does that kind of mean that there is some sort of like boundary or a distance from the star where that changes and the way the planets form will then be very, very different because of like a melting point of water or something like that? Yeah, absolutely. And it's the condensation point. So it's more like snow forming than melting because you're in a protoponetary disk. It's basically a giant atmosphere at the scale of the solar system. You're going to have weather systems in there. You're going to have fronts and movement and turbulence and all these processes that are going to distribute energy and matter around. And we have what we call the snow line.

And you can do a theoretical calculation. It's kind of like sitting by the campfire, right? If you had a block of ice, let's say you had a campfire in the middle of winter in Canada. you know, you put the block of ice right next to the fire, it's going to melt, but you start moving it out, you're going to reach a point where it's just not getting enough radiation from the fire to melt it. And that's the snow line. And that's where you get a lot of icy material forming. And when I talk about snow, I'm referring to water. But you also will have the same kind of fronts for carbon dioxide, for methane, for ammonia, all these other things that make

isis. And you have to get farther and farther out into the solar system for those different ice is to be stable. And that I'd say another big surprise is that Benu is loaded in ammonia, which freezes at much lower temperatures than water does, which means that, you know, we estimate the snow line for water ice at around five astronomical units, which is about where Jupiter orbits today. The ammonia line is probably twice as far out, probably more like where Saturn is today. So the ice is and other materials that form Benu's parent body, and it's important to recognize Ben, who is a very small fragment of a much larger world that was shattered probably a billion or a billion and a half years ago, those had to form way out in the solar system

and then eventually they've been marching inward to now Ben is a near-Earth asteroid whose orbit crosses the Earth. That was probably the single best description I've ever heard of that whole phenomenon. I feel like I've read a lot of that stuff and no one has ever done it better than that. You're awesome. Like totally straight up. That was awesome. Yeah, that was really a good way to think about it.

Now I'm like, okay, my head's spinning. I got to think of that now. So what is the, you say it's migrating in? Like, is that the planet that it was a part of had an orbit that brought it into the inner solar system and it just happened to fall apart closer to us? Yeah, and it swung in towards us. Yeah, it looks like the giant planets were moving around in the early solar system, a process we call planetary.

migration, which just as a side note, we never even thought of until we started discovering extra solar planets. And we found hot Jupiters, big Jupiter-sized objects orbiting right like inside the orbit of Mercury. And you're like, well, how would that get there? It had to form out and then migrate in. And when you look at the dynamical state of like the Kuiper belt and even the asteroid belt, it was clear Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were moving around and their gravity fields are like plows. And they just push through these planet testaments and scatter them all over the place. So you had this large object, at least 100 kilometers, maybe as big as 500 kilometers in diameter that formed with all these ices plus the rock in organics and the material that makes

up some of the what we call refractory material at 10 astronomical units. You had planets moving around. It had to end up in the inner main asteroid belt at around two astronomical units. And we know that because Benu came in from the inner edge of the main belt. We can kind of take its orbit and integrate it backward and show it came through a gravitational interaction with Saturn, actually, which is a little obscure. It's called the New Six Resonance that sculpts the inner edge of the main belt. If you cross that line, you get flung into the inter-solar system. And we can tell where Benu came from, and then we can see that there is a population of asteroids that have very similar orbits. We call these asteroid families. And they have similar surface

compositions that we infer from their reflectance and from their spectroscopy. And it looks like if you integrate all their orbits back, they all came from a single point. And that was this large body. It was hit by another asteroid, catastrophically disrupted, produced thousands of things like Benu. And then you size sort. The smaller the asteroid is, the more susceptible it is to something called the Yarkovsky effect, which is basically sunlight pushing around asteroids. And small body, move much faster than large bodies. It's a surface area to volume ratio effect. So small things get kicked out of the belt.

The big objects will stay there. And so you can say, oh, Benu is part of this family that was one single object. That's its parent. It's now gone. And there are its siblings are all left behind. That's wild that you can trace it back like that. That's like planetary detective. That's insane.

Oh, my goodness. All right. So is there, knowing that, or is there a motivating reason to go to those other places and do comparative science? Or do you feel like Benu served that purpose and you need to look at the other families or even other types of asteroids entirely? Yeah, that's a good question. I would say, you know, there's so many different kinds of asteroids. We're really between our mission and also the Jaksa Hayabusa 2 mission, which returned samples from a similar asteroid called Dugu. we've kind of got those well represented right now.

I would say I'm excited about the Psyche mission, which is going to go to potentially a metallic asteroid. The Lucy mission is getting out to the Trojan asteroids, which are trapped in the same orbit distance as Jupiter, what we call the Lagrange points, where the Jupiter's gravity and the sun's gravity balance, and you can trap a bunch of asteroids there. They look darker, redder, more organic, rich.

So I think getting a sense of the diversity of the different kinds of asteroids is a high priority right now. Now, as much as I would love to go out to the parent of Benu and survey all of that, I would say, yeah, let's really get a sense of how different all this stuff is out there. Yeah, that's one thing I'm sort of noticing through the, you know, having followed through some of these, you can almost kind of call this like the age of asteroid, you know, discovery. We've had such like a good string of missions and discoveries in that kind of area. And it feels like the more we learn about them, the more we're learning that there are these, like we need to start thinking about them differently. Because before me, they were just all rock. There were space rocks and there's planets.

That's like that was the only two things there were, right? But like, no, like they all have these kind of like interesting kind of collective identities of different groups and stuff. And I don't really know what the impact of that is to me yet, but it seems like an interesting kind of observation. Yeah, I like to say, you know, we talk about planetary exploration. And that kind of analogy would say, well, what do you need to go explore Jupiter for? We've ever been to Mars and that's a planet.

Right. So even all planets are like. It's like, no, every one of those has its own history. its own geology, its own composition, its own dynamical evolution, and you really want to be able to sort all that out. So, yeah, they're each their own world. There is a continuum, it looks like, between asteroids and comets, comets being the stuff from the far outer edge of the solar system that are heavily ice dominated to the innermost asteroids, which are all rock and metal. You were mixing those components in different proportions, and that will lead you to very different

geologic histories. Also, the size, how much of the radioactivity did it have when it formed, all of that will play into what was its history like. Are the things about, you know, obviously you had a phase of the mission after sample collection when you were still flying your way back, then you had the phase where you were getting this thing back, now you're distributing it and doing all the initial science. I'm curious the things that you focused on in those different phases, right? Like immediately post-sample collection, we saw how this one went, we saw how high-upius two went.

Was there a moment where you were like, man, if we knew it would react like that, if we knew we were going to get an arm's length into this asteroid. We would have designed a different sample collection system. And are there learnings that you've got from that that you shared with other teams working on future missions? Absolutely. Yeah, one big activity I'm working on is a comet sample return mission. That's like the next frontier. It's a bigger challenge because you've got ice.

You want to try to figure out can we bring some of the ice back, which means you've got to have like a refrigerator inside the sample return capsule, which is a big engineering challenge. But absolutely, looking at the collector, looking at the fact that we probably collected, 10 times as much material as we returned because of that stuck open flap means that, boy, we would have had a huge collection if we just found a way to close it right after collecting. So absolutely, we feed forward. One of the products we're working on right now is called our Lessons Learned Report, which will deliver both to NASA, but we'll also publish it.

So other teams will just have that record. And so you always do that. You look back and say, boy, if I would have known then what I know now, I would have done things a lot different. It's about a huge net. Yeah, exactly. what we were doing. So we left the asteroid in May of 2021. So we collected in October of 2020. So we still had like seven months at the asteroid. And I pushed and successfully got us to go back and do a flyby in April of 21 to characterize the site. Because we weren't planning on doing that. We didn't expect to really change the surface at all. And so we were like, well, we're not going to need to go back. It's going to make a hole this big. And we were going to have a hard time finding it to take a picture of it. But then I saw that we, blue hole what turned out to be eight meters or 25 feet across and I was like we got to go take a

picture of that. Even Jack from lost. We have to go back. I can't not know what it looks like. And so we spent a lot of time planning that event. And then we left in May of 2021. And then you start thinking about recovery, which is a huge logistical operation. You're dealing with the U.S. military, the Air Force, the Army, Strattcom. You've got to talk to Utah. We landed in Utah. You've got to talk to the Utah State government, Salt Lake City, all the tribal nations that are surrounding that area, the federal aviation administration, FEMA. There's like all these different interactions you've got to start having. It's like, okay, we've got to go remind the military, by the way, we've got a capsule from outer space landing in your test site

in September 2023. Because it's going to go way different if Golden Dome works out. That thing's going to get taken out halfway down to the 70. Right. Yeah, right. Because we made agreements with people who are no longer there. Like the range commander changes every couple of years, right? And so you bring it like, here's the letter. You said you would do this. And they were great about it, but it's just an education activity. And then how are we going to operate with the military? And so a lot of it was just the logistics of operations. You got helicopters. I will say, you know, we had a TV show. That's an enormous amount of logistics doing a live broadcast from the middle of nowhere in Utah. It was a big challenge for us. So that was probably like three times as much effort to make the TV show work as it was

to recover the capsule on the ground. You had to build the curation facility, all the glove boxes, all the tooling, all the cleaning procedures. So there was just a lot of work to get ready to recover the sample, transport it to Johnson Space Center, open the capsule, which, as you noted, was a challenge for us, right? So that was, even though it didn't close properly, it was stuck closed when we got it back on Earth. So it was really messing with our heads.

just planning all of that schedule and then how are you going to send this thing all over the world and are all these laboratories ready to receive it? This is precious sensitive material. So we had to train all these different labs up in protocols and making sure they were secure, making sure it was pristine and that they could do the analysis that they promised us. So there was just a lot of logistics and planning and rehearsing and worst case scenario, you know, assessment. What are we going to do if the parachute doesn't open, for example?

Yeah. that was a spicy moment yeah i think i lost five years in my life in those three minutes i bet you did yeah we were all uh watching with bated breath for sure um by the way anthony did you hear and mention the comet sample return do you remember that mission i sure do man uh listen it's dante i have to tell you yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna throw anthony under the bus here but we had we had a little bit of a bet going way back when about whether it was either going to be dragon flyers Caesar that was going to be selected for new frontiers. Anthony was on Team Dragonfly, and I've never let it go.

Listen, listen. This was neither of us dunking on the other. This was more of a shark tank convinced the other one that this is the right choice. And I will say, the Dragonfly did win out. So, you know. You couldn't pronounce the comet name. Pick a comet you could pronounce and maybe when we were talking, but I don't know, you could probably pronounce it for us.

What was the common name? Yeah, should you remove Gero Samenko? but, you know, it's marketable. People who discovered the comet, right? You don't want to hold that against them. I know. I'm not saying they shouldn't have. I'm just saying we should name it.

It's something that people could say on a TV show that you made about bringing the sample back. We call it 67P, which is this numerical designation. There you go. Or Chudy. It gets, I think, called Chirry is a, as a nickname. True. Yeah, we put a lot of work in the marketing deal with Churis. Caesar was a big effort.

And, you know, we did a very strong case. We made a very strong case that that mission was ready to fly. And we're still working on it. It's not gone. The Caesar team still needs. Yeah, we're still hoping there's a new opportunity that we can bid on to fly that one. Yeah, I hope that flies. I think that's really cool.

The cryogenic sample part, the refrigerator, like you said, that sounds like, that sounds awesome. That sounds like it's a really important thing to do. Yeah, exactly. You've been just seeing how much more you found from Osiris Rex by bringing that sample, you know, pristently through the atmosphere versus burning up, taking that one step further and going like, what if we kept it cold? Like that would be,

that's pretty remarkable to me. That's an interesting thing too, because it's kind of wrapped up in that mission proposal, but presumably there are other missions that would use that kind of tech. And, you know, when you look at like the human space light side, they talk about capabilities approach

where we're going to design landers or launch vehicles that can do certain capabilities. Right. Is there a way to structure the science side of a NASA portfolio, to say, you know, 10, 20 years from now, we're going to need this kind of tech to do a sample return mission location agnostic. We should start a program.

Like, is there a framework for doing that kind of thing? And then you could kick that project off independently? Well, the challenge is that, you know, NASA's budget is a year-to-year thing. And so you've got to get into the congressional budget. You've got to become a line item and a program. And NASA's tried it with the science and technologies, you know, directorate. And that's the goal, right? but these always end up being one-offs,

and you really focus on the thing you need to do. And I think we're starting to see that era. I mean, look at Starlink and how rapidly they're cranking out those communication satellites. That's a whole new paradigm. And I think someday we'll see that kind of thing for planetary exploration. A lot of us sit around and think about how can we make money exploring the solar system because we just want to do a lot more solar system exploration. And nobody has a really good answer right now.

So do you look at like VARDA? Yeah. If you're not making money, it's hard to scale, right? Do you look at any options out there? Like, you know, there's VARTA that's working on their sample return missions where they're doing smaller scale stuff, pharmaceuticals, whatever. They're working with Rocket Lab when their reentry capsule. Is there a path there that there's, you know, somebody commercializes reentry capsules and that at least takes that off of our budget line items and we can focus on a refrigeration system? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we tried to do that. The capsule is very similar to. what we flew on Stardust, at least in form. And what you do when you begin the design process is you sit down like our aerospace provider was Lockheed Martin and you say, okay, what have you built before that we could reuse? And you get a lot of reuse out of your avionics, your electronics box, right?

All missions need to command and control instruments and communicate. And so there's a lot of reuse at the component level. But you run into parts obsolescence because of these long timescalescence. You can't just rebuild the board. You're like, oh, well, that transistor no longer works or no longer available. So can I find something that fits that spot on my board or do I have to redesign the board around the components that are now available? And you always get into that, you know, when you get down to the details. It's even down to the screws sometimes.

You're like, well, we need a different screw, a fastener or whatever, because this one's no longer being manufactured. So that's the real challenge. It's just takes so long and technology moves so quickly that by the time you get ready to refly, it's no longer available. Yeah, you're working on tech that's outdated and no one knows how work and operate. Yeah, you mean you're saying the range commander changes out sooner than your agreement expired with them. So yeah. Exactly, exactly. We did help Varda out quite a bit because they didn't have permission to reenter.

Right. And we kind of went through that whole process and we were able to go back to them and say, okay, this is the kinds of things you need to do to get permission to reenter the vehicle. You had a good forcing mechanism of we are fucking coming in whether you like it or not. You know, like, here we are. You were like, we're here. Yes, right. No, no, we're going to hit the earth and we're going to land where we're laying.

And you're either ready for us or you're not. Jeez, yeah. I want to dig into, you kind of hinted at this, but I would love to dig into the sample curation operations because that seems like a super fascinating part of this mission. It feels like it's probably undersung. Like the rockets and the spacecraft and the samples and the science is all really important stuff. But like handling this stuff is super critical, like you said.

But, you know, where are the samples? How do you take care of them? What sort of facilities or machines did you have to make? What was already existing? Yeah, it is a heroic effort that does get underappreciated. So props to the curation team, they've been fantastic. So we're at the NASA Johnson Space Center, which historically is where all NASA astro materials are curated and it goes back to Apollo.

That's where the astronauts were based and that's where they trained. And when the astronauts came home with their boxes full of rocks, they all went back. to Houston. And so Houston is where they built the original facilities. And they're still there today. And there are neighbors. It's really cool. We're right next door to the Apollo collections at JSC in Building 31. And so the first thing you have to do is build a clean room. So you've got to have a high purity room, kind of like where you manufacture semiconductors or spacecraft. It's more like semiconductors, really high purity grades. And they're characterized by particle counts and thin film depositions and what volatiles are in the atmosphere. And we benefited from the fact that

Jaxsa was flying Hyabusa 2, and there is an interagency agreement between NASA and Jaxa, and NASA was expecting Hyabusa 2 samples earlier than OREC samples. So we were able to build the clean room in parallel. We're going to build the Hybusa 2 and the Osir's Rec's clean room together, and there's some shared facilities that you can benefit from that, like sample prep kind of stuff. And then you need all of the glove boxes. So all the sample, if it's not being actively processed, like in a laboratory, and you try to minimize this, it's just sometimes unavoidable. It's under a dry nitrogen atmosphere.

And we have our own grade, curation grade, which certifies a certain amount of water, carbon dioxide, all these other things. You don't want interacting with the sample. So you got to have a whole system to generate dry nitrogen, flow it continuously through all these what is dry nitrogen. So fortunately, there's a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere, right? It's 78% of the atmosphere. Nitrogen, but there's a lot of stuff you don't want. So you got to take air. and you got to scrub out all the oxygen, you go scrub out all the water,

all the carbon dioxide, any contaminants, whatever, pollutants, carbon monoxide and stuff like that. So you're basically purifying air to just extract, you know, five or six nines, like 99.99.9% nitrogen is what you're striving for. So you just have a purification facility.

Pure nitrogen. Yeah. Why do they call it dry? What's the... No water, right? No water. And that's because water really... If it's pure nitrogen, that would count, wouldn't it?

Yeah. That's why I'm just. about it. Yeah, it's a certification. You're allowed to have a certain amount of water. If it's not dry nitrogen and if it's dry nitrogen, you've got to be below. And I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's a benchmark. You got to get below this water content. And we're at parts per millions of levels of stuff that we're talking about here. So dry nitrogen is what we call it. That's a good question. I never thought about why we call it that before. But it's a cool name. You know, I like it as a name. Right. Exactly. Dry nitrogen gas. And then you got to have these glove boxes. And

when you're designing these glove boxes, you got to think about what are all the tools that I'm going to need, what's all the equipment, like I need a balance, I need cameras, they gotta have visual access. And so you gotta have a whole tool kit. You gotta have a cleaning lab. So all those tools have to be clean before they can go in there.

So you're like, okay, how do I make something ultra clean? And then how do I get it from the cleaning lab into the glove box so that I can use the tool? And it's hard work because you're constrained. You can't really do any shoulder motion when you're in the clean room. It's all elbow and wrist. And that's exhausting, right? It's just exhausting to try to do all this tooling.

You know, we alluded to the sample collector getting stuck. One of the reasons it was stuck is they couldn't get their elbow onto the torque of the tool to actually push on it. So we needed a, if you looked, it's like a little ratchet screwdriver that we ended up designing to overcome that challenge. It's loud because there's so much air handling going on. It's just blasting constantly afloat. and it's hot because you're in this complete garb bunny suit, right? Double layered with masks on and hairnets and for me, beard nets and all this stuff just to make sure the dirtiest thing in the clean room is the human, right? And so you want to make sure the human isn't transferring any contaminant to the sample.

And the curators who had originally planned that they would work eight-hour shifts, a normal shift, you know, with a lunch break and that kind of stuff. but I was in the labs for about an hour and I was exhausted. And I was like, as exciting as it was to be there and looking at the sample and thinking about the kinds of stones that we want to request, I was like, I got to get out of here. I'm just exhausted. And, you know, they ended up, couldn't not working eight hours. We ended up saying you can only do four hours shifts just because of the human factor and making sure that we took care of our team. And so it's a, it's a huge effort. And we do have a couple papers on it.

There is a paper Kevin Reiter wrote about the design of the creation. facility for the Uber geeks out there who want to go and read we put in meteoritics and planetary science. I would read that. That's for sure. I mean, you know, there's there's all the, assuming Mars sample return gets their, their, their house in order, you know, they're going to have to build a some sort of similar thing to that.

And I'm excited to kind of see what, you know, what we, what we learn from Apollo that you're using what you're going to teach to the Mars sample return people when they build that. I mean, that's just, I know, I like science operations. I think it's like a fascinating sort of subset of a niche, an already niche interest of mine. Yeah, and we work with the Mars sample return team quite a bit, especially our colleagues that are based at Goddard Space Flight Center. They're the organics experts. And, you know, Danny Glavin is my organics analysis working group lead. And he's on our sample return.

He was part of the Mars Curiosity, Sam instrument team. And Jason Dworkin is our project scientist, but he's really the contamination expert on Osirx. And I know they talk to the Mars sample return planning team quite a bit. And MSR has an even bigger challenge because you're worried maybe that there are actually Martian life forms. And so you've got to have like a bio5 hazard containment system to process the samples in, which is a whole other level of gear and, you know, that you're going to be in. It's going to be even more exhausting to process that material.

All right. That brings me to my fun question, Jake. I have a pet theory on this show that not in the show, just generally in my life. That we went from like, I forget when the first there's water on Mars news release was. Probably when would the first one have been. I think from Mariner, right? I mean, yeah, the first one. When we went.

And obviously that comes back every couple of years. Water on Mars. And we went through this phase of- Sciapparelli is what you're looking for you. Yeah, right. Exactly. First of a low. Canali.

Yeah. Yeah, first one low. Yeah. First time we looked. So, obviously, we went through that phase. But then we, we went through that phase. went through a phase of the entire solar system being like, wow, there's water everywhere.

Everything is wet. There's water all throughout the solar system. And I'm on the end of we're going to go through that with life, that there's just life everywhere, because you look at Earth and it's like, you can't find a spot there's not life. Like, everywhere. The hardest place you could possibly think to live, there's life. On the outside of the space station,

there's life still. Like, the deep ocean vents, there's life. Weirdly places in Antarctica, there's weirdly life. That lake that is like doesn't have, what's the one weird lake in California, is it Mono Lake or whatever? That's like... Mono Lake, yeah, right?

Yeah, like life is anywhere that you'll give it a space to exist. So I have this... Three kilometers deep underground, right? Doesn't matter where there's life everywhere. So I'm like, this is definitely the case everywhere in the solar system. Like, there's life everywhere. I'm convinced of this. And so, you know, were you not at all worried that like,

what if we come back with life? Like, you were zero percent worried about that? I was zero percent worried about it for two reasons. One is, you know, we were planning we would only get material from the very surface of the asteroid. And that was exposed to cosmic radiation and stuff like that. And so it would have been sterilized. We made that case. You have to go make your case to the planetary protection officer that, you know, it's safe to bring this stuff back.

And then the second reason was if there was something that was, you know, going to cause a pandemic or something, I'd be patient zero. And it would be my problem. I'm not worried about getting infected, but I'm just convinced. Like, man, life lives everywhere on Earth. Why would I think it doesn't live everywhere else that sort of looks like Earth? Because all these places don't look like Earth. The real mystery is how did it get started, right? And that's, since we don't know, we can't really answer.

I'm with you. I think life's going to be common, at least in the galaxy. And probably somewhere else in the solar system. But until we know how you go from a pile of organic goo to something that's alive, we can't really say what the odds are in any kind of intelligence. manner. Yeah. I'm thinking, though, that like, you know, obviously Mars Sampreturn going through its own

drama at the moment, but part of me thinks that we spent all this time thinking of, like, how to prevent the sample return mission that is designed to bring back a life form, how we should treat it, and what we should do. And part of me thinks we're just going to bring back a sample one day and be like, oh, shit, like, we got it. Here it is. It's on this thing that we brought back and we didn't, this wasn't the mission we were thinking about it for, but here it is.

Yeah, yeah. And it's not an easy thing to detect life, right? I mean, it is if it's an animal running around or something like that, that's the obvious. But, you know, some of these edge cases, you're like, how would I, what is it doesn't mean to be alive, right? And that's also a real puzzle in astrobiology. What are we talking about? You know, and a lot of life detection is, well, we're going to look for amino acids or we're going to work for nucleic acids. I was like, well, that's, you're going to find Earth life.

But that doesn't mean that's what Mars life is like. So maybe, maybe not. Yeah. Yeah, that also kind of plays to the sort of the patients required to study this field because it's like, like you said, we just have no idea how it starts. We can't even identify it. And so, you know, there's people always ask, like, can we go to Mars and just and look for, like, to look for life.

And we tried that with Viking. And like, what we learned is like, we don't even know which side is up with this question. And we need to like really ski. Like we had to go back 15 steps and go, okay, where is there water? okay, let's find all the water and really understand what water does and what the environments look like. And then like get some understanding that, okay, now let's go one step up to, you know, or let's find methane or something, you know, one really kind of base level organic. And I feel like we're very making a nice progress, but a slow march through those questions.

And I feel like it's going to be a while before we get any, unless your thing happens, Anthony. It just comes back. I think it's like like extra solar planets, right? I think it, you know, they were speculated. There was people who said they're going to be everywhere. People said they're going to be incredibly rare. And then we found them. And then it's like, okay, now we know what to do, right?

And you started out with these Doppler surveys looking for the stellar wobble. And then we got Kepler and there's thousands of them, right? So now we have more than we know. Can't stop finding them. Yeah, you can't stop finding them. So I feel like it's going to be that watershed moment where it's like, okay, that's what we're looking for. And so now let's go get it. And there's no single molecule that's going to tell you you've got life, right?

Like we've got this dimethyl sulfide detection, right? And we're arguing about, did they really detect the molecule or not? That's the first thing. But even if they did detect it, is that a sign of life. And life is all about, you know, your environment, your ecosystem, your relationship with the planet. And so it's got it's a process, right? It's ongoing. So you need, at least you need kind of temporal survey.

Is this molecule rising and falling with the seasons? Is there other molecules that show up or go away when this one occurs? So you can start to look at. at the cycles and the interfaces and the interactions and you say, okay, now it looks like you might have a real shot at a biosphere. Yeah, that's a, that's a big problem. It's a big problem to answer. I'm glad that I'm not in charge of it.

Well, you know, it's a journey. So it's all, if you got to enjoy the ride, if you enjoy the ride, it's great. You know, as long as I've been on Osirish Rex, the job has changed so many times that I've never been bored, right? And I've never been like, okay, I've got to be. really tired of doing this because as soon as you get good at something, you stop doing that and you got to do something completely different. And like, now I got to go figure out how to fly a spacecraft. I learned how to build one. Now it's like, how do you fly this thing? So, you know,

I'm going to learn how to deal with the military. Yeah. Exactly. Who were great, by the way. Yeah, they were great. Military was great. They were so fun to work with. They were really excited about the mission. This doesn't sound like a, uh, a, uh, a sentence that you're being told to say, by any means. This feels like a very freely said thing that you're going out there in the open. I really do mean it. We're really proud of that partnership. Yeah. Good. You mentioned spacecraft. You've now handed that off to a different mission. It's going to go out to Opaphas. And I think you're like, are you kind of like advising that mission? You're not involved at all?

Are you still pretty involved with operating the spacecraft? Where are you at? I'm a co-investigator, so I'm on the science team still. And I'm the emeritus principal. investigator. So that means I get to come and go and please. And I am not involved in flying the spacecraft. I didn't want the daily, weekly grind that that entails anymore. I was, I was done with that. I was like, okay, that's a lot of work. And I was exhausted. And I got a sample. I wanted, you know, I started out my career as a laboratory chemist. And that's why I got in this business in the first place. Now that we have the sample, I want to be working on it. And I've got my astrobiology center. And, you know, we're trying to grow the Arizona Astrobiology Center, turn that into a really fun

enterprise. So I'm the, I'm like the fire department. And I'm the repository of corporate knowledge. Like, I'm the guy who knows why things are the way they are on the vehicle. And so Danny, Del Justinia, who's a great friend and colleague who's the principal investigator now, she'll call me up if she just needs to talk it through. And I was fortunate to have the same kind of support. So both Alan Stern, who's the PI of New Frontiers, and Scott Bolton, who's the PI of Juno orbiting around Jupiter, you know, they said, call anytime. You know, You know, because you do run into situations. You're like, I don't know.

I'm no idea what to do right now. And I just need to talk to somebody that knows what kind of situation I'm in. Yeah. You're like when the presidents call each other. There's like five people that know what that's like. So I should call the other four. I'm that guy right now for Danny on the, on the Cyrus Apex. And it's really fun because we just sit, we talk through strategies and I help her game it out.

Okay, if you do this, this might what might happen. Think about the consequences. You know, you go in with a heavy hand, you go in with a soft touch. It's those kinds of approaches. Because when you're leading a team of hundreds of people, ripple effects are enormous, right? Like something, you can say something kind of in an offhand way. And the next thing you know,

there's a team of 20 people working on a design, you never intended them to go and do. Like, whoa, wait a minute. I was just spitballing, right? They're like, oh, we thought you wanted us to do that. That's where the full shoulder bag for the clean room environment came from because you were like, I can't get my elbow in here. And like, we got to figure out how to get his elbow in this clean room.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Calling the presidents, that's a good thing. I was just going to say, like, there's almost like a- Oh, whoa, well, that holds up anymore, to be honest. No, I mean, not, yeah. But there's like a, there's like a PI club, right? It's like the people that have been through the fire of managing a mission like that. It's probably not terribly different numbers-wise, too,

especially for like, you know, beyond-earth missions. Like, how many are still around that have operated those kind of missions? Yeah, doesn't it or so maybe? Yeah. It's a very select crew. Yeah. So what, Pophis is like 2029?

Is that one supposed to make it's close? 2029 is a close approach. It'll come within about 30,000 kilometers of the earth. That's going to be wild. It's going to be naked eye visible, right? That's how close that's going to be. Yeah, Eastern Europe and Africa. I didn't think about it, but I guess we got to go.

We got to have a trip back his plan for 2029. Yeah. I can hear about this old. thing my whole life, you know? So like we got to get... It's probably part of it isn't Romania. I'm thinking Africa. I think I've always wanted to get into Eastern Africa. I've never really been there. So... Yeah, that might be actually kind of fun.

There's good eclipse, too, that the 20207 eclipse is like seven minutes long and parts of Africa. Yeah, and like, yeah, you're right. That'll be good. Okay. That's a good one. We've got our astro travel like just booked out forever. You've got to make like a travel agency or something. Yeah. I know. We should probably make a thing around that, Jake. Maybe. I mean, what is that? Can you talk a little bit about how the mission?

It feels very capitalistic, right? It's like, well, the spacecraft still works. So let's do something with it. Right. Okay, well, there's this a asteroid. But like, why is this a good choice for the U.A. spacecraft to go onto this Osiris Apex mission? Yeah, it's a very capable vehicle.

And it's designed to get up close and personal with an asteroid. And we started looking just kind of as an intellectual exercise. We weren't going to throw the spacecraft into the earth after the capsule because that would make a mess. And so we had to put it into a parking orbit was the original plan. Just get it in a stable orbit around the sun. And they're like, well, if you're sitting there with a vehicle in orbit around the sun, what can you do with it? And we started, most follow-on missions are flybys because you can almost always find a target that you can get within several thousand kilometers up. And then we looked at all our instruments and we're like, we kind of suck at imaging something from a thousand kilometers away.

It's like, that's not what we've built the spacecraft to do. We're built to look at something like this, right? And so it's like, is there anywhere in the solar system we could go and get into orbit and do the proximity mission? And then we said, well, Apophis is coming by the Earth in April of 2029. If we can get our spacecraft to the Earth in April of 2020, and we can use the Earth's gravity well to do the gravity assist and get us onto our rendezvous trajectory. And we're like, that's just too cool of an opportunity to pass up. It was literally the only object in the entire solar system that this spacecraft could rendezvous with within a decade. And we're like, that's almost like fate, right? It's like, that's unbelievable. The whole community was starting to spin up

to say, what kind of mission can we get to Apophis to support this opportunity? And I popped up, I think it was the Apophis T-minus 9 workshop. They've been having these workshops now every year. And I said, hey, I can get Osiris Rex to Apophis. And everybody was like, what? And there's just this huge groundswell of scientific support. We're like, we absolutely need to figure out how to make that happen. And that's when the advanced mission concept came into play. And Danny stepped up to said, hey, I'll lead the proposal because you have to write a proposal to NASA. Because the last thing I wanted to do was write another space mission proposal at that point in time, right?

So wait, when you presented this idea, did you tell them or did you hold this back that is actually the only place that you could go? Was that like the thing that you were waiting to say? If they said no, you're like, well, honestly, it's the only spot. Yeah, I think we, because we went through the whole design. Like, because we, you know, and NASA wanted, they had asked us to do a Lucy of the inner solar system. They're like, can you do just a bunch of flybys and gets back to this diversity that we were talking about, trying to understand all the different kinds of asteroids. So we spent a lot of time saying, okay, how many asteroids could we fly by? And I think they gave us like a six year window or something like that.

And it was like, we could do a couple, but the data isn't worth it. And I said that. I'm like, it's just not worth the money. So it wasn't the capitalistic idea that you have a spacecraft. And I was like, well, let's just get it to an asteroid because I'm like, eh, it's, the return is not going to be worth the millions of dollars. I'd rather do something else in asteroid science with that money. But then when we got into the orbital scenario, I was like, now we have a real value

proposition because we've got great instruments. They're functioning very well. And it's an important problem because Apophis is going to change as it goes through the Earth's gravity field. It's going to feel. idle forces, its rotation state will get torched. We really want to understand that because if you're trying to predict what these things are going to be doing in the future, you need to know how they get modified when they pass

deep inside these gravity wells. Yeah. Doesn't Apophis have like that a keyhole thing? Is that what we're talking about? There's like a, if Apophis hits a very specific point, then it'll like bounce around and come back in a few years to hit us. That's right. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's true for all these near earth asteroids, right? They have close approaches and there's these keyholes. and that's how you get a probability, right? Because everybody's frustrated with, why can't you tell me if this isn't going to hit the Earth or not? Right? And I was like, well, it has to do a very specific thing at a very specific time to get on an impact trajectory. And we don't know it's orbit that well. We know it really well, but not well enough to say, is it going to hit this one keyhole spot or not? And we can say it's going to hit a target this big and here's the probability and there's this many keyholes in that.

And that's where the probability of an impact comes from. So, yeah, absolutely. Apophis could come back and hit the. the Earth in the future, especially if somebody messed with it before it does the close approach to the Earth. If you did something to change it like a dark kind of mission, it's really sensitive prior to the 2029 encounter. It gets less sensitive afterwards. I feel like in my memory somewhere is maybe we can extend the sample collection arm again

and do something to the asteroid. Is that in the card still? only after it passed spires obviously probably not I think we turned off all the heaters on the tag sam motors just to save power and so there's still two bottles

of nitrogen gas on we only used one of the three that we brought with us so that you could fire the gas bottle I don't know if you could move the arm I think that motors are probably going to freeze how dry is the nitrogen it's curate dry nitrogen

pretty dry that's good that's good totally. And we have so good archived if you, if you're really interested, you request it from NASA into your own analysis. That's bizarre. I like that. That's pretty bad.

The nitrogen itself. I guess because it's part of the, it's part of the, uh, the sample in a way, right? So you have to kind of be able to characterize it so you can back that data out of the, the actual analysis. Yeah, we have a huge collection at Johnson Space Center of spacecraft components. There's, uh, samples of the gloves at the text wore when they were assembling the spacecraft, any solvents, any clean. any cleaners, any epochsies,

everything that was definitely used to build Tag Sam or the sample return capsule. There's a representative material at JSC, and then anything that had line of sight to Tag Sam or SRC, we also archive. So it's the spacecraft materials collection, and it's part of the Osiris Rec sample set. And for exactly that reason, you find something really exciting,

like a bacterium or whatever. I'm like, wow, you know, we have witness plates that were used to monitor the whole assembly and test, process that Tag Sam saw as well. So there's a, that was part of the pristine nature of the sample. Not only do you make it clean, but you document anything that might have kind of come in contact with it. So you can always back it out and verify whether it's a contaminant or not. And that turned out to be really important early on because one of the salts that we found was the phosphate. And that was stunning and really exciting. And I immediately called Lockheed Martin when we found it

because it was very early. And like the first week, we started finding these bright white flakes in the sample and they were magnesium sodium phosphates. And I called them. I said, did you use this? I don't remember anything like that. And they went through their whole list.

And they're like, no, it doesn't match anything. And they came back to me and they said, Dante, isn't that exactly the kind of thing you're looking for in the sample? And I was like, yeah, you're right. They're like, you did it, dummy. Come on. Yeah, right. The instinct was it was such an unexpected phase that I didn't believe that.

It came from the asteroid. I either thought it was a contaminant. But I had that record. I had the archive and we could go back and say, no, nothing like this was used. You know, because you have frangibolt, which are explosive bolts. And like, maybe it's something that comes out of the bolt when you fire the explosive. And it's a byproduct. We have all that documented.

We fired bolts into filters. We have the products that are made from that event. So it's this enormous record of everything that could have come in contact with the sample. Wow. This is awesome. Awesome. This hour actually flew by. Don't that you are amazing.

This is a really fun conversation. These people in the chat, I love in this too. Oh, good. Yeah. Good luck with the driver's test later to your son. All right. You can tell him, listen, I know you screwed up this parallel parking. One time I flew a spaceship all the way to an asteroid and collected a bunch of rocks and flew it back to Earth.

So let me know how your parallel parking is coming. Oh, he knows. It's been his whole life. Yeah. There you go. It's actually true. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, man.

All right, gentlemen, thank you so much. This was a blast. And let's do it again sometime. Yeah, we definitely should. Anthony, do you know what we're doing next week? I don't think we know, do we? I think we're... I think we left a hole of, let's maybe catch up on news because there's been...

I went in toward a valve production facility yesterday, Jake, to learn about valves. I know what a pop it is. I stood pretty close, shockingly close to a Falcon 9 first stage attitude Control Thruster when it fired. It was amazing. So probably talk about that, some launches. So I think it's one of those catch-up shows. Sounds like fun. Awesome. That's all we got. Thanks, y'all.

We'll see you next week. Thanks, Dante. Take care. 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1,000, End of death.