StarTalk Radio - OSIRIS-REx & Asteroid Mining with Natalie Starkey

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Will an asteroid hit Earth in 2182? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice learn about asteroid mining, OSIRIS-REx sample-return, and the origins of life with cosmochemist Natalie Starkey. For more information about the new book: https://startalkmedia.com/booksNOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free.Thanks to our Patrons Konrad Jeleński, Sunny Rajpal, Kwesi collisson, Ellen Taylor, Ted Gould, and Tim Henderson for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: NASA Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Coming up next on StarTalk, our go-to cosmochemist, Natalie Starkey from the UK returns. And we talk about NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission from the Earth-crossing asteroid Bennu. What will we learn? How did we accomplish this feat? What do we hope to find? And will asteroid Bennu ultimately hit Earth in the year 2182? All that and more on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe

where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here. You're a personal astrophysicist. We're doing cosmic queries. Cosmic queries today. And you know I can't do that without Chuck Nice.

Chuck, how you doing, man? Hey, Neil. What's happening, buddy? Yeah, yeah. Guess who we have as a guest today? I'll play along even though I can see her on the screen right now. Who

could that be? Who could that be? She's our resident Cosmo chemist. Yes. How many people get to say that? Nobody gets. We get to say that. Oh, yeah. Not even the people who work at Cosmo get to say that they're a Cosmo chemist. Natalie Starkey, thanks for coming back to StarTalk. No problem. I love to be here.

I want to chat Cosmo chemistry. Oh my gosh, that's your professional expertise. And people don't think that the universe involves other fields, right? You start out as a geologist. And, of course, there's geology on rocky planets. And then you want to know what the chemistry is. We got to tap people who've got these kind of expertise. And you're just that kind of person that plugs one field into another or cross-pollinates.

I never realized myself, you know, when I started out, I just liked rocks, I liked volcanoes. And then, you know, slowly you start to learn more and then you realize, of course, all the planets are made of rock. And so you get to start doing geology in space and looking at chemistry in space. So yeah, it just, and then you get cooler names like cosmochemistry.

Now what happens when you encounter a gas giant? Are you like foiled again? Ugh. Chuck, didn't you hear that bias? Well, planets are made of rock. No, that's what made me say it. Planets are rocky. I'm like, hmm, really?

Really, Natalie? That's just a bias. We give her a hall pass on the bias. Okay. We can give Natalie a hall pass on the bias there. That's fine. If all planets are rocky to a cosmochemist, then I'm okay with that.

So, Natalie, of late, you were with the Royal Society of Chemistry? Yeah, that's correct. Is that correct? It's based in London and also in Cambridge, just outside London.

Okay. And you're a writer and science communicator with them. You've written two of my favorite books that are out there, Fire and Ice,

The Volcanoes of the Solar System. We did a whole show my favorite books that are out there. Fire and Ice. The Volcanoes of the Solar System. We did a whole show on that. Yes, we did. Where we talked about ice volcanoes. Oh my God. That was fun. And a book a few years before that, back in 2018, Catching Stardust. Comets,

asteroids, and the birth of the solar system. And that's why we have you on now, because the space mission OSIRIS-REx is bringing back samples from an asteroid. Yeah. Was it a comet? So we want to, first, people have asked questions about this,

but I'm not going to go until I'm done with you, okay? Okay. I'm not done with you on this. So, OSIRIS-REx, that's an acronym. So, do you remember what it stands for? Oh, it's like, yes. It's like maybe optical spectral regolith explorer or something like that. There's a really long name.

I was worried you were going to test me on that. Okay. No one ever asked that. It's always… Oh, wait, wait. I got it here in my notes. I just found it in my notes. You ready? It's very forced, I might add. Go ahead. Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource

Identification, and Security Regolith Explorer. Oh, that's ridiculous. I knew Regolith was in there. That's ridiculous. Somebody said, I want to name it Osiris. Get us there. That's how that happened. I want to name it Osiris.

It's not the worst I've heard. It's not the worst. Yeah, we do like to make nice space things. Like Juice, I think, is my favorite. But yeah, the juicy moon, it doesn't even work. But, you know, we like nice names in space. Right. So it could be easy.

But yeah, okay. So, this mission went to the asteroid Bennu. Yeah. Bennu. And that's an Earth-crossing asteroid, if memory serves. Correct? Yeah. Oh, you say that so calmly.

I think I'm trying. There's loads of them. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a possibility that we might bump into one another one day. Just, you know. Well, this is precisely why we're looking at them.

Because, you know, there are a lot of what we call near-Earth asteroids. And they're sort of in this Earth environment space within, you know, sort of similar orbits that could be Earth crossing in the future. Bennu just takes about just over a year to go around the sun. And about every, I think it's every five or six years, it comes fairly close to our planet. But for the next, say, 100 years,

it's not really thought to be a problem. It's not going to hit us. But there is the potential in maybe, I think they're saying 2182 or something. Yeah, November 2182. There is the possibility that it could collide with us. Now, obviously, don't expect any of us to be around by then unless medical technology improves dramatically

between now and then. But yeah, so it's... Natalie, you can't say it that way. You can't say, I don't, might strike Earth in 2182. We're not going to be around, so not to worry. That's not. You know what?

I got a feeling my grandchildren are going to be, you know, kind of a-holes anyway. So guess what? Guess what? They get what they deserve. Okay. So, Natalie, just help us out here. Because the headlines say this same asteroid that we sample collected is may hit Earth in 2182.

And then I looked at the likelihood of it hitting Earth and the probability is around 1 in 3,000. You know, now listen, that doesn't sound insignificant, 1 in 3,000. Those are better odds than you get in many games. In the lottery. And definitely better odds than the lottery. So... Yeah.

Okay, so what level do they say it may hit versus won't likely hit? Is there a boundary between those two terms? The problem is there's a few little things you have to unpick here. And part of it is that actually, we need to go up and study these objects to understand exactly what the orbit's going to be.

So at this moment in time, we can give it that probability that it will hit Earth. But as we get closer to that date, we refine these figures. So it may get like higher possibility that it's going to hit Earth, but it may go down. And that is often what happens.

One of these things we're trying to understand is called the Yarkovsky effect. And this is the effect that the sun, the heat of the sun has on an object orbiting around the sun. And it's quite, it's not a new phenomenon, but it's something new that we're kind of studying in detail, understanding how that's going to affect the orbit. So basically it heats up maybe one side of the asteroid more than the other and creates more of a spin. And therefore, it can very slightly change the orbit of that object over time. But that phenomenon is quite hard to predict. So we have to study the object more to understand how it's going to change. So what is the difference? I'm sorry, I'm just curious here. If the heating is the same as when they refer to solar winds, or would that be a different phenomenon?

And does that have any effect on it, the radiation of the sun itself, not just the heat? Yeah, there's different effects. So yeah, there's another well-known effect, and it starts with another Y. So you definitely have different effects that happen to the objects in space as they go around the sun.

There's other things, for example, as, for example, a comet. Isn't there a Yarkovsky effect? Yarkovsky? Yarkovsky, yeah. Is that the one you just talked about or is that the one you were talking about? Yeah, that's the one I've just spoken about.

But there's other things, like if you take an object with a lot of water in, so there's a lot of ice and water in comets and asteroids sometimes. As they go close to the sun and that water evaporates off or sublimates away, that also affects the orbit of that object because obviously it's getting smaller and it's shedding material all the time.

So these are active environments. These rocks are not just sitting in space, just sitting there as a rock. They're changing as every time they orbit the sun. And that's one of the reasons we go to study them in space because if we get up close to them, we can see exactly what they're doing. We can see what they're made of, what shape they are, and what is sitting on their surface that's going to affect all of these things. And then we can kind of refine our thoughts about whether they're going to collide with us in the future. It's kind of like predicting a storm,

like a meteorologist. Like, you know, eight or 12 days out, who knows what the path of the storm is. But then as we get closer, we know, okay, once again, Florida, you're doomed. So what we're saying here then is if you didn't have all these extra effects, we would know the orbit precisely, right? And then it would either hit us or not hit us. It wouldn't be a chance of either. It would just be a binary kind of understanding. Yeah, we'd probably know exactly where it was going to

hit. But, you know, this is a 500 meter wide object. So in terms of things that you can get into... Speak American, Natalie. Oh, don't try me to... I have no idea what that is. Jesus Christ, 500 meters. I'm like, okay, how many football fields is that? I don't know. I don't try me to convince you. I have no idea what that is. Jesus Christ, 500 meters. I'm like, okay, how many football fields is that?

I don't know. Okay, I don't do football fields. I do swimming pools. So let's take an Olympic-sized swimming pool. You know, it takes me a while to get down an Olympic-sized swimming pool. They're about 50 meters. So it's 10 of these end-to-end. It's a really big object, but in terms of space, that's quite small,

obviously, compared to a planet. So if this were to collide with our planet, and if it were to make it all the way to the surface without breaking up on the way in through atmospheric entry, if it made it as a block to the surface, it would probably create about a six-mile-wide crater or more. And so we're talking about kind of localized damage. It's not going to be like Earth shattering, Earth changing.

You know, the whole globe is not going to change. Extinction level. Right. It's not going to be like earth shattering, earth changing. Extinction level. Right. After it hits, Morgan Freeman won't have to come out and comfort us all. Right? He could do that. You never know. I'd still want him to do that.

But another issue, of course, if it hits the ocean, then you could have tsunamis that would totally terrify coastlines, probably doing more damage than if it just hit land, is my guess. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think it would be really hard. I mean, obviously, if it hits somewhere very remote, that's going to have less of an effect than if it hits New York City, which is usually what they use in the movies, isn't it? It's always New York for some reason.

Right, right, right. Okay, so now, Natalie, before we continue this podcast, I want you to promise me that NASA going to Bennu to bring back samples didn't affect its orbit such that it's now going to hit Earth. Wow. Oh, man. That would be bad.

Because how is it that we go to an asteroid, and then all of a sudden we have headlines that say asteroid might hit Earth. So now you're going to promise me NASA had nothing to do with that. You're right. Let's not make that link. Let's not expose them. No, but you know what?

It's funny to say that because that is actually a way that we could think about redirecting these objects. And there was a mission called DART, which is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. That acronym works. I like that one. Yes, that totally works. And they did this just a couple of years ago.

They basically put a kinetic impact into the side of a very small asteroid called Didymus, and they changed its orbit very slightly. So we've proven, or NASA have proven, and ANISA are working on this project, that you can move an asteroid if you want to. If you've got enough time, you can change its orbit. So actually, you can do that. Just to clarify, we changed its orbit around its host asteroid. Yeah.

Because it was a binary asteroid. That's the double asteroid. Yeah, it was like a baby asteroid next to a big asteroid. It's hard because that orbit is very well determined, right? You can time that. It's just an orbit around an asteroid moonlet orbiting an asteroid. So that made for a very reliable scenario to test what effect you had. Exactly.

And we weren't endangering anybody if it went kind of a little bit wrong scenario to test what effect you had. Yeah. Exactly. And we weren't endangering anybody if it went kind of a little bit wrong because you don't want things to go a little bit wrong and then redirect something into an Earth-crossing orbit. But we've tested that technology and that is what we could use in the future. But one of the things you've got to also remember is that all of these objects

are completely different to each other. So Bennu, for example, is what's known as a rubble pile asteroid. So it's not like a big lump of just solid rock. It's actually made up of lots of little and bigger pieces, maybe boulders up to 10 meters in size, again, a fifth of a football field, and smaller pieces that are all kind of held together,

but it's not like a solid, solid piece of rock. So if you were to push a kinetic impactor into the side to try and nudge it out of the way onto a different orbit, it might be that it broke up instead of, you know, just moved slightly, which might be worse. You then have more pieces to deal with. So these experiments are very important to establish the structural integrity of the object.

Now, if it's so loosely held together, I mean, that would affect the way that it breaks up when it hits the Earth's atmosphere as well, too. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, there's so many sort of, I don't want to call them unknowns because they're knowns, but we don't know exactly how it would react. And if, you know, parts within the internal parts of it are held together better, would that maintain itself or, you know, if bits are flying off as it comes in? It's very hard to know.

And literally every asteroid is different. So, you know, we have a lot of unknowns that we're just like, okay, we just have to wait and see. Natalie, I'm old enough to remember when this was first discovered, where people, the first measurements of the density of some asteroids, and these are rocky asteroids and they measure the density, and the density was less than the density of rocks. Yeah. So how can you have a rocky, a rock asteroid where its density is less than that of rock?

And people said, wait a minute, maybe it's a collection of rocks. And there's like... Pockets. And there's pockets of whatever that's not rock. Exactly, right. So the overall density is less. And then we just talk on rubble piles, I think. Yeah.

And you've got other components in there too. You've got different types of ices, not just water ice. You've got other elements of ice and you've got, yeah, you've got pore space in there. So they're incredibly complicated objects and there's a whole, you know,

you've got extreme end members, all ice and all rock and then everything in between. So, yeah, this is why we need to study them in space to get up close. You can't get this information really with a telescope. You've got to be in orbit around these objects with, you know, advanced cameras to have a look at the surface in detail. Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallward, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio

with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson. So this sample is arriving now, okay? Yeah. So it'll be a while before we get to analyze it. We, those who, of course, it's their mission. What do you expect to find?

You're a geochemist, so why don't you just be ordinary geochemical things that you'd expect? Yeah, I guess the thing is, we're not going to expect to find anything, I'm going to say alien. There's nothing alien in it. We know kind of what we expect to find, but there will be interesting things

that we will be able to confirm along the way. So they expected to collect, they wanted to collect about 60 grams of rock. I think that's two ounces, maybe. Yeah, two ounces. I'm trying to very quick. That's two ounces. Thank you.

But they actually think they've collected quite a bit more. Now, until they open that canister, which lands in the Utah desert, and they're going to collect it and take it back to the Johnson Space Center, until they open that canister, they don't know exactly how much they got. They think they

might have up to a kilogram of rock in there, which is absolutely phenomenal. That's so much rock. And actually, the kind of work that I used to do was on these kind of rocks. And I was always working on literally tiny, tiny pieces of dust. And the amount of detail we can get out of that piece of dust of a comet or an asteroid is phenomenal. So the fact they've got a kilogram potentially is going to be absolutely amazing for the sample analysis community. Wait, wait, wait. So how is it that they were after two ounces

and might have gotten a kilogram? 2.2 pounds. How do you accidentally get 20 pounds? Set your standards low, right? And then you always achieve. It's better to overachieve. I think the problem was they didn't know necessarily what the surface was going to look like till they got there.

And this is always the same with these missions. It was the same with the Rosetta mission that went to comet Churyov-Gerasimenko, that 67P. They didn't know what to expect until they got there. And then they've got to land on this thing. Well, Osiris-Rex didn't land exactly. It did what we call a touch and go. So it kind of dropped down to the surface.

It has this instrument called the TAGSAM, which was collecting the rock, and it blew nitrogen onto the surface, and that kind of blew up rock into the capsule. And so they just didn't know how much they were going to get, because that depended if they were landing on a piece of solid rock or dusty material or what it might be. Obviously, when they mapped the object first, so they did all this amazing, you know, the whole object was mapped and the camera's got an image of every single part of it. When they saw a big 10 meter boulder, they were like, well, we're not going to land there because we're not going to be able to pick up a 10 meter boulder. We need to land

somewhere where it looks a bit finer grained and we can pick up material. So that had to be very carefully mapped out before they did that sample analysis. But yeah, hopefully they've got quite a bit in there. So Natalie, you were previously involved in sample return missions, but just not this one. Which ones were you involved in? Yeah, so I've been really lucky to work on initially the Stardust mission, which was the first sample return mission from a comet or asteroid. And it went to an asteroid. Oh, sorry, it went to a comet. What am I talking about?

And this wasn't landing on the comet. What they did was flew through the tail of the comet. So this comet was just going around the sun, materials flying off the back the whole time. And they had what they call a tennis racket-style collector that kind of popped up off the spacecraft. And the particle just flew into that, and they collected them at high speed as high-speed impacts.

And they brought that capsule back. But didn't that use aerogel? It did, yeah. So I love that stuff. We have a lot of aerogel in the lab. I have a little sample of it here. Wait, I got it right here on my desk. It's amazing stuff.

I keep aerogel on my desk. It is so light. It's amazing. The really cool thing about it is that it decelerates the particles. So they were coming in at the speed of a speeding bullet, I think six kilometers per second or something. So you need to be able to decelerate those particles without destroying them. Because obviously, if you decelerate something very quickly, it's going to heat up. And therefore, you've got all this really exciting carbon material

in these comet particles, and bits and bobs of whatever's in there. You don't want to destroy that by heating it all up and volatilizing everything. So that aerogel was amazing at kind of slowing things down and collecting and keeping those particles. It's quite then hard to get the particles out of the aerogel. So that was part of the sample analysis. It took a long time to process the collector. But yeah, so I got to work on those samples. You could have used cotton candy, just letting you guys know. Yeah. It might have worked, you never know, just to be it sticky. And then all you would have had to do was wet just letting you guys know. Yeah. It might have worked. You never know. Just a bit sticky.

And then all you would have had to do was wet it, and you would have had everything. Everything would have been right there. And so before we go to questions, let me just give a shout out to my people here who will launch a mission from Earth, a moving platform, do a touch and go on an asteroid, itself a moving

platform, return to Earth, and have it land in the Utah desert. Okay? And know this. And you have people walking among us saying, I don't trust science. Excuse me?

Do you see what we're accomplishing here? And it's not finished. That mission's continuing now, actually. It's going to go... So it's dropped off the sample capsule

so it comes back to Earth and now the spacecraft continues on to another asteroid. So it's going to cost a bit more money, but because it's still working and all the instruments are working, it's going to cost a bit more money, but because it's still working and all the instruments are working,

it's going to go to Apophis, I think it's called. Apophis. Apophis. Yeah. That's another Earth-crossing. Another asteroid. Yeah.

And so we're going to study that and get some more. We're not going to get any samples because that's done now, but we can study it with all the other scientific instrumentation and see what it looks like. Wow.

Okay. So yeah, that's really exciting. All right. Do you expect to find organics at all? Yeah, definitely. So Bennu is a C-type asteroid, so it's carbonaceous. It's got lots of carbon. It's actually a B-type. So within that, it's got even more carbon within it. So it's thought to be what we call a very primitive asteroid, which means that we think it's left over from the very birth of the solar system.

It's got the very first materials that were formed around the sun. And these are the kind of objects where we found amino acids, right? Precisely. Yeah, yeah. So we fully expect to find amino acids in there. They should be there. They've been found in all the other sample return missions we've done from comets and asteroids so far.

The building blocks of protein. Yeah, and I mean, the Hayabusa 2 mission, which did a similar thing and came back just a couple of years ago. The analysis have been ongoing for that. They've even found one of the nuclear bases of RNA. So we've got so much exciting information there. I think it's uracil.

Is that how it's pronounced? I'm not a biologist. Is it a battery? I'm sorry. No, it it's uracil. Is that how it's pronounced? I'm not a biologist. Is it a battery? I'm sorry. No, just uracil. But it's in there. So you've got, yeah, you've got all the building blocks

for life within these objects. And that's part of the reason we want to look at them. What we really want is something to crawl out of it when we open it up. That would be very bad. You know, you could.

It would be just, it's trapped in the capsule. So we never know. Okay, Natalie, I'm older than you. I remember good. Yeah, it would be good. It would be just, it's trapped in the capsule, so we never know. Okay, Natalie, I'm older than you. I remember in real time, I read the book. Rare for me to read a book

before I see the movie, but I did that for The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton before he was famous with Jurassic Park and whatever his doctor show was on TV. The Andromeda Strain

was a sample return from space. And it was a bug that got out of the capsule and it didn't bode well for the town where the capsule landed. So... Well, watch out for Texas then, because that's where the sample's going. Oh, Texas, not Utah?

It's landing in Utah and then it's going to go to Johnson Space Center. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay. Yeah. Chuck, give me some questions for this geochemist here, cosmochemist. All right, let's jump to it. Well, we might as well start with Paul Sinema.

And thank you, Paul, for the phonetic spelling of your name. It says, hey, Natalie, Neil, Chuck, Paul here from the Netherlands. Each time the Apollo astronauts returned from the moon, they had to go into isolation because of the fear of bringing back something bad for the moon. Look at that, Neil. When we bring pieces of asteroid back to Earth, do we not run the same risk? And is there any protocol? Yes. There's protocols both ways, because when we send, you know, Earth materials into space, we want to make sure they're not contaminated with anything from Earth that's going to then put it into,

you know, onto Mars, onto the moon, or onto an object in space. Because we want to check that we're not, you know, taking some bugs there and then saying, oh, no, we found these bugs

on this object. Look how cool this is. So that's one thing. So that's called planetary... So in other words, you don't want anybody sneezing on the spacecraft before it goes to, you know...

Exactly. We found rhinoviruses on Mars. Oh, my gosh.inovirus. We thought rhinovirus is on Mars. Oh my gosh. No. Okay. And this is one of those problems when you get meteorites landing. So meteorites come from these space objects and land on our planet, but they've come through our atmosphere.

They've sat on the ground for a while. So there's, you know, there's every expectation that they could have been contaminated with Earth things. But when you go to an asteroid and collect stuff directly and put it in a clean capsule and bring it back and then you take it back to a lab to open it you know that anything you find within there in that clean lab environment and i've worked in these labs in the johnson space center they are incredibly clean they're very hard to get into because you've got to go through this whole procedure and you've

got to wear masks and a full hood and suit and everything. So you want to make sure that you're protecting the sample from you so that you're, you know, and it's gotten even more extreme when people have been building space missions. They, you know, I remember one guy had a beard. He had to shave his beard off because they just said, we can't deal with your beard. It's too dirty. We have to get rid of your beard. Otherwise you can't go in the clean lab. So this is, you know, it's this level of cleanliness. Yeah, I mean. It's like, however much washing, it's got to be gone. So yeah.

That sounds nasty. I guess there is that. You're a slob, okay? That's what there is to it. You're disgusting and there's food in your beard, okay? So you're going to have to shave that puppy. All right. But yeah, when we bring stuff back, sure. Potentially, you know, we could have things crawling out of that.

It's very unlikely. But we have dedicated labs for the return missions. So there's nothing else in those labs. We're only dealing with those samples. That's what they said about Andromeda stream. Well, you know. And by the way, each level below ground was a higher level of sterilization for you as you went down. And you only worked on it at the lowest level there.

And they even burned off your outer skin layer, which has all these microbes. Oh, my God. You walk through some UV thing, and then they wipe the skin off. So, no, it's a fascinating. Michael Crichton wrote it. The boy has an MD. So, he knew what he was doing. It was a fun, terrifying story,

the Andromeda Strain. That's cool. So, I'm going to watch that. I'm going to watch that while your people open this capsule. Okay. By the way, how does it land? Oh, it's got...

Basically, it's a capsule and it comes down with parachutes. Oh, okay. It's like an escape cat. And then it plonks itself into the desert somewhere. Okay. Hopefully in a predictable location. But yeah, I mean, there are issues sometimes, you know,

the parachutes don't open. That has happened before with a capsule that came back from collecting samples of the sun, believe it or not. And it actually crashed and the capsule got a bit broken. But they did manage to sort of actually collect samples still. That wasn't pieces of rock that were. By the way, Chuck, I remember the pictures of it. That was not so much a capsule.

It looked like a flying saucer. It was like saucer shape, and it was an angle into the ground. It looked just like a crashed flying saucer. Like an alien ship. Right, exactly. I got to tell you, whoever was in charge of parachutes had to get fired. Okay. I mean, serious.

It's like a billion dollars we spent and we skimped on the parachutes? Seriously? All right. Wow. So, all right. So, yeah. So, Natalie, correct me if I'm wrong. NASA, it's the department. I don't know if there's a department,

the Division of Planetary Protection. That's what it's called, right? Yes. It protects both ways, forward contamination and back contamination. Okay. Exactly, yeah. You got it. Okay.

Okay. Chuck, what more you got? This is Andy C. from Vancouver, British Columbia. He says, what are some of the unique challenges of working on asteroids due to their minimal or negligible gravity? I assume it's pretty close to just working in microgravity of space for most of them, or am I wrong?

Yeah. No, completely right. I mean, Bennu's the smallest object or the smallest asteroid to have been investigated in detail. And as I said, it's 500 meters, which doesn't sound very small, but it is really, really small. How much would you

weigh on Bennu? You wouldn't stick to the surface at all. You'd be flying off. So, you know, if you wanted to land an object on Bennu, you would need to, or if you wanted to stand there, you'd need to be tethered down because you would, if you just jumped, you'd fly away, which was an issue with the Rosetta mission. When it did land on the comet and it bounced initially because, you know, it didn't

quite go to plan. There were a few things went wrong. There was something broken on the spacecraft and they knew it was broken. There was nothing they could do at that point. It attempted landing, but they then had these tethers that came out and kind of attached it to the surface, and that was the plan. But in terms of OSIRIS-REx, when you go into orbit around these objects, we call it orbit, but it's not really because there's not enough gravity to be pulling that spacecraft towards it. So it's really powered flight around these objects.

It's not as easy as going to Mars and just orbiting around. So you're orbiting, but it's not an orbit that is caused by the object itself. It's powered flight, and it's a lot more complicated for the mathematicians. They've got to figure out all that whilst not hitting the surface and not getting too far

away. What else are they going to do? They're not in the lab. Just give them a pencil and a pad. Give them a pencil and a napkin. Tell them, go work this out. So, okay, so what you're saying is, on Earth, escape velocity is like seven miles per second, 11 meters per second.

No, no, 11 kilometers per second. So you're saying that on these smaller asteroids, if you just trotted, you would be lifting yourself up with enough speed to possibly escape the asteroid. Yeah. Because that's how low the escape velocity is. It's a whole other dynamic relationship.

It's Armageddon, isn't it? Where Bruce and what's-his face, go up to the asteroid and start mining it and stuff. Is that the movie? Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. But they don't mine it. He's a miner. He's a miner

and they're trying to drill into it. Yeah, he drills in. But they do have these grappling hooks. Yeah, so. They did give some sensitivity to the lower gravity. Yeah, that was where, you know, there was

a lot of inaccuracies in that movie. But there we go. They were on the asteroid. Within the first maybe two minutes, but anyway. But yeah, so it's something you would have to think about. If you wanted to go and mine these objects, you've got to tether yourself on there. But with the OSIRIS-REx, it didn't land.

It did this touch and go. So it wasn't really a problem. And by the way, famously noted in Armageddon, the asteroid that Bruce Willis had to destroy was the size of Texas. So that would certainly have a noticeable gravity.

Okay, yeah, that's quite a large one. It's a line delivered in the film. I know every line in the film. And that's where that happened. By the way, Armageddon violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film I had ever seen until I saw Moonfall.

Oh, my God. Oh, poor Halle Berry. You know? Yeah, the moon is discovered to be hollow. And there's like a moon creature inside made of rock. I have not seen this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just get ready.

Strap yourself in for that one. Yeah, Halle Berry bought a summer house and was like, damn it, I got to do a movie. Oh. All right, so keep going. Chuck. All right, here we go. This next question.

Greetings to the Royal Court of Cosmology. So Osiris-Rex took a bite out of an asteroid, and I wonder what it tastes like. Seriously, though, is it at all cost-effective to mine an asteroid, and how would it be processed? Should it be sliced like deli meat, ground like burgers? What would the wheat be separated from the chaff? Dave in Montague, New Jersey wants to know. Dave, very poetic, Dave.

I just love that. Dave's being very poetic. When we separate the wheat from the chaff, what exactly shall we find on the floor of a cosmological trio? Exactly. Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, that question's got me. Okay. Yes. Okay. Exactly. Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, that question's got me. Okay. Yes.

Okay, so mining asteroids, sure. It would be profitable if we wanted to do it. But there's just loads of economic implications of doing it. So the asteroids contain tons of precious metals. Brilliant. We need tons of precious metals for all the technology we need on Earth, particularly car batteries now need tons of precious metals. Wait, wait we need on Earth, particularly, you know, car batteries now

need tons of pressure metals. Wait, wait, wait. The carbon ones don't, just the metallic asteroids, right? Yes, but they still contain quite a bit of siliceous material, so they will have other bits and bobs. But yeah, you go to the right asteroid.

Siliceous, like silicate. Silicate, oh. I was going to say, are you talking about sexy asteroids now? Oh, that asteroid's very salacious, I'll tell you. Okay. But yeah, you'd go to the right ones, and there's plenty of them up there. And so when you've got a metal-rich asteroid, it's going to be pretty solid.

It's going to be harder to mine than a rubble pile, but there are ways to do it. We really have the technology to do it. The big question is, you've invested all that money, you could then potentially bring all of those metals back to Earth, and you would literally flood the market. So if you would have a lot of money, but then we would basically wouldn't need any more ever again.

Potentially. However, that's not such a bad thing, because mining is extremely deleterious to the ecology and to, you know, the structure of our ecological balances. And so to be able to go someplace and bring it back. Space mining. Space mining. I mean, you're really doing a great deal of good, even though you would have cornered the market and kind of collapsed that sector of the

economy. Other than that, everything's fine. But there's also technologies that we could develop if we had enough supply of certain metals. So some things are constrained at the moment because we just don't have the supply. So we couldn't say, oh, let's go make this amazing thing because we just don't have that. So what you're saying

is we would create industry, even though you're destroying one sector of the economy, you're creating a whole brand new area. Potentially, yeah. So the initial investment is huge. The risks could be huge as well. So what if something goes wrong? What if when one of these companies goes up

and starts mining, something goes wrong, they redirect something by accident, ends up colliding with Earth, you know, or Mars or something else? We don't want that to happen. So there's a lot of regulation that would be required. But, you know, there's companies working on this. There's a lot of investment happening.

And I think it will happen one day. But to your point, Natalie, the asteroids of interest would be the nearest ones, which are the Earth crossers, right? Right. I mean, as a category of asteroid, those are the easiest ones to get to. So the thought that a mistake could direct it towards Earth is very real. But if they're up there messing with asteroids,

I might say, if I'm the president, I'll say, we discovered an asteroid headed our way. Could you go to that one and deflect it out of harm's way? And so they have the power to get to asteroids and mess with them. hey, could you go to that one and deflect it out of home way? And so they have the power to get to asteroids and mess with them. They might be our biggest defense system. Right. They have a dual purpose.

So let me ask you, when you identify these asteroids, are there any that have many metals in them? So instead of just one precious or rare earth element or rare space element, would there be several? Yeah. Is that possible? In fact, yeah. The ones that contain metal contain a lot of different metals. So they'll tend to be, the really metallic ones will be iron and nickel on the most part,

which is the same as sort of the core of our planet, which is what we think is down there. And that's the reason we think we know what's down there because we've looked at these very metallic asteroids and we think that's the center of a big object. And by the way, I want to interject, iron and nickel are the major byproducts of supernova explosions. Okay.

There's a variety of supernova where iron and nickel, it comes right out. And so there's no shortage of iron and nickel in the universe for that reason. And it falls to the middle of things when they're molten and they form. So we get the iron and nickel for free from exploding stars. And the other elements as well, but the abundance of iron and nickel is huge. It's huge. So that is the majority of it.

But there's tons of it, as Neil said. Within that as well, there's all these other, like platinum and all these other palladium, whatever the metals are, all the heavy metals that fall into the center of a planet or the center of an asteroid when it's a molten blob of lava, essentially. And then it segregates as it cools down into heavy stuff in the middle and the lighter elements on the outside. So there's loads of stuff in there. And even if there's only like one weight percent of platinum, it's a huge object. And that's still tons and tons and tons of platinum.

So it's plenty. So nature, it's reshifted. Yeah, I was going to say the hard work is done. Yeah. Chuck, you can get a couple more in. We only have a couple more minutes here. What do you have? All right, here we go. Hi, Dr. Starkey, Dr. Tyson, Mr. Chuck, you can get a couple more in. We only have a couple more minutes here. What do you have? All right, here we go.

Hi, Dr. Starkey, Dr. Tyson, Mr. Nice, Malcolm from Trinidad and Tobago. Who holds the rights to the resources of Bennu and any other celestial bodies? The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the Space Act of 2015 fall short in providing a clear answer to this question. So does anybody get to go up and just, you know, is it the Wild West up there?

You just get up there and this is my, plant a flag? Somewhat. There's literally space lawyers now, which I thought was just the coolest thing ever. I was like, okay, so they're working on these problems. And there's many of them. You know, you've got private companies getting involved in space exploration. You've got private companies taking tourists up into space. You've got, when they get there, who owns what they get?

And exactly who can bring it back to Earth? What happens if something goes wrong? All of this. And how do, you know, space agencies collaborate with private companies? There is so much in space law to be figured out. And a lot of it isn't figured out at the moment. The 1967 treaty basically was saying that you can't use space as a kind of a weapon.

You can't, it's got to be anything, any work that goes on in space has to be peaceful. We've moved past that. We're beyond that now. Space is a busy place. We're launching satellites all the time. You've got lots of different people launching satellites. It's a busy place above our planet now. And we've not kept up. So space law

is always, it's running and it's trying to catch up with what's going on. At the moment, I believe, I believe the law from a couple of years ago was that, I think Obama maybe signed this through, that American citizens can own the bits of space they find. And I think Luxembourg has a similar rule. I'm not sure all the other countries have caught up yet, but it's slowly kind of... So this is like a homesteading kind of rule, right? Yeah.

Where if you get there first and you develop it, then you get to... But if you do something with it, that's... I think in the homesteading, you have to make... It has to be economically viable.

But the idea is that promoted not exploration, it promoted settlements, right? So otherwise, what's your motivation to go there if you didn't have a return on that effort? And the return on that effort is you get the free land. Yeah, that was a... Yeah, it's a

big area at the moment and constantly changing field. I can't say I'm up to date completely with it, but... I'm just looking forward to the space wars because, you know, once we figure out who's got what, you know that means somebody else got to come along and be like, you know, I'm Vladimir Putin. I won't give me some. I'm taking that. here and I'm taking that.

So one of my more interesting elements of space law that I read about was if you meet an alien who's more intelligent than you and you kill it, is it murder? Yes! No, because murder applies to humans. It's not... It's beyond

murder. It's double murder. It's worse than murder. You actually killed something better than you. That's ridiculous. That's like a fly. That's like a fly pulling out a AK-47 and blowing us away. A bunch of flies pulled the trigger

on a gun. It's ridiculous. That's terrible. Okay, Chuck wants to be a lawyer of the future. Okay, Chuck. All right. Keep going. Let's get two more in. We got five minutes left.

Two more. All right. All right, here we go. All right, let's get back to basics on this one. This is Matt from Perth, Australia. Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Starkey, Lord Nice. How do you think asteroids are formed, given you need mass to convert gas to solids?

Like asteroids, how could they form independently and not part of a planet or a star? Can they do that? And let me add to that by saying, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Natalie, if you add up all the asteroids in the asteroid belt, and it's like 5% the mass of the moon. Yeah, it is.

So that they don't actually have a planet's mass worth of content. No, that's funny. So what the hell happened there? Whoa, yeah. They're just kind of the leftover bits from when the solar system formed. So you had a star that exploded, and you've got all this gas field around it in a cloud and

it condenses down and then you start to form material around it. Now, it's a process that actually we don't really understand in a huge amount of detail because we've never seen it happen. We can now look at other star systems where planets are forming around them, but we're looking at these, you know,

light years away. Do you think Jupiter messed with the area so that it couldn't make its own planet? where planets are forming around them. But we're looking at these, you know, light years away. And we can just... So you think Jupiter messed with the area so that it couldn't make its own planet? Because it's between Mars and Jupiter. Jupiter's badass. Yeah, so Jupiter took a lot of the mass. It's very large because it's made of mostly gases.

So it became very large. And the rocky planets became smaller because they've got all the denser material. But you had all this other material left over, which was the comets and asteroids. They actually just didn't get incorporated into a planet. But that was quite good. It's useful for us because they're these sort of time capsules of that very early process, those very early times in our solar system, the first few million years, which sounds like a long time, I understand, but we're talking about

4.5 billion years of history. They preserve those materials from that very early stage of star and planet formation. So that's why we want to analyze them partly, because they can tell us a bit about how the planets formed, how life got started, where life came from, and water. So that's part of the reason we want to look at them. But yeah, they've got a lot to tell us about those really early stages. but yeah, they've got a lot to tell us about those really early stages. And so another dimension of this is, of course, you know, when the KT impact happened 65 million years ago,

we think of that as an impact, but Natalie, do you think of that as just, oh, Earth is just gathering more mass from the bits and pieces? I mean, I also see it as like that's something that completely changed the direction of life on Earth. You know, we probably wouldn't be here had that not happened. Right, right.

Life as we know it today might not have ever developed. It wiped out a lot of stuff, but some stuff survived and it creates a new, you know, route for life to evolve. So it is just part of the process. It's part of the process of being a planet in space. For sure, we're going to be hit by an asteroid in the future. Hopefully, we're going to know it's going to happen and we can do something about it. But chances are we're going to be hit by an asteroid in the future. Hopefully, we're going to know it's going to happen

and we can do something about it. But chances are we're going to miss one. They're arriving all the time as meteorites, but small pieces of rock. And that's our show, people. Thank you. Chances are we're going to miss one.

Sleep well. Go ahead, sleep. Sleep well. I'm sorry. Chances are we're going to miss one. What's killing me is that we're hearing this from an expert. Like, you know what I mean? You know, let me just tell you something.

I'm glad you're Dr. Natalie Starkey, cosmochemist, instead of Dr. Natalie Starkey, heart surgeon. Listen, your heart is crap. You're going to die. Okay? That's it. That's it. It's all over.

No, it's not that you said it. It's just you said it so casually. So casually. I kind of just see Earth as like, we're on this planet for maybe 100 years at best. And, you know, it's been here so long. And all these things have happened to this planet. And we're just this planet in space. There's all these other planets. And, you know,

I do get a bit of an existential crisis because I'm like, we're really not that important here. You know, we think we are, but actually we're not really, are we? It's been here for ages. I don't think that means we shouldn't protect our planet and we shouldn't do things about climate change because there's still generations to come, but we are going to have to deal with these things in the future. And hopefully... I'm not ending on that note. Okay. Give me another question.

More positive note. Chuck, give me the last question. Last question. Okay. And Natalie, you're going to answer this in a positive way. Got it. Okay, go. Chuck.

Okay, here we go. Here we go. Hello, Dr. Starkey. Can you please tell me, are we all going to die? Seriously? Is that the... No, I'm joking. We're all going to die. Okay. Seriously? Is that the proof? No, I'm joking.

We're all good at that. Okay. This is Kevin. He says, hello, Dr. Tyson. Lord, nice. Dr. Starkey. Kevin from Browning, White Deer, Texas here. What can the sample from an asteroid reveal to us about the information of the solar system itself. Can it tell us anything about the

origins of our life here on Earth? Yeah, so that's one of the major things. Yeah, Natalie, just because it has amino acids, why would that have to mean, if that can make amino acids, then so could Earth, right? So they say life might have come from asteroids, but maybe life could just happen anywhere. And it's just a curiosity, but it's not the stork that brought the molecules. Yeah, so we think and we know that asteroids have the building blocks for life, or many of them.

But it's about then having the environment for life to form. So it's not just about having those building blocks. Life is pretty unlikely to form on an asteroid itself because we probably need water. We need some kind of liquid solvent, all these chemicals to move around in and form life. That's what we think is probably quite important. So the combination of water...

But just to be clear, what you're implying there, and I just want to make it more graphic, is an atom or a molecule can't just get up and walk and find another molecule to bind with. Yeah, it needs to move in something. It needs a medium that can carry it so that it has these encounters and possibly explore the chemistry that could result from it. Is that a fair characterization?

Yeah, exactly. So early Earth was very inhospitable to life. It was very hot. It was molten. As it cooled down, it then condensed water on its surface. And we still were being impacted by asteroids from space. Now, these asteroids were containing these amino acids, these nuclear bases that we see, and all this carbon-rich material. So it might be that that is how life got to Earth and then the building blocks for life. And then they had this lovely water-rich environment where stuff could start forming. We got this very basic life form.

So that's one potential that did come. Yeah, we probably need water. And that's why when you look around the solar system, there isn't a huge amount of liquid water sitting around. And we haven't yet found life anywhere else. So that's why we sort of make that inference that we need water, we think, for making water. All right. There you go. All right.

Well, that's a good note to end on. I like that. I feel encouraged somehow. No, no. It's an important thing because I love that you can bring ingredients, but now you need

the right environment. And Earth might have been just that. I love that. Well, Natalie, it's been a delight. We need to call you more often than we do. Oh, thank you. And you have unique sort of parameters of expertise that feed our mission here.

And so thank you. And let me remind people that Natalie was the author of one of our space shows here in New York at the Hayden Planetarium. So we have a long relationship with this brilliant cosmochemist over there in the UK.

I'll come back anytime. Well, there it is, Natalie. We love you from over here across the pond. Thanks for helping us out to understand this mission. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always. Always a pleasure. All right. Neil deGrasse Tyson here

signing off for StarTalk Cosmic Queries. As always, keep looking up.