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Good morning. I’m Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History
and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the Museum and to this fantastic Rose Center
for Earth and Space. We are delighted to host the Association of Space Explorers for this
important event on such a hot topic: Asteroids and the potential threat of near-Earth objects.
And for anyone out there who is tweeting, our hashtag is #asteroiddefense. This event
is especially timely, because we here at the Museum are about to open a new Hayden Planetarium
space show on another hot topic in astrophysics, titled Dark Universe. The new space show explores
dark matter and dark energy, the mysterious stuff and force that make up so much of the
cosmos.
Dark Universe opens to the public on November 2nd, so I hope that many of you will come
back to see it. And for any media in the room who would like information about the special
media screenings or opportunities to see Dark Universe, please seek out someone on our communications
staff who is in the room.
And now, it is my great pleasure to introduce the moderator of today’s event, Frederick
P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium and one of truly the most outstanding interpreters
of science for the public, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
You know, people always say that someone needs no introduction—Neil really doesn’t need
an introduction, but nonetheless, he deserves one. He is the author of 10 books, most recently
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier. He was the host of PBS’ Nova Science Now
for five seasons. And his new TV series, a 2014 version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos will
premiere next spring on Fox. He is also the narrator of our soon-to-open space show on
Dark Universe.
It is my great pleasure now to introduce Neil Tyson.
Thank you. Welcome, members of the press. And other passerby. We’re meeting this week
primarily because this press conference relates to sessions that are going on now at the United
Nations across town. And one of those sessions relates to the threat of asteroids on the
security of our species on this planet. And we have a panel of distinguished—I’m going
to call them “guests.” They’ve all been in space. A panel of distinguished astronauts,
I’m going to bring them all up right now and I’ll introduce them individually when
they give their presentation. Please come on up, all five of them. Thank you.
So, if I just give a brief statement of the problem. We live in a solar system on a planet
called Earth. And it was not known until 1800 that there were other kinds of objects in
the solar system that would not deserve the name of “planet.” They left no mark, no
visible extent of a disk on a photographic plate. So they looked like points of light
as a star would appear on a photograph, as a point of light. But we knew they were not
stars because they were orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
And so the name was invented for them and they’re called aster-oids, star-like. And
that’s where asteroid got its name. We discovered that there weren’t just a few of them, as
were initially found, but there’s swarms of them, most of them orbiting between Mars
and Jupiter and some of them, a subset of them, have orbits that come in a little too
close and cross the orbit of Earth around the sun. And so this conference, this press
conference, which is entirely derived from the efforts of these gentlemen and others
who are concerned about the safety hazards of asteroids striking Earth and rendering
our civilization extinct or disabling our civilization so that we have to jump-start
all that is fundamental about it.
And let’s get straight into this. I’m going to first introduce Tom Jones, he’s
a shuttle-era astronaut. And Tom, why don’t you start off with your presentation?
Thank you, Neil, and thank you to the American Museum of Natural History for welcoming the
Association of Space Explorers here. The Association is the society, the professional society of
astronauts and cosmonauts from around the globe. And we have international representation
here in our Committee on Near-Earth Objects, which is concerned with preventing a future
asteroid strike. So we are very glad to be working with Neil and his Planetarium and
the Museum today to talk about this important issue.
Our organization, the Association of Space Explorers, has an educational mission, it
has a technology mission to further space flight technology and exploration of the solar
system and the Universe. But we also have an environmental mission, environmental protection
in our unique perspective of seeing the Earth from space. We’ve all been up in orbit and
we’ve seen impact craters around the globe as we’ve circled our planet and we want
to expand this environmental mission to preventing a future asteroid strike and the effects on
our human civilization. So that’s why we’re here and that’s why we’ve been working
together for the last, oh, six or seven years, on this asteroid prevention mission.
Now, as Neil mentioned, the General Assembly’s meeting this week at the U.N. Its Fourth Committee
has adopted a report from the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and on the
slide here you see these important steps that were adopted this week by the United Nations.
Now, our organization has been helping these U.N. discussions about preventing an asteroid
strike over the last half-dozen years. And we made some suggestions back in 2008 and
submitted them to the U.N. in ’09. It’s a report called “Asteroid Threats” and
you have a copy here that’s available in the back. The Asteroid Threats report suggested
to the U.N. that it take several concrete measures to further decision-making on preventing
an asteroid strike. And they were very successful over these last few years at bringing these
to actual, concrete action. So, the U.N. has adopted these measures this week and the final
approval will come before the end of the month.
International Asteroid Warning Group has been set up so that the nations around the world
will share asteroid detection information, their orbits and their impact predictions.
And this outfit will also warn the international community of potential impacts. This consists
of telescopes and scientists and space agencies around the world, already working together.
The new step here is the formation of this network and a subsidiary Impact Advisory Group.
And this impact advisory planning group will help disaster response organizations around
the world respond in case there’s a threat from a real asteroid heading our way.
You might also look at the Space Missions Planning and Advisory Group that was set up.
That’s in the bottom left corner of this diagram that shows how the U.N. has put these
steps into action. This is a group that’s going to prepare mission options and look
at mission technologies—how you would actually deflect an asteroid in the future. And that
planning that that group does will then be available for the world’s space agencies
to work together to actually deflect a rogue object.
And, finally, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is going
to monitor these threats from asteroids, take note of them, advise the global community
and help plan a deflection campaign, if that’s necessary.
And it’s appropriate, I think, when talking about the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of
Outer Space to introduce one of our guests here today. We have the chairman of the Committee
on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, Mr. Yasushi Horikawa. Would you stand up, sir? Thank you.
Another gentleman who’s helped with bringing these steps to the U.N. and having them become
real is Mr. Michael Simpson. And Mike is the executive director of the Secure World Foundation.
And he has aided us in these discussions at the U.N.
We also have a couple of other astronauts—there’s Dr. Don Petit in the back, a Space Station
flyer. And Dr. Tammy Jernigan here, who was one of my crewmates on the Space Shuttle.
So they’re involved in our asteroid and Association of Space Explorer activities,
too.
And working together, the U.N. has actually brought these steps on asteroid prevention.
And so you’ve seen this network of telescopes in action, making impact predictions already.
That’s going to be succeeded by this Impact Disaster Advisory Group, helping us deal with
an actual impact event, like we saw in Chelyabinsk last winter. And, finally ,we’re going to
do the planning now in the future with these U.N. steps of how to actually deflect a rogue
object heading towards Earth.
Now, our group has made some suggestions for future action and I hope we’ll get to those
in the discussion as we wrap up at the end of the talk. Let’s move on, Neil.
Excellent, thanks, Tom. Next up is Apollo-era astronaut Rusty Schweikart. He flew Apollo
9 in 1969. And he’s one of the founders of the organization that is represented in
front of you today, the Association of Space Explorers. That’s not just any organization
you can join at will. You have to have flown in space. So, Rusty, what do you have to tell
us?
Thanks, Neil. One of the questions which all of us get as soon as we talk to the public
about this issue is why in the world did you take this to the United Nations? The United
States, Russia, all kinds of people have space programs, so why did you take it to the United
Nations? And what I want to do is take just a moment to answer that question. (The right
hand?)
So, if you will imagine yourself to be an asteroid and, from where you’re sitting,
you’re headed toward the Earth and you are expected, let’s say, with a probability
of one chance in 10 of hitting the Earth. You don’t hit it anywhere, but typically
what you’re going to have is a line, like that red line, that crosses the Earth and
in fact extends out left and right of the Earth. Picture the Earth moving from left
to right and you’re headed toward it. You’re going to pass the Earth somewhere on that
red line. Obviously, you may hit it or you may go out in front of the Earth to the right
or behind it to the left.
And let’s imagine that you’re going to hit right in the middle, just in order to
give you an example. If you’re going to hit right in the middle of the North Atlantic
there, and we now want to deflect this asteroid, the only way to deflect that asteroid—and
I don’t want to get technical—but I make it arrive a little bit early by changing its
orbit 10 or 15 years ahead of time and that asteroid will then pass in front of the Earth
or over in space to the right of the Earth and miss the Earth. Or, I make it arrive late,
in which case it passes to the left of the Earth and misses the Earth.
But you can imagine that that impact, effectively what you’re doing is dragging that impact
off the Earth, one way or the other. And, of course, if you’re going to make it arrive,
miss the Earth to the right, you can see that if you drag that impact, it’s going to go
across England and Europe and Russia, who are not initially at risk if it hit in the
middle of the Atlantic. If you’re going to make it arrive late, it’s going to go
across parts of Canada and the United States.
So the question is, which way do you move it? And, if something goes wrong in the middle
of the deflection, you have now caused havoc in some other nation that was not at risk.
And, therefore, this decision of what to do, how to do it, what systems to use, all of
the rest of it, have to be coordinated internationally and that’s why this is an international
issue, not just something for NASA in the United States or [JAXA] in Japan. This has
to be coordinated—that’s why we took this to the United Nations.
So, in 2005, our Association of Space Explorers decided, having finally figured this out after
about 3 or 4 years that this was the physical challenge, we took this to the United Nations.
We figured out it had to be international and eventually realized the Association of
Space Explorers, a group of astronauts and cosmonauts, probably had the required credibility
to elevate this issue to world leaders. And that’s why we took this to the United Nations.
In 2006, we formed a distinguished international panel that helped us put together this report
that Tom held up a few moments ago. This is available online. And I should point out that
Michael and, by the way, Franz von der Dunk—Franz is an international space lawyer, among other
attributes—a number of international distinguished people helped us put together this report,
which we delivered to the United Nations in 2008 and 2009. That is reaching the General
Assembly now, this coming week and month. And it will be adopted and become basically
the skeleton of a decision-making process that will help us decide what to do if a threat
arises. I say a “skeleton” because it has no meat or muscle on it yet. And that’s
the challenge for the next few years.
Now, before I finish, I want to do one other thing here. I want to—there it goes. I want
to remind all of us that this was the scene at Chelyabinsk on the 15th and 16th of February
of this year. We’re talking about real people, we’re talking about death, we’re talking
about injuries. This is real stuff. And none of us want to see our grandchildren killed,
let alone have glass flying in their faces. And that’s why we’re doing this work and
why we have brought it to the United Nations and we’re very thankful that this is now
being adopted by the world, formally, as a challenge.
Thank you.
Thanks, Rusty. When you say “ no meat on the bones,” were you referring to no money
yet? Is money synonymous with meat?
Money—actually, Neil, that’s an excellent question. Money is hardly an issue in this.
This is a very, very inexpensive thing to do.
So it’s organizational, then?
It’s organizational. It’s setting the actual criteria, thresholds, etc.
This panel wouldn’t be complete, especially in the wake of that February 15th explosion
over Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains of Russia without having a Russian cosmonaut
join this panel. And we’re fortunate enough to have Dorin Prunariu, who represents Russia...
Oh, Romania.
Oh, Romania, excuse me.
I flew with Russians.
You flew with the Russians, okay. But certainly, we’re reminded that not only Americans have
been in space. We occasionally need to be reminded of that here in America. So, thanks
for joining us on this panel.
Thank you, Neil. So, as long as you confused me with a Russian, I can tell you that, in
the Association of Space Explorers, there are more than 370 cosmonauts, astronauts,
taikonauts, spationauts—in Japanese, okay? From 36 nations. I have honor now to be president
of the Association for one more year, but most of the guys know me as the U.N. guy within
the Association, because I connected first in 1992 the Association with the U.N. In 1993,
exactly 20 years ago, we became observer members of the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses
of Outer Space. And then, therefore, we started to work actively with the U.N. And, as you
heard, Rusty Schweikart presented our report in 2009 and this report became a working document
of the U.N.
In 2004-2006, I had the honor to be the chairman of the Scientific [and Technical] Subcommittee
of the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. And 2010-2012, I was the president
of the full committee and I was followed then by Mr. Yasushi Horikawa, who is here and representing
officially the U.N.
Most important thing when you think about asteroids, about institutions, is how to organize
the work. You may think that within the U.N. we start to speak about asteroids only in
2007, ’08, ’09, but the first input was done by the 1999 Unispace Conference, United
Nations International Conference on Space, where the main direction of the approach of
the problem of the near-Earth objects was established.
Therefore, in 2001, we established the framework of the U.N., the so-named Action Team on Near-Earth
Objects, or Action Team 14. It’s one of the action teams dealing with many problems
that impact globally humanity. And one of them is the near-Earth objects.
In 2007, after several years of work of this action team, was established in the framework
of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee a working group. The working group addressed
all nations involved in the work of the committee. And, in this working group, we have the input
and the working group only this year, after several years of hard work, international
workshops, discussions, debates, issued a report. The Report of the Working Group on
Near-Earth Objects was officially presented in February this year to the Scientific and
Technical Subcommittee of the U.N. and in June to the full committee and now introduced
this report to the General Assembly.
Two days ago, the report was endorsed by the working group of the General Assembly and
for sure it’s no problem now, we consider it’s approved by the General Assembly and
it becomes mandatory for all nations to take measures in accordance with our recommendations.
So, I’ll pass the mic.
Thank you for that. Reminding us of just what the administrative and cultural challenges
are to make this work.
Next up is Ed Lu. He’s actually a fellow astrophysicist. He’s a Shuttle-era astronaut.
And he’s head of the B612 Foundation, correct. And we may hear some of that in your talk.
If not, we’ll surely get to it afterwards. So, Ed, what have you got to tell us?
Okay, I wanted to show a quick movie. I want to show the challenge that we have. I want
to show what we can do. And if you could start this movie. This will set up the problem that
we’ve got. And this is every single known asteroid in our solar system, correctly displayed.
Okay? The light green line is the orbit of Earth. The outer belt, there you see, that’s
the asteroid belt. The inner asteroids are the asteroids that Neil talked about, the
near-Earth asteroids and those are the ones that could hit the Earth. There are about
10,000 known near-Earth asteroids.
And our challenge here is finding these things, because in the end, we really want to do something,
right? We don’t want to just talk and hold meetings. In the end, we have to do something.
What do you have to do? If you want to deflect an asteroid, if you want to protect everything
that we’ve built as a civilization, you need to find them first. You cannot deflect
an asteroid you haven’t yet found.
Here’s the problem. There’s a hundred times more asteroids out there than we have
found. This is really what the solar system looks like. There’s about a million asteroids
large enough to destroy New York City or larger out there. We know that there’s about a
million because we know we’ve only surveyed a small volume of space. So, our challenge
is to find these asteroids first, before they find us.
And I think I’d like to talk a little bit about the solution to that. It’s one of
the recommendations in the Association of Space Explorers’ recommendations is to support
the launch of a telescope that finds these things. And what the B612 Foundation Sentinel
mission is going to do is be an infrared telescope which can see much larger areas of the solar
system than our current telescopes can. So, on the right is to show you what you can do
with an infrared telescope if you put one in space, versus this little, tiny area over
here is the volume that we can see currently from Earth right now.
So, we’re building and launching an actual telescope in 2018, privately supported, that
will find and track a million asteroids and that will be how we, in the end, protect our
planet. And that’s our challenge: how do we find these things?
Thanks, Ed. Just a quick question. Why did it have to be privately funded? Was the search
for government funds unyielding?
The reason we’re going about it that way is essentially because we can. The searches
haven’t been done yet, that’s an irrefutable fact. And the technology exists, the knowhow
exists and we realized that the cost of building and finding and tracking all these things,
a telescope to do that is about what it costs to build a large freeway overpass. And that’s
within the capability of a private organization to do, so we decided that we would just do
it.
Okay, thank you. Last among the panelists is Soichi Noguchi. And he’s actually an
active astronaut with the Japanese Space Agency. And in fact I just learned today he has a
weekly television program that brings space to the Japanese public. And we welcome him
here to New York. So what do you have to tell us?
Thank you, thank you so much. Yeah, today I’m wearing two caps. The first cap is as
the director of the Japanese [National Office]. And, as an active astronaut, we are very concerned
with the object, because—anybody seen the movie, Gravity these days? Gravity? Yeah,
yeah, no. I don’t want my colleague to be in that situation. Or, doesn’t want to happen
on my next flight. So it’s very interesting object.
And the second cap is as the President of AAC-Asia, that during as the international
president, I serve as the Asian chapter. And, as you know, Asia Pacific region, including
Siberia, is a very large area and we see lots of impact. So there is international interest
in finding those impacts.
So I’m going to show you how. You know, first of all, as Ed pointed out, the very
first step is find where those objects are. Find and track. And I guess this is [next
one 25:01], I just want to show you the two dedicated sites in Japan. That’s the Space
[Guard the] Center, 24/7 in conjunction with the U.S. asset, so we have a dedicated facility
to track those asteroids around the Earth.
And the finding is one thing. Next is the, all those monitoring on the ground side. Because
like I said, there is international interest. Once the disaster happens, like to know where
those impact occurs, how big is the damage, so that all the space agencies shown behind
me has international charter and I just want to show you the big schemes—look at those
international agencies working together to use their assets, once disaster occurs, including
the asteroid impact, they will quickly disseminate those information and each individual space
agency to the best effort bring those data from space.
And one of the assets is International Space Station, because Japan has a big space [mojo].
One of them has an HDTV, the high definition TV, looking down on Earth 24/7, sending the
data on the ground what happens. So those data are used by the international partners
to quickly monitor and understand once the disaster occurs.
And the last thing, I don’t have a slide, but for the deflection portion, we do not
have a deflection mission. However, Japan has a high [unintelligible 26:43] successfully
conducted three years ago which included an asteroid—actually, we landed on that asteroid
and get a sample returned back to Earth, the first time ever in the world. And next year,
by the time next year, we’re going to have a high [unintelligible], we go to a different
kind of asteroid. We do have an impact onto the asteroid to see how we can sample, bring
the sample back again, but whatever the deflection method occurs in the near future, we will
need to get near to the asteroid and find exact location, either pushing or pulling
or just whatever to get the information. So that I fully believe that the high [set to
emission] will contribute big to these, our activities.
Thank you.
Excellent, thank you, gentlemen.
Let me take host liberties now and just sort of engage you in a quick set of questions
and dialogue. Let me start off with Dorin. Dorin, you commented how many different nationalities
are represented in the Association of Space Explorers. I’m curious, as you go around
the world, are all countries equally as interested in this problem? If you’re a developing
nation and you don’t have an astronaut to cheer behind and you’re worried about where
your food is coming from, can you really expect them to rally behind this exercise?
You know, [unintelligible]… The [whole] of the nations are so interested in space
activities. The main powers that have big capabilities, they are involved in the decision
regarding the near-Earth objects. They are involved in the organization of the structures
that will build future spacecraft to push the asteroids. But there are also the developing
nations. They are interested in research, in developing of their own countries. They
are not so interested at this level in pushing asteroids forward, backwards.
So we have to mobilize them, to show them that each nation, it’s important in this
[unintelligible] endeavor. And the U.N. does it. And the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful
Use of Outer Space, there are now 74 member states and more than 13 international organizations.
And all these institutions belonging to these nations—space agencies, offices, ministries
and so on, they should be mobilized to take part in a way or the other way to our effort
to discover, first, the asteroids and then to deflect.
Rusty, I got a question for you. You speak, several of you have spoken, but especially
we go back a few years, you’ve spoken to me at length about the challenges of administratively
recognizing this problem. What I wonder is, in the end, is a collaborative effort really
the most efficient way to do this? Shouldn’t it just be like one agency who gets it done
and everybody sort of rallies behind that? Or do you end up getting what they say of
camels, it’s a horse designed by committee? A committee’s a good thing in this, is really
what I’m getting at?
Well, efficiency is not always the prime criteria for something of this kind, when you’re
dealing with the lives of people who have no relationship to the institution—you might
want to do it. I mean, are you going to have the United States push an asteroid away, but
push it across Russia before it goes off the Earth? Or are we going to sit around and be
happy with the Russians pushing an asteroid, the impact point across the United States
on the way off the Earth?
So this has to be coordinated whether we find that the most efficient way or not. There
has to be international trust in what’s going to be done. The biggest problem, Neil,
right now, institutionally, is not so much with the United Nations, although the United
Nations has a lot of work to do, but no government in the world today has explicitly assigned
the responsibility for planetary deflection to any of its agencies. NASA does not have
an explicit responsibility to deflect an asteroid, nor does any other space agency. [TALKOVER]
So there’s not even a seed planted where you can grow that into something that would
work. We have to birth this from scratch, is what you’re saying?
Well, I don’t want to be biblical, but we did cast seeds around, but they didn’t seem
to grow. The seeds were there, but the water didn’t follow.
Neil, that’s why the B612 Foundation exists, in some sense. Because there was an action
and it is within the capability, again, of private individuals to get the ball rolling.
In the end, we’re going to give this data away. We’re going to make it public.
Data on where all the asteroids are that you find.
Yes, that’s going to be public, it’s going to go out to all the astronomers of the world
simultaneously. And we want to make this decision-making problem relevant. Because it’s not relevant
if you can’t find them, again. But efficiency matters when you’re running projects. Efficiency
isn’t necessarily the prime criterion for decision-making among nations, but for running
a project, getting the data—yes, efficiency matters and that’s why we’re doing it.
Tom, if you try to bring the whole world into this, how would you do it? Are you imagining
some kind of a tax on a GDP, per capita…? In practice, how does this get paid for?
Emperor Jones.
Well, it would be nice to have—it would be nice if there was so much international
interest that we’d already formed a consortium to mount a future deflection campaign and
that was standing by. That hasn’t happened yet. And I think the whole purpose of today’s
press conference really was to bring to the U.N.’s attention and to the international
space-faring nations’ attention these next vital steps that we have to take. This will—funding
will follow where we have the determination and the willpower to execute these steps.
So, Josh, if you could bring up my last slide again that has the vital steps, we could bring
those up. And I just want to mention them, because the Association of Space Explorers
has been involved with trying to raise the attention profile on this hazard that we all
face globally. And we’ve succeeded in getting the U.N. to adopt certain steps to warn us
and to take advantage of our disaster preparation capabilities. But we really need to go farther.
We need to maintain this momentum now that we’ve achieved this milestone.
And so here are the five steps we’re recommending today in our statement. And that is, first,
to your point, Neil, about funding, we’ve got to get the U.N. delegations to brief their
policymakers on how this is a real hazard and how they should take advantage of these
actions that have been taken and address them back home.
Number two, we’ve got to have the policymakers around the world address their asteroid impacts
in planning for disasters in their home country. They deal with tsunamis, they deal with floods,
they deal with earthquakes. They should include asteroid impact. So this is a planning exercise
and that doesn’t cost much money.
Finally—not finally, but number three, this is something that Rusty mentioned, we’ve
got to assign lead responsibility in each nation around the world for dealing with an
asteroid impact. Appoint an agency that’s going to collaborate with the others around
the world to deal with detection and a future deflection campaign. Somebody has to be assigned
responsibility.
Number four, governments have to contribute funds, and this is a small amount, if they
pool their funds together, less than half a billion dollars over 10 years, they could
actually support a telescope like Ed’s been talking about, an infrared telescope to find
the million hazardous asteroids that are out there. And so that’s a technical step that
can be done by pooling resources with real promise of success in the near-term.
And, finally, we would like to call for an international deflection mission, where the
nations of the world, the space-faring countries, supported by the other states, actually pool
their funds and fly a mission to a harmless asteroid and move it enough to guarantee that
it would miss Earth had it been on an impact trajectory. So, a real demonstration in space
of what we’ve been talking about to put this plan into action, have it on the shelf
and be ready.
You don’t want to deflect a harmless asteroid into a collision path, that would be bad.
That would be bad and I hope we’re smart enough to avoid that. But these five steps,
if we continue this momentum that we’ve built up here at the U.N. this fall and over
the last few years, we can really ensure the survival of our species.
Soichi, you had a comment.
Yeah, sorry, just a quick thing. I was in Dubai, UAE, until Tuesday and I have [different]
the U.N. Technology Symposium. I was talking to students from like the Sudan and Sri Lanka.
They’re all interested in these kind of asteroid impact, how do we find it? How can
we live through it? And I think that this is obviously noble solution, I mean, noble
obligation for all the international partners around space station, now those companies,
who has the assets to point and find and track and let the rest of the world know that we
have [unintelligible 36:20] coming.
Neil, you might want to ask about the costs of this.
Rusty, what does this cost?
Glad you asked that question, Neil. You might think that this is expensive. Tom and I ran
a task force for NASA about three years ago and we looked, among other things, at the
cost of setting up a program that would provide planetary defense. And, basically, the answer
is, for the first 10 years when you’re doing a lot of preliminary work, it costs just a
little bit over 1% of the NASA budget.
One-sixtieth.
Just over one percent. After the first 10 years, that drops back to less than one-half
of one percent of NASA’s budget. This is not expensive. This is taking responsibility
for the survival of life on Planet Earth. It’s not costly.
Thank you for that.
You’re welcome.
I have one last question and we’ll go to…
Glad you asked.
Oh. I have one last question, I’m going to direct it to Ed and then we’ll take questions
from the press.
Ed, it’s been assumed in this conversation that the way to save Earth is to deflect an
asteroid rather than to just blow it out of the sky. All right, all the movies tell us
that’s what we should do is blow it out of the sky.
And movies are always accurate, as you know.
So, is there a leading way we would be deflecting asteroids? Because, as you know, asteroid…the
structural integrity of asteroids is not a well understood problem. So how would you…
They don’t all look like this one back here.
Right, this one is a solid, [unintelligible] meteorite. If you push it, the whole thing’s
going to move. But there might be asteroids out there where you push apart and that breaks
off and you miss the rest of it. So, is there a leading idea about how you would deflect
them so that you don’t run into those kinds of problems?
Well, again, if you can find these things so that you know that they’re, in advance,
they’re going to hit decades before they’re going to hit is actually we have a lot of
options, it’s actually fairly simple.
Let’s say that thing is going to hit the Earth, let’s make it its cousin, 10 thousand
times larger. Let’s say it’s going to hit the Earth 10 years from now. That thing
is traveling around in space, like the Earth, which is a moving target, it still has 6 billion
miles to travel before it hits the Earth. You don’t need to change its speed by very
much to make it miss, because that is an incredible shot. I mean, the amazing thing is that NASA
has figured out, scientists have figured out, astronomers have figured out how to track
things accurately enough that we know 10 years in advance when something’s going to hit—if
you can see it.
So all you—the simplest thing you can is simply run into it with a small spacecraft—that’s
been done before. Again, we’ve got to give ourselves a fighting chance…
Did you just say “run into it”? Like, just bump it?
Yeah. And…[TALKOVER] Yeah, and if you—we can give it a fancy name, they call them kinetic
impacters, if that makes you feel better. But the…
Kinetic impact—that’s what happened to the car, it was a kinetic impact.
Yes, indeed, and not covered by insurance.
Okay.
So, we can do that step.
All right. Good to know.
I just wanted folks to think—I see some kids out here in the audience. I mean, think
about how amazing what we’re talking about is doing. We’re talking about what the ability
to find—you know, black, black things in space, track them accurately enough so we
know where they’re going to be up to a hundred years from now, accurate enough to know if
they’re going to hit the Earth, going out there, flying rockets out there, changing
their trajectory ever so slightly so they miss the Earth. I mean, if you think about
all the steps involved, all the things—it’s just like the culmination of all of our space
knowledge. All of us here have been lucky enough to be involved some of the great space
projects. And at least for me, personally, that’s been a highlight of my life. But
I can’t think of anything more important than to do this.
My favorite poster on the Internet I saw recently is, shows a stylized spacecraft and an asteroid
and it says “Asteroids: Nature’s way of asking, ‘How’s that space program coming
along?’”
Let’s go to the press. If you have any questions, please identify who you represent when you
do. And we have a—oh, take that. Please identify your journal.
Thank you. Oh, sorry. Thank you very much. My name is Carter [unintelligible], I’m
with Turkey’s national broadcaster, Turkish Radio & Television.
Now, this is actually wonderful, thank you very much for this. Are there riskier spots
in the world in the case that these asteroids hit the world? Is, for example, the north
of the world is more riskier than the south or the east, from the west? How do you define
it?
They all hit Russia, don’t worry about it. Thank you.
No, it’s random. It’s random.
Okay.
Look at the moon, look at the craters on the moon, they cover that entire body. We just
don’t see the craters that have struck Earth because of Earth’s dynamic geology that
erases a lot of those craters. But, yeah, they’re randomly distributed.
In terms of national concern, the country with the largest cross-sectional area has
the highest probability. But it’s…
Russia.
…a uniform ting, yeah.
Russia and Canada. [TALKOVER]
In the movies, all asteroids fall down in the U.S. And in reality, they fall down in
Russia.
Also in, I think it was in the movie Armageddon, those asteroids had really good aim. They
were hitting national landmarks and things. So that…those are movie asteroids.
Neil, one serious answer to the question, though, is that the Earth is mostly ocean,
water. And if an asteroid is something on the order of 150 meters or larger in diameter,
it will cause a tsunami. And so actually the damage to life and property from tsunamis
historically has probably been the largest phenomenon.
Just because it falls in water doesn’t make it a safe impact. Another question? Yes.
Hi, Clara Moskowitz for Scientific American. You’re talking about deflecting an asteroid
that’s 5 or 10 years out from hitting us. But what if we find one that’s a year away
or six months? How quickly could we mobilize a deflection mission if we needed to?
In fact, if I can add to that, none of you have discussed comets. You have long period
comets that come in out of the blue—out of the dark—and we don’t even know they’re
there until they pass Jupiter and at that point they’re barreling into the inner solar
system—we have months to mobilize, not even years. So, what—yeah?
Clara, thanks for the question and, Neil, we’re going to ignore your comet thing.
It’s an excellent question and the best answer to your question is, if we discover
something only a year out, then we probably haven’t done the job that Ed keeps pushing
here, which is find—you know, Don Yeomans at JPL, whom I’m sure you know, Don says
the three most important things, if you want to protect the Earth from asteroid impact
are, one, find them early, two, find them early and, three, find them early. And when
you find them early, that means, as Ed said, you can predict ahead 100 years that something
may hit the Earth and get ready for it. If we don’t find it until a year out, make
yourself a nice cocktail and go out and watch. Or, better, the better answer is, you evacuate
the impact area. In other words….[TALKOVER]
…for very small asteroids only.
…small asteroids are the ones that are going to hit us the most frequently, by far. And
therefore, with a small one, you’re probably not going to spend the money to go up and
deflect it. You are probably, number one, going to find it later and just before impact,
and you can then evacuate. That’s part of the process that we’ve outlined here for
the United Nations.
So you’re really saying you got nothing for comets here.
Well, hang on a second. First off, what Rusty said is correct. But I think we can do better.
Let’s not put ourselves in that spot, okay? A hundred years ago, if the Earth was hit
by an asteroid, as it was in [Tunguska], 10-megaton explosion…
Russia.
In Russia. That’s bad luck. If we get hit again 20 years from now, that is not bad luck,
that is stupidity. We can do better as a race.
I don’t want humans to be the laughing stock of the galaxy, having gone extinct from an
asteroid when we had an active space program that could have prevented it. Next question.
Neil, hey, let me ask you a question. We have looked at this issue of comets versus asteroids.
Asteroids are 99% of the treat. Comets are about 1% and they are by far much more difficult
to find ahead of time and predict exactly what’s going to happen to them.
It’s a different threat.
So we’re going to solve 99% of the problem, then we’re going to go to comets. We’re
not going to forget you.
Thank you.
It’s like saying I’m not going to work on solving heart disease because I can’t
solve the problem of cancer.
Yeah, I gotcha. Yes?
Hi, Laura Poppik from Space.com. I was just wondering if you guys could speak on how the
impact in Russia earlier this year sort of galvanized public interest in this and how
we can keep that going in the future.
Tom, you got this.
Well, the Association of Space Explorers and our committee was at the U.N. on February
15th when we were discussing near-Earth asteroid impacts and the Chelyabinsk event occurred.
So that focused everybody’s attention rather wonderfully.
Kind of suspicious, actually.
In the committee room—Dorian was there and …
Tom, that’s a little suspicious.
I think it was Dorian’s doing, actually. You want to address that?
I actually want—actually, we looked for another asteroid [unintelligible], that’s
day 15 of February this year. And in the morning, we just heard the news that an asteroid hit
Russia, hit Chelyabinsk, near Urals. Actually, the asteroid had the dimension of about [17]
meters in diameter, but a very high energy and the speed of the asteroid was about 20
meters per second…
Kilometers.
Kilometers per second, yes. [You’re transforming] the mice, okay? That’s your job. And you
have seen, even if the asteroid fall down about 80,85 kilometers from the city, it broke
all the windows in the city and hurt more than 1,000 persons. And it had a diameter
only of 17 meters.
In 2000…in one… thousand nine hundred eight, the [Tunguska] asteroid was about 45
meters in diameter and put down 2,000 square kilometers of forest. And the visual and acoustical
effects were felt far to England. So, do you understand what means an asteroid of 100 meters
or 200 meters or even worse?
It did make a difference, I think, in policymakers realizing that this is not just a science
fiction concept or something that will happen a hundred or 500 years in the future. The
fact that it happened right now when the U.N.’s been talking about it I think reinforced its
reality. And I hope that in addition to the congressional hearings in the U.S. that we’ve
seen in the past six months or so, that we’ll continue to see the policymakers as we recommend
bringing this asteroid hazard into their disaster planning. And then, of course, getting on
board with the deflection mission.
And what’s interesting is that, in Chelyabinsk, we had more than a thousand injuries, but
I think no one died, is that correct? So it’s the ideal shot across the bow. You recover
from it and you are snapped into sensitivity to the problem.
The real issue, however, is not just policymakers being aware that this is an issue, but having
specific things, specific actions that they can take. And the reason that we’re here
today is because we have identified, as the professionals who have been looking at this,
albeit non-profit professionals, but nevertheless—these are five very specific actions that we can
recommend that people, seeing the effect of Chelyabinsk, can actually implement. That’s
the important thing.
Does anybody here know how the space agencies of the world found out about the asteroid
impact? Twitter and YouTube.
From all the forward-facing cameras that filmed it and then posted, yeah.
Is that unacceptable? I think the answer is yes.
One more thing, a few decades ago, nobody could believe that private industry will be
involved in space. Everything was about governments. Everything was about space agencies and so
on. And now the biggest responsibility of defending the Earth should belong to the governments.
But, see, a private institutions—the foundation B612 Foundation, built its own telescope to
discover the asteroids and to defend the world. So the responsibility of such things now belong
to all humankind, not only to governments. And we have to be aware of this and act in
this respect.
That’s an excellent point. Who’s next, with the microphone? Yes, sir.
Alexei [unintelligible], from [unintelligible] Russia. So, how active is my country in your
cessation or other activity in this field? Because you repeated so many times today—Russia,
Russia, Russia—but nothing practical I didn’t hear.
So, actually, Russia, it’s part of the Action Team 14 of the United Nations. Russia is taking
part in a lot of international workshops, conferences dedicated to the defense of the
Earth against asteroids.
You have some very good specialists, but you have also some persons involved at the high
level that think that we could defend the Earth just bombing the asteroids. Actually,
they have to take part more in discussions at the international level, in the research
at the international level and to see how really could defend the Earth. Now, after
Chelyabinsk event, the new head of the Russian space agency, of [Ruscosmos], declared that
they are focused on a program dedicated to defense of Earth against asteroids. I’m
quite sure they will interact at the international level to find out exactly how to do it and
what is the level of research in this respect. Thank you.
I will say that some of our private donors to the B612 Sentinel mission are Russian.
So there are individual Russians taking steps to solve the problem.
And I’m told these days there’s no shortage of Russian billionaires, right? So there’s
money to possibly tap, still tap.
Any other questions? Since the press has no more questions, I guess we’ll go to some
of the kids. Yes? Your name and what grade you’re in?
I’m Alex [unintelligible], grade 8.
And are you cutting school right now?
Yes.
This is an awesome reason to cut class.
Yeah.
Okay. If you need a hall pass later, I’ll write you one.
Okay, thanks.
You can do that?
What expendable rocket boosters will be used for the telescope and deflection missions?
So you got a launch vehicle planned out for this?
The launch vehicle in July of 2018 is a Falcon 9 built by SpaceX.
And the same for the deflection missions. You don’t need a giant rocket to carry out
these missions. You typically have to loft a spacecraft that might have a 10- or 20-ton
mass. And that’s plenty enough to run into an asteroid and have an observer spacecraft
fly alongside and watch the results of that impact. So, it requires just a middle-sized
booster.
Another question.
I was just wondering, apropos of his question, can you, once it’s launched, can you redirect
it or you can control it from…?
Right, like any planetary exploration mission—a probe to Mars or to Pluto—these spacecraft,
we know how to guide them very precisely and they have maneuvering engines to make a rendezvous
if necessary with the asteroid and then, of course, to guide you right into a collision,
if we use kinetic impact as a technique.
And to make corrections if something changes in the orbit, presumably.
That’s right.
Yes. In the back there, yes.
Hi, there. I’m actually a volunteer here at the AMNH. Usually discussing the victims
of the last really large—really large extinction event--
You have someone’s skull in your hand, yes.
Well, yeah. Technically, it’s a cougar, but I use that to show evolution. Anyway.
The point is, we’re talking a lot about smaller asteroid impacts. What would we do,
what do we have available in our arsenal if there was something, say, of the Chicxulub
crater that killed the dinosaurs? What—do our kinetic impacters have that ability to
stop that?
Rusty, what do you have?
Well, this is an excellent question, but you have to get into probabilities. I hate to
say that. The frequency with which the event you just suggested happens is about once every
100 million years. So it’s probably not something that we want to really rush to get
ready for. I mean, there are many, many other accidents, like the Tunguska event, which
happens about once every 300 hundred years. And those will destroy New York City or any
city in the world. And when I say “destroy,” I mean kill everyone. Okay? The U.S. Congress
labeled them “city-killers.” And those are the ones which are thousands of times,
millions of times more frequent than an extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The deflection techniques that we have deal with things up to about 400 meters in diameter
or so. When you get larger than that, you either need to have a series of deflection
events or potentially use a nuclear explosion event. But hopefully we’ll have much better
techniques in the next 100 million years before the next one appears.
Wishful thinking.
Or, or, just think about this for a second. If you can hit it with a kinetic impacter,
you can hit it with 10 or 100 of them, right? And I will submit to you that, if we are finding
an asteroid that’s going to wipe out all life on Earth or the majority of life on Earth
that funding is not an issue for launching a hundred of them.
Besides that, I want to point out that if the probability to hit the Earth is once in
300 years, if let’s say tomorrow an asteroid like that would fall down, the next one will
not wait for 300 years. Could fall down in the next day and then 600 years will be nothing.
So, it’s just a statistical thing. Could fall down anytime, but in time, if you count
in millenniums, maybe, the statistic says that every 300 years it’s one.
The other important thing about your question is that an object that large—by the way,
the one that wiped out the dinosaurs was something like 8 miles in diameter, it was not a small
rock, 8 miles in diameter…
The size of Mount Everest, basically.
Yeah—oh, bigger than Mount Everest, actually, quite a bit bigger. You’re going to see
that a long, long, long time before it hits. In fact, we already know of all—we think—I
say we think that we know of all of those in the whole solar system today. In fact,
there’s only about two or maybe even one. So we’re not going to be surprised by something
that large and we will have lots of time to worry about it or mix our martinis or whatever
we’re going to do.
Unless it’s a comet.
In the film Armageddon, the asteroid that they discovered was the size of Texas and
they had only just discovered it. Which means they’re living in a universe where no one
was ever looking up. Because an asteroid that size would have been discovered in the 1800s.
So, yeah, size matters here in terms of how early you can get it.
We’ve run out of time. The panel will be available for press one-on-ones over in our
press pen in the back. I want to thank all of you for coming and I want to thank the
Internet for tuning in, and being concerned about this problem that affects us all. I’m
Neil deGrasse Tyson, signing off, thank you, panelists, for this.
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