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MALE SPEAKER: You're here because of asteroids and
Jason, who comes out of NASA's headquarters in DC, at 300
East Street, I understand.
JASON KESSLER: Southwest.
MALE SPEAKER: Southwest.
Anyway, so Jason's come here to speak with us about finding
and planning for asteroids that may squash us like bugs
or like other species who have been squashed in the past.
JASON KESSLER: And thanks for the invite.
What a great opportunity.
We announced the Asteroid Grand Challenge back in June,
and it's a new way of thinking and doing business at NASA.
So it's a great privilege.
This will be the first public audience since the
announcement that I've gotten the chance to speak to.
So, thank you.
Space for a long time has captivated our imagination.
And through space exploration, we have the ability to
radically change our future and, at the same time, do
things for the benefit of all of humankind.
About a little over 65 million years ago, there was a very
bad day here on planet Earth.
And these poor folks didn't really have any ability to do
anything about it.
And really what I'm here to talk about is a natural
disaster that we actually have the ability to
do something about.
We can change our fate.
And it really only requires the will to do so.
This is not new.
It happened over 65 million years ago.
But it happens more often than I think people ever realized.
Earlier this year, in February, the 15th of
February, we were anxiously watching DA14 pass by--
very close asteroid pass of the Earth.
And then lo and behold, out of the sun,
comes a 17 meter asteroid.
It hits in Chelyabinsk, Russia.
You can see here a crater from a 50 meter asteroid, the
remains of which are in Northern Arizona--
the equivalent of 10 megatons of TNT.
So this stuff happens.
One need only look at the surface of the moon.
We're in a very, very active neighborhood, statistically.
Folks might say the likelihood is small.
But the reality is that we don't know where that many of
these smaller asteroids are located.
So NASA announced with the FY14 budget an Asteroid
Initiative.
So to give you a sense of how this fits into the overall
NASA program, NASA has an overall
strategy to study asteroids.
They're very interesting for lots of reasons--
origins of life, origins of the solar system, planetary
defense, resources for here on Earth or exploration.
And so NASA's had a whole lot going on in
the asteroid realm.
But in '14, we announced two aspects of an Asteroid
Initiative.
The first, which you've probably heard quite a bit
about, is the idea that we would find a 7 to 10-meter
non-threatening asteroid, send a spacecraft through a solar
electric propulsion system out to this asteroid, capture that
asteroid, redirect it around the moon in a trans-lunar
orbit, and then send humans on the SLS Orion program that we
are currently building at NASA to go explore it and bring
samples back.
It got a lot of press early in the year--
the excitement of sending humans to go and explore a
body that hasn't been touched before.
The other aspect, though, and the one I'm going to focus on
today is the Asteroid Grand Challenge.
And that is focusing on the potentially hazardous threats
that every single human being and every life form on this
planet ought to have some interest in.
So digging down a little bit more deeply into the Asteroid
Initiative, we see that there are a couple of areas of
overlap between the Grand Challenge and the mission.
In terms of detection--
absolutely have to find a target for
humans to go and explore.
While at the same time, we have to find what is
threatening out there and might impact us.
So there's overlap between the two aspects in detection.
And then the second, maybe not as obvious to folks, is that
when you go out and explore, you're going to have to have
proximity operations.
You're going to have to learn how to operate around this
foreign object.
The same type of knowledge might be useful in terms of a
mitigation solution.
Are you dealing with an asteroid that a gravity
tractor might work, where you have a mass that helps pull,
slowly nudge, this threatening asteroid off of its course and
thereby saving the planet from getting impacted?
So there's some obvious areas of overlap.
Additionally, the Grand Challenges is focusing on
engaging a community that we don't normally talk with.
NASA has a tradition of getting a mission, having
requirements for that mission, executing to those
requirements through either grants and contracts that are
let with a community that we typically
work pretty well with.
The twist here, and one that I can say, thanks to Ames, the
neighbor just down the road from here and the NASA Center
that really does push the envelope in terms of
partnership and participatory engagement, is that we have an
opportunity to speak with folks that we don't normally
talk with about these kinds of things and start to pull in
ideas that we wouldn't have before.
And I'll give some examples of what that looks like.
In a scale this bigger that's new for NASA.
So here we are with the actual challenge statement.
And you can see that it is grand.
It's bigger than NASA's ability to handle on its own.
Finding all asteroid threats to human populations and
knowing what to do about them, that's even
really beyond our mission.
In terms of mitigation and deflecting,
that's not our bailiwick.
But what the Grand Challenge enables us to do is take an
area that we do a lot of work in and start a conversation
broadly, a global conversation at that, and invite others
into help with this effort, because as I said, this is an
issue that every life form on the planet should have some
interest in.
So the way we're addressing this Grand Challenges is in
five areas.
Detection--
we have to find where they are.
Tracking--
we've got to know what their orbits are so that, once you
find it, you need to know, is it on a
path to hit the planet?
Characterization--
what's its spin rate?
What's its size?
What's it shape?
And then, as you start to move into some of the other
interesting aspects of asteroids, what's it made of?
What kind of materials might be there?
Is there water, a fuel source for deeper
exploration, minerals?
And then finally--
mitigation.
Once we find something that's on its way, we need to figure
out, out of the multiple choices that we have now, how
do we deflect it and mitigate its impact?
And then woven throughout all four aspects is a
communication piece, because thanks to Hollywood, there are
some wild ideas on how one might solve this problem.
And part of this effort is to communicate clearly what is
factual and what solutions might work.
So to dig in a little bit more deeply, if you look at that
circle, there is a chunk of the circle
that's not filled in.
The rest of that circle, those are slices of people that are
already doing work.
NASA's doing a lot of work to find
potentially hazardous asteroids.
Starting in '98, we've had a very serious program.
The Near-Earth Object Observation Program has found
over 95% of the 1-kilometer or larger asteroids.
Those are the planet killers.
The challenge is that we're only finding about a thousand
a year, and there are potentially a million out
there, down to 30 meters or larger.
And as I said earlier, Chelyabinsk that hit in
Russia, that was 17 meters--
about a thousand people seriously hurt, windows blown
out, millions of dollars worth of damage.
So we're looking for roughly twice that size, because that
could really devastate a city.
So there's opportunity here to build upon the work that we're
already doing.
We recognize there's a need.
So beyond just external contributors to this effort,
there are potential contributors.
And in fact, the third listed there is Maker Community.
It's a new one for NASA to think about.
I'm off to Maker Faire in New York City this weekend.
And I know that Ames has had a big presence at the Maker
Faire here and have been engaging with folks about a
conversation--
are there ways that we can improve mirror grinding?
Are there ways that we can improve
telescope mount builds?
Can we redesign, re-engineer?
Can we lower the cost of what it takes to build
ground-based detection?
I mentioned Hollywood earlier as well.
I'm very pleased to say that there's some serious interest
in focusing on a very factually-based asteroid film.
And so in terms of the communication piece, to be
able to explain to folks what's really at stake here
and what really do we have the ability to do at this point
and what is that gap that we need to start filling--
an interesting opportunity to partner there, to bring
science fiction and science fact a
little bit closer together.
An example of partnership potential here--
light curve analysis is really hard to do.
You need to be patient, and you need to have telescope
time with the equipment to be able to track a quickly-moving
asteroid through the night sky throughout the night, because,
basically, what you're doing here is
you've got your telescope.
And you've got a CCD taking images.
And over time, you're determining the change in the
reflected light.
The albedo changes over time.
You can start to get a sense of what the spin rate is.
Eventually, you can figure out what the shape of the
asteroid may be.
Mathematically difficult--
it takes, again, a lot of telescope time.
And so as we focused our energy into detection, because
that's the first problem we need to solve, it's expensive
to spend time on those telescopes tracking and
characterizing.
So there are about 50 to 100 amateur astronomers that are
doing near-Earth asteroid light curve analysis.
So as I stepped into this program, I saw this is an
immediate place that we can change the conversation.
You can get a published paper out of the work that you do on
a light curve analysis.
So by broadening this conversation and saying to
folks, we've got a serious problem.
We'd like your help addressing.
we'll collaborate with you to figure out how to make light
curve analysis either easier or more accessible, and you
can contribute meaningfully to this cause and potentially get
a published paper out of it.
So as a first step to build off of the momentum that we're
creating, engaging university students is one of the first
things that we are looking at doing.
Shape model--
I mentioned characterization.
Shape models are also tough.
It's not an easy problem.
And so, is there a way to throw a challenge out to a
community and say, here's our requirement.
Here is the state of the art right now.
Can you help us?
A technique of using the prize and challenge authority that
NASA has to engage folks with the potential of getting some
prize money if not great recognition.
And then finally, as an obvious next step, would be
space-based observation.
I believe Ed Lu from the B612 Foundation was here previously
and is coming back later this month.
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, November 4.
JASON KESSLER: November 4--
come see Ed.
B612 has got a plan to send an infrared telescope up into a
Venus-trailing orbit and radically improve the number
of asteroids that we can discover each year.
And so space-based observation really would enable us to get
to a place where we can increase our detection rate
and enable us to find those that are getting smaller, down
to the 30-meter size, because 30 meters is tough.
I said we've found 95% of the 1 kilometer or larger, and
we've had an amateur help with that.
The difficulty, though now, is that as you get smaller,
they're fainter.
They're moving fast.
And to expect the amateur community to help us with
detection is really not very realistic at this point.
And so that's why we focused on light curve analysis as a
way to engage the amateur community to help here.
But it's really getting into space that will enable us
24-hour viewing.
It'll get us away from the sun and keep that blind spot from
impacting our ability to search.
Does that mean that there might be small sat solutions?
We were talking a little bit earlier at Ames with some of
the folks there about small sat solutions for observation.
And in fact, just had somebody pop up with an idea of using
space station as a platform as well.
So space-based observation is really the next phase for us
to get serious about our detection effort.
I mentioned Ed and the B612 foundation.
This is one example that we anticipate using at NASA to
engage the community.
Here's a public-private partnership.
We have an unfunded Space Act Agreement that's a legal
agreement between NASA and private entity.
In this case, it's a nonprofit whose mission is very well
aligned with NASA's.
And the idea is that, through a Space Act Agreement, through
this partnership mechanism, you have a shared future that
you'd like to see become real, and you align your expertise
and contribute accordingly.
And so NASA provides some science and engineering
support as well as the use of the Deep Space Network to
receive data from the mission that they
have proposed to fly.
So the Space Act agreement is a great mechanism for us to
look to other organizations to partner with and enable a
collaboration that's beneficial for both.
I mentioned briefly prizes.
So NASA has prize authority, a pretty special opportunity for
us to have no-year money.
For those that aren't familiar with the government budget
cycle, it usually has two-year life.
But prizes can take quite a long time.
And so we have the ability to have some funds
that wouldn't expire.
And so here you see an image a Centennial
Challenge prize winner.
This was the Green Flight Challenge.
And the challenge it was to fly 200 miles in less than two
hours and less than a gallon of gas per person.
And Pipistrel, pictured here, won $1.3 million and flew over
400 miles in that in that two-hour period.
So here's an opportunity leverage a need that we have
with funding that we have to enable innovation in the
marketplace.
There was another entry that broke the 200-mile barrier,
but they didn't break the 400 and a number of others that
didn't win.
But here's an example of individuals, whether they're
partnered teams or individuals themselves, because of the
opportunity are willing to spend their time and their own
resources to come up with solutions to a technological
problem that we have and hadn't really focused on and
have a payday where, eventually, a
company can come out.
In fact, there is a Centennial Challenge winner for an
astronaut glove--
very difficult technology challenge to enable an
effective glove when you're in zero G and you've got a vacuum
that you're fighting against and a pressurized suit.
To be able to have the ability to grasp and use tools--
really tough.
So there was a Centennial Challenge for that.
And now there's a company.
The winner of that Centennial Challenge has a company that
is building suits.
So the idea here is, are there technological challenges that
we can identify in this Grand Challenge that we can spark
some innovation from folks that may be not thinking about
this right now but would be willing to spend their time
and energy for the contribution?
Another mechanism for us in the Grand Challenge is
crowdsourcing.
And you guys are probably quite familiar with it.
The idea here is that you leverage the crowd to help
with a problem.
The Zooniverse platform through Galaxy Zoo radically
cut the time it took to characterize and define types
of galaxies out there.
And so we have lots of data through our asteroid search.
Planetary Resources, a mining company, wants to exploit the
resources of asteroids, had a Kickstarter campaign, raised
almost $2 million.
And because they raised so much, they announced they were
going to be able to do an Asteroid Zoo.
And so, through a partnership with the Catalina Sky Survey--
that's a survey out of Arizona that has years worth of data--
the thinking is, by opening up that data to the crowd, we can
have eyeballs on that that the algorithms might have missed,
some potentially hazardous asteroids there.
Are there other ways that we can use the benefit of a crowd
to help with this data problem?
And finally, really, the fourth area, it's related to
the light curve analysis piece.
But it's citizen science.
And this image here predates NASA.
I think this image is '55 or '56.
And you're looking at Biloxi, Mississippi,
Operation Moon Watch.
The idea was a brainchild of a gentleman at the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory and had tremendous battles with
the science community back then because his idea was
there are going to be all sorts of human-made object
circling the earth, and we're going to need to know where
they are, what they are.
And we don't have any ability to do that right now.
So I want to go out and train the citizenry to be able to do
to help with this effort.
And so they did that very thing.
Here you see a training in Biloxi where they're showing
folks how to look at how to contribute.
And if you do a search on Moon Watch, you'll find images--
Boy Scouts in the Philippines , gentlemen in suit and tie in
South Africa looking through telescopes.
And what they'd do is they'd find something in the sky, and
they'd let the people in Boston know.
And they'd get the cameras out and be able to take images.
And so before NASA was even around, citizen science was
proving its value in contributing to a cause.
And the essence here of the Grand Challenge is this is
bigger than NASA's ability to do on its own.
We don't want to do it on our own.
The excitement of engaging communities that we don't
normally talk with to help solve problems that we can't
do on our own, that's the opportunity here.
An example of how this type of innovation can work--
we had a dark matter problem.
And through a challenge that was thrown out to a broad
community, turns out that a glaciologist noticed what we
were looking for and said, aha, the edge detection and
the change for glaciers is very similar to this dark
matter problem.
And so what happened is he came with a solution--
would have never been involved in a dark matter
conversation before.
And that challenge sparked innovation from a totally
different field.
He didn't end up winning the prize, because you ended up
having an astrophysicist that saw the improvement and was
able to then tweak that improvement for an even
greater improvement.
But you had breakthrough because of a broad engagement.
And so that's really what we're looking to do here, is
to start this global conversation and engage in a
dialogue with citizenry of the Earth and our national
partners around the globe.
And really, what it does is it allows us to prove that we are
smarter than the dinosaurs.
This is, again, the one natural disaster that we have
the ability to do something about.
We have the science.
We have the technology.
We could have great breakthroughs to
improve all of that.
But what a great legacy for us to focus on in the next 10 or
15 years and potentially do it sooner and be able to share
with our kids and our grandkids that this is a
problem they don't have to worry about.
There are going to be plenty others.
But this is one that we took ownership of and decided we
would solve together.
And so with that, I will gladly take any questions and
hopefully spark some solutions in the room today.
AUDIENCE: How do you know you found 95% if you don't know
the last 5%?
JASON KESSLER: It's modeling and statistics, so it's a
best-guess right now.
But we don't know for sure.
And so that's where I will say, statistically, somebody
might say, it looks like the planet killer happens every
100 million years.
It happened within 66 million years.
But that doesn't mean that we're going to wait 30 more
million years until it happens again.
We can only look to the way the climate is changing and
seeing that the 500-year flood is no longer every 500 years.
And so while we feel confident we've got 95%, we don't know
that for sure.
And we certainly need to increase the number that we're
finding each year.
So it's a best guess at this point, that
we feel good about.
AUDIENCE: What your estimate of the fraction of the
30-meter asteroids that have been found?
JASON KESSLER: In the 1% range.
So when you look at the models that say there's down to 30
meters, they'll say the population is so big.
And what we've discovered of that estimated
population is about 1%.
So I won't quote the numbers on that, but the frequency of
the smaller are going to be much higher than
the 1 in 100 million.
And the other interesting thing, because we're growing
our population so rapidly, the numbers are going to increase
because there are going to be more populated areas for
people to be impacted by these.
So that's a piece, in terms of the numbers, that folks I
don't think often consider.
AUDIENCE: Ballpark, how many asteroids are you actually
tracking right now?
How may does 95% account for?
JASON KESSLER: We have about 10,000 that we have track of.
But one of the difficulties with it is that
you can find it--
you might find one--
but you've got to get more glass on it pretty quickly
because they're moving by fast.
And so if you don't track it well enough to understand its
orbit, it'll be gone, and you won't know when it's coming
back or where it's coming from.
And so there really needs to be a concerted effort.
And I think that's where we have an exciting opportunity
to really build a global network.
So we've got a strong US detection, ground-based
network currently.
Europeans are doing great work.
There's a great opportunity in Africa, a great opportunity to
improve Southern Hemisphere coverage.
And so having a network when somebody's dark versus daytime
or somebody's cloud-covered and can't see is really where
we need to be so that we can find them and then get
tracking on them quickly, before they're gone.
AUDIENCE: With the one earlier this year in Russia, did we
have any warning that that was going to
happen, or it was a surprise?
JASON KESSLER: No.
And the difficulty there, the attraction of a space-based
telescope that's in a Venus orbit, is that asteroid was
coming from the sun, the direction of the sun.
And so even if we had some warning or ability, we would
have been blinded and not be able to pick it up, because 17
meters is pretty small.
Yeah, so no warning.
AUDIENCE: You have the crowd-sourced efforts like the
DNA folding and Galaxy Zoo and all that.
What future ones do you envision coming?
And maybe it involved asteroids, but what other
crowd-source efforts do you picture?
JASON KESSLER: I'll tell you a pretty fun--
I think it gets in semantics whether it's crowdsourcing or
citizen science, and I won't go into the details of that--
but we had a challenge.
The longerons are the structures on the space
station that hold the solar arrays.
Now, the station is circling the Earth, and it's in night
and day every 90 minutes.
And so there's a great temperature variation.
And so are we're starting to notice some limitations in our
ability to maximize the sunlight that we're getting on
the solar arrays because we don't want these longerons to
get too brittle.
And so there was a challenge that was thrown out.
And the interesting thing about this challenge is the
first step in the challenge was to build a model that
would enable a full-up 3D model of the system.
That was challenge one, solve that.
Second challenge was to then figure out, how do you
maximize the sunlight hitting the arrays without
threatening--
there are a couple of particular joints that were
areas of concern.
Crowd--
if you want to call it the crowd, maybe expert crowd--
solved it in days.
And the solution is not yet being implemented, but we
expect as this life of the station continues
that it will be.
And so we're just starting to play with this concept of the
crowd-enabling solution to problems that we have.
And so part of the pressure that I feel as owner of this
Grand Challenge for NASA is to show the agency that this is a
culture change shift, that there are smart people out
there in other fields that can contribute to the mission and
impact and benefit the mission just by having a conversation
and, in this and other instances, using a challenge
to incentivize people.
But there are a lot of mechanisms that I think I
really see this as contributing not just at NASA
but, whether it's the aerospace industry or industry
at large, there's an opportunity here to see that
you can really help through this method.
AUDIENCE: Do we think that the asteroid that caused the K-T
event and the asteroid that hit in Russia, were these
asteroids in near Earth orbit that we
just didn't know about?
Or were they asteroids in highly elliptical orbits,
trans-Neptunian objects that this was their first time
approaching the earth in 5,000, 10,000 years, and
there's no way we could know about them in advance?
JASON KESSLER: Had we had the systems in place, we would
have known that these are crossing our path and that
there's about a million of them like that out there down
to 30 meters.
So it's a very active neighborhood.
But that's not to say--
somebody brought up the issue of comets.
Right now, the Asteroid Grand Challenge
is focused on asteroids.
But comets also pose hazard as well.
AUDIENCE: Russia, 1970.
JASON KESSLER: So it might be worth expanding the focus.
And so that's where I would say that some of the
discomfort is that we've got some plan right now, but
having a conversation leads us into saying, oh, yeah, what
about that?
We need to add that.
And that's not habitual for us at the agency.
So this is fun to be playing in.
AUDIENCE: So that's a perfect prelude into my question.
I think that this is a great example, and I think the comet
one would be another great example.
But there are very few people qualified to take a lot of
these problems end to end.
How much work is being done to take the base problem, the
fundamental problem, and get them in the hands of kids or
people that aren't as qualified, getting them to
where the experts can focus on the last mile?
JASON KESSLER: Sure.
And this one in particular, as NASA's first Grand Challenge--
so the White House sees Grand Challenges and as a means of
innovation.
This is a strategic method of innovation.
So DOE has a couple of Grand Challenges.
USAID has a couple of Grand Challenges.
The Brain Initiative that was recently announced this year
is also a Grand.
Challenge
The Asteroid Grand Challenge is scientifically and
technically tough.
There's no doubt.
We issued a request for information back on the 18th
in June when we announced the Grand Challenge.
And that request for information was open for 30
days, and as things are, this was released through Fed Biz
Ops and the traditional NASA methods.
We got over 402 responses, a lot of which were from folks
we don't normally talk with.
We had 96 of those responses that we are gathering the
proposers, either virtually or in person in Houston at the
end of the month-- and I'll invite you to watch, because
we'll be broadcasting live--
to bring together those ideas.
And in some of those ideas, there is the opportunity to
have telescope farms.
So I was in a conversation last week.
And I'd lived in Manhattan for seven years, and it didn't
even dawn on me.
One of the opportunities here is you're talking about
getting into the hands of everybody.
People in the city aren't going to
get a backyard telescope.
They're not even going to spend $10,000, $15,000 to get
a system that would enable them to do light curve work
let alone have the time and the willingness to dig in.
But could you imagine a crowd-funded or crowd-shared
set of telescopes in ideal places all over the world
where that student or that mom chooses to spend a
subscription fee and participate that way, either
buying the time so that she can look or donating that time
to others so that they can look?
And so that's an initial reaction.
Just out of the first request in June, we're getting ideas
on how to enable the citizenry to engage.
I would say that the biggest hurdle is going to be in
mitigation.
Detection, tracking, characterization, it's a
little easier to get one's arms around how people would
contribute there.
But mitigation's tough.
You don't have to move it a whole lot, but you've still
got to move it.
And technically, that's not an easy task.
And so that's where I think there will be less opportunity
for most folks to be able to contribute.
But whether it's looking through a Galaxy Zoo or
whether it's contributing through a
crowd-funded effort--
the other thing from my perspective and why I'm happy
to talk to anybody about this is that who knows what
network they have?
So you speak to somebody.
Now they go home and talk to their spouse, their friends.
And somebody gets turned on by the ideas, and they have a
whole network that they can bring into this conversation.
So even if it's just talking about it, from my perspective,
that's a contribution.
AUDIENCE: Great.
JASON KESSLER: Well, thank you so very much for having me.
And I invite you to watch through the Asteroid
Initiative page--
we're having the workshop at the end of the month, 96
fantastic ideas from folks that are wanting to go explore
asteroids and protect the planet from them--
and encourage you to talk amongst your networks and
friends about this very issue.
So, thank you.
Take good care.
[APPLAUSE]