Asteroooooid De-FENSE!

The Threat of Asteroids

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1:01their laser blaster. Yeah, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I was reminded today of the Asteroids joke from the movie Vacation. I don't remember that one. It's when they go visit Cousin Eddie, and the two boys are hanging out, Anthony Michael Holland, the cousin, and he's talking about, you got Pac-Man something, you got Asteroids. And I think he says something like, no, but my dad does, and sometimes he can't even sit on the toilet or something like that. Dumb, dumb joke.

1:33That is a dumb joke. That's a Chevy Chase-level joke. Oh, he didn't write that. It was John Hughes. Yeah, I don't know. I think Chevy Chase maybe contributed that one. Okay. I know your lifelong grudge against Chevy Chase continues. Yeah, it really does. Unabated.

What Asteroids Are

1:52I know. So, we are talking about Asteroids, not Hemorrhoids, I think is what they were getting at, right? Yeah, probably. And they are small, rocky bodies. That's the point here. These are essentially two different things, Chuck. They're either ancient pieces of the early universe that were meant to become planets but never did, so they disappointed their parents tremendously. Or they're smashed remnants of early planets, right? Whatever they are, they're big or sometimes small chunks

2:25of rock floating around in our solar system, most of the time trapped between Jupiter and Mars in an asteroid belt. But every once in a while, one of them gets spit out. And by God, there is a non-zero chance that the thing is headed right toward Earth, ready to kill you and everything you love. Yeah. I mean, that is a deep impact in Armageddon. Weren't those the two movies? Yeah, at the same time. Yeah, that happened a few times back then, back in the good old days of moviemaking. But there

2:59are, and they probably said some of this stuff in the movie, who knows, there are more than 1.8 million known asteroids and they can be, you know, 30, 35 feet in radius. They could be several hundred kilometers in radius. The ones that we worry about are the 25,000 near Earth asteroids. And we discover about 1,100 of those every year. So, you know, those are the ones that we keep an eye on and, as you'll see, we have plans for, potentially.

3:30Yeah. The reason we want to keep an eye on them is because they sometimes can fall into orbit or fall through an orbit and interact with a planet, whether it's Earth, the Moon. If you look at all the craters on the Moon, those are from former asteroid strikes. And so, one of NASA's big roles is to monitor these asteroids that are near Earth and classify them even further if they pose a threat. We'll get into that. But NASA's carrying on a several hundred-year-old tradition of discovering new asteroids that started in the 1770s, the

4:06swinging 70s.

Discovering Ceres and Mapping the Belt

4:07Yeah. I mean, it's crazy when you look at the year when some of these discoveries were being made, like how far ahead of stuff they were. Super impressive. And there was an astronomer named Johann Bode. And they discovered a, through math, a mathematical sequence that you're going to, I'm going to make you explain it. I'm just kidding. That explained the distances from the Sun for all known planets. And when they were doing their calculations, they were like, wait a minute, there seems to be one missing here in the calculation. Like, there should be something,

4:41like, a planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. And eventually, well, they started to search for it. And in 1801, an Italian astronomer named Giuseppe Piazza found a faint body that he called Ceres. And I guess we should explain, like, what these planetesimals were and kind of what happened back then, right? Yeah. The planetesimals, which is a, it's an okay word, I guess. They were, they were either forming into planets and didn't, like I said, or they were broken up from other chunks of

5:15planets. And when they came near Jupiter, Jupiter is so immense and its gravitational pull is so strong. How strong is it? It actually can break stuff into other planets just from orbiting around it. So these asteroids have been broken into smaller and smaller pieces. But the one that remained the largest, Ceres, is so big that it makes up one third of the total mass of the entire asteroid belt. 1.8 million known asteroids, one third of the mass of all of them is just Ceres. That is an

5:47asteroid we do not want coming anywhere near us, Chuck. I think Ceres is Latin for problem, problematic. Potentially problematic. All right, I got it. Yeah. Yeah. Did you say how big it was? 620 miles across? 1,000 kilometers across? So that is very large. There had been five asteroids, you know, something called asteroid watch, which is exactly what you think it is. It's a watch made of asteroids. Oh, shoot. There were five asteroids on that list

6:19in December 22 alone. Two were thought to be about the size of a commercial jet. And earlier in 22, there was one that was two and a half times the height of the Empire State Building. And it flew the closest it's got in 200 years to planet Earth in 2022, which was 1.2 million miles. So everyone can now breathe a sigh of relief. Yeah. And that sounds like a really far distance. And it is pretty far. It's further than the moon is. But for an asteroid, that's close. It's close enough that NASA keeps them

6:53on what's called its close approaches list. And I said, oh, there's a close approaches list. Let me go check that out. And most of these, these are like, you know, airplane size meteors or asteroids, millions of miles away than as close as they're going to get. But Chuck, there's one. There's one that's coming April on April 13th, 2029, a POPFIS, A-P-O-P-H-I-S. Oh, yeah. 375 meters in diameter. That's big. It's going to come within 20,000 miles of planet Earth.

7:28That's relatively close. That's closer than some of the satellites we've launched in orbit around Earth are. It's going to come really close. And NASA was like, calm down, everybody. There's basically no chance of it hitting Earth for the next hundred years. They added that kind of quietly on the end. Great. So look out on April 13th, 2029 for some end of the world parties that are going to be bitching. Oh, I bet. I mean, they did come out and say like, hey, something bigger than 400 meters is could collide with Earth about every 160,000 years.

8:07So it's not a matter of if, but when. And it could be 100,000 years from now. But, you know, at some point it's happened before. And we'll talk about some of those events and it will happen again. And the idea is that NASA is just going to keep an eye out and hopefully thwart anything in the near future.

Space Telescopes and Hazardous Objects

8:24That's the hope for sure. One of the ways that they do it is by launching space telescopes to keep an eye on these things. And not only are they using them to track, they're using them to discover new ones. Because like you said, I think Giuseppe Piazzi discovered a planetismal that he named Ceres. And he noticed that it was way darker than the other planets. And one of the reasons why is that asteroids reflect far less visible light than planets do, than other celestial bodies.

8:54So they've created infrared space telescopes to keep track of them. And these are turning up an alarming number of near-Earth objects that we didn't realize were there before. Yeah. I mean, we're throwing around a lot of terms. Near-Earth object is one. There's also a PHA, potentially hazardous asteroid. So this near-orbit surveyor has been, you know, infrared-ing around, spotting these PHAs, writing them down. Probably not writing them down. It's probably digital, I would guess. Sure.

9:24And basically, anything over 460 feet or 140 meters in size that has an orbit that will bring them as close as 4.6 million miles. So they're really like, they're really pushing it out there. Those are the ones that are potentially hazardous. Yeah. And that are ending up on the close approaches list too. So, yeah, there's all sorts of, the other thing too is there's different lists. There's different definitions for what's close. There's different definitions for what size we need to keep

9:56an eye on. But essentially what they're saying is there are some out there that could be close enough that we really need to track. Right. And that we eventually may need to actually do something about this. So let's start thinking about that today because we might need a decade's worth of heads up to do something about it. And I say, Chuck, that we take a break and come back and talk about that after the break. Let's do it.

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11:39So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply. So we're back. I want to make a quick, not a correction, but maybe clear something up. That near-orbit surveyor is not launched yet. I think they said September 27 was like the earliest it could get

12:12out there. But they had something for 25 years, another space telescope called the NEO-WISE. And so it's not like nothing was going on. No. And I think you said that there was like, it discovers, we discover 1,100 new ones every year. That's new asteroids, like overall new asteroids. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh no, I think those are near-Earth asteroids even. Oh, are they? Okay. Yeah. But not potentially hazardous. There's so many distinctions. Right. Exactly. There's this and this and this, and they're all subclasses. It's really the

12:45potentially hazardous ones that we need to keep an eye on. Sure. But NEO-wise is how we started discovering so many every year. That's right. And I think these guys were like, we really should start doing something about that. There are some, there's, here's another subclass. This is one of my favorites. Asteroids. It's a subclass of potentially hazardous asteroids that are extinction class asteroids. Yeah. The kind that are so big that they could conceivably wipe out all life on Earth, which makes them

13:17an existential risk, by the way. That's right. What Busta Rhymes would call an extinction level event. Is that one of Busta Rhymes' songs? That's one of his records. Oh, okay. That sounds like a Busta Rhymes record for sure. Yeah. I don't know if that, there may have been a song called that, but yeah. E-L-E. Okay.

13:38I'm not going to say it like Busta Rhymes. Please. No, no, no, no. But extinction class is anything bigger than 6.2 miles or 10 kilometers in diameter. And that's basically like, hey, if this thing hit Earth, could possibly destroy all of life. There are four of these that are PHAs. So four extinction class asteroids that are potentially close enough to one day cause us a problem, even if that day is 100,000 years from now. Yeah. And not just cause us a problem, cause bacteria a problem. Like everything on Earth

14:12would die if one of these hit it, you know? Yeah. But who cares about bacteria?

Impact Scenarios and Megatons

14:16Exactly. Exactly. The chances are very small, obviously. And I think NASA's like, we've got 90% of the near-Earth asteroids at least half a mile wide tracked. And they stopped taking questions before anybody can be like, what's up with the other 10%? Yeah. Right? They rushed off stage. And they're like, none of that 90% have a significant chance of hitting Earth. But there is a non-zero chance, which means we really need to keep an eye on

14:50these things. There could be some bigger ones out there that we don't know about. And it doesn't have to be an extinction class asteroid for us to want to do something about it. They gave an estimate of what would happen if a mile wide, I think you said a six mile wide would be extinction class. This is one sixth of an extinction class one. What would happen if it hit the planet, Chuck? What would happen? Yeah. We have a few scenarios. If it's a mile wide asteroid and it comes in cooking at 30,000 miles

15:25an hour, that would be about a 1 million megaton bomb. You probably don't even know what that means. So let's lower the stakes a little bit and make it a little more relatable. Yeah. Let's say it was the size of a house, an asteroid the size of a, oh, I don't know. Let's call it an 1,800 square foot home. Two story? One story? Let's go with two story. Maybe a basement, subterranean basement. Ranch? Dutch colonial revival? Dutch colonial at 30,000 miles an hour hits the Earth. It would be equal to the bomb that fell on

15:58Hiroshima. It would completely flatten any kind of reinforced concrete building about a half a mile from where it hit. And any wooden structure up to a mile and a half out is just gone so. Right. That's one the size of a house, Chuck. I want to go back and point out that there are, I think, five or six airplane size, like commercial aircraft size asteroids that are passing by Earth today and tomorrow. Today is September 1st and tomorrow is September 2nd that we're recording

16:30this. So like if it was even bigger than say a house or a commercial airline or say like a 20-story building, that would be roughly something like 20 to 50 megatons worth of explosion. I saw that the most powerful nuclear warhead in the United States arsenal is 1.4 megatons. This is potentially 50 megatons, which is the same size as the Tsar Bomba, which is the far and away the largest nuclear warhead ever exploded on Earth. And it was just a test.

17:06That's right. If you want to wipe out almost everything on Earth, it would have to be about seven, an asteroid seven to eight miles or 11 to 12 kilometers big. It would, there would be a dust plume. Basically, you know, we would experience something like a nuclear winter. It would block out the sun, raise temperatures to scorching heats. Almost everything would be destroyed, but potentially some stuff might live. I think they said it would have to be an asteroid 60 miles or 96 kilometers

17:39wide to completely wipe out every like bacteria that you were talking about. Everything on Earth would die. Like unquestionable. There's just no way something would survive. Although life tends to surprise us, you know. Life finds a way. Right. Can't you just see like a couple bacteria just jumping right at the moment of impact,

The Chicxulub Impact and Dinosaurs

17:57like an elevator going down and surviving? That's right. And, you know, we're going to detail some past events, kind of like the one 66 million years ago that most people agree that was an asteroid that took out the dinosaurs and a lot of other things. It was a global mass extinction event. About 75 percent of all species were killed off. And we discovered this in 1978. We discovered along the Mexican Gulf Coast,

18:27these geologists were doing an underwater survey for an oil company. And we're like, there's a weird arc like formation on the seabed here north of the Yucatan Peninsula. And they're like, buddy, this is an underwater underground crater between 112 and 124 miles in diameter. That's a big crater for sure. It's a very large crater. So, by the way, I mentioned this in a little more detail in The End of the World. It's one of my favorite things to talk about is this insane event that took place in a moment in Earth's history.

19:04Just talking about it and like all the little details of what happened as a result are just mind-boggling to me. And what episode was that? That was, I don't remember. Okay. So, I guess they're going to have to listen to all 10. That's right. But this was the Chicxulub impactor is what they call whatever it was that hit the Earth. And I think, I don't know if you said it could have been a comet, could have been an asteroid, but it seems pretty clear that it was definitely an asteroid that did this. Yeah.

19:34The iridium is kind of the giveaway. Iridium is in the Earth's crust, but it's like asteroids are just loaded with iridium. And the Chicxulub impact crater, you know, landed, I think it was named after a village near there where it hit. And it left the crater. And it also scattered iridium all over the planet because all over planet Earth in geologic layers that mark 66 million years ago, the end of the Cretaceous period, there's really high levels of iridium.

20:04So, if you're still on the comet train, you're probably missing out on the good parties would be my guess. I agree. So, a couple of things about this. They think now, just basically by crunching some numbers, that it was this Chicxulub impactor, this asteroid, was about 8.7 miles in diameter. That's big. Yeah, it is. That it produced an explosion or an impact, or a blast, I guess you'd call it, equal to

20:36about 100 million megatons. That's 20, 30 times the total megatonnage of all of the nuclear weapons and all the nuclear arsenals in the world today, all going off at once in one place. And they figured out that right when it hit, since it hit in what's now the Gulf of Mexico, or part of it, that it just created all sorts of chaos, not the least of which was a tidal wave that formed within five seconds of impact, right? Yeah, a 15-mile, 15-mile-high tidal wave.

21:11That's so nuts. I mean, I feel bad for all the animals. Like, can you imagine just being a stegosaurus, just grazing around, and all of a sudden, it's just over everything? Yeah, I can. That's why I think that I find this so fascinating. I can just imagine this stuff happening. I can imagine, like, a sauropod getting carried away on that 15-mile-high tidal wave, going for real. I feel bad for that. What'd you say it was?

21:43A sauropod? I believe that's one of the flipper ones. Okay. The flipper guys. Yeah. I'm sure they were into waves, but nothing like that. No, not like that. So, all the rock and seawater would have been vaporized. It's going to obviously kick up all kinds of debris, geologic debris, that's going to come back down to Earth. Like, what goes up must come down. Sure. And that produced friction that set off what's called the heat pulse throughout the atmosphere. Basically, that's what killed off all the surface-dwelling life. And then the aftereffects are sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere raining down as sulfuric acid.

22:20The acidity of the planet and the oceans as a whole, like, changes in an instant, basically. Yeah. The ocean acidity increased 100-fold very, very quickly. That is a really quick, really big rise in acidity. So, that killed a lot of stuff off immediately, right? There was just, like, plankton doesn't like stuff that's acidic. And so, you've got a food web, which means if you kill off stuff like plankton or ferns on the surface,

22:51it's going to have an extended cascading effect on the rest of life. And that's what happened not just from the acidity, but also from the nuclear winter that followed. Because remember, like you said, what comes up or what goes up must come down, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it comes down immediately. So, a lot of that vaporized rock floated as dust in the atmosphere and blocked the sun for God knows how long. And a nuclear winter set in, and it was an extended one.

23:22Yeah. I mean, they estimate that it took about 30,000 years for the Earth to just be Earth again. Yeah. It's a long time. Yeah. That really knocked Earth off of its good mood. It's charted course. Well, I mean, I don't know if you can say, like, bright side or anything, but it allowed mammals to fill in a lot of niches that were vacated. The mammal diversification after this was just bonkers.

23:51Birds, obviously. Humans probably would have never evolved had it not been for this event. So, you know, bright side? Yeah, I'd call it a bright side for sure, for us at least. Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't have this podcast. No, and you know what? Nothing alive today would know that this even happened if we hadn't evolved. So, pow. Yeah.

Nuclear Options and Deflection Strategies

24:09Good point. Okay, Chuck. So, even though there's a silver lining that humans evolved as a direct result of the KPG extinction event, we wouldn't want it to happen while we're around because we'd be the dinosaurs this time, right? That's right. But, unlike the dinosaurs, we have things like nuclear weapons, we have brains, we're a space-faring, well, you know, I guess that was pretty dinosaurist. But, we're a space-faring species, too, which means we can actually get out there and meet the asteroid where it's at and deal with it there.

24:44So, you put all this stuff together, and it's actually becoming a lot clearer that we could conceivably deal with an asteroid that we figured out was headed for Earth to mess stuff up. So, that's right. So, the first thing, obviously, that you might think is nuclear bomb, and that is a reasonable thought because we have all seen those two movies. And that could work. I've actually not seen either of those movies. Oh, really? Well, wait a minute. I think I saw both of them. Is one of them, does one of them feature Taya Leone standing on a beach where their dad is like a tidal wave's about to kill them both?

25:18I think that was Deep Impact. Okay, then I guess I – was Morgan Freeman president, although that doesn't really narrow it down for disaster movies from the 90s. You bet your sweet Bippy he was president in Deep Impact. I guess I have seen that one then. Yeah, that – I mean, you know, they both were what they were, like fairly fun summer movies, like not great cinema, but not like terrible. Armageddon was a – I don't know which one did better. I feel like Armageddon probably did better, or maybe I'm just thinking because of the Aerosmith song. I was going to say you can chalk it up to Aerosmith if it did. Oh, Bruce Willis.

25:51Poor Bruce Willis. It makes me sad every time I think about him. Yeah. All right. So nuclear bombs is a reasonable assumption, and like I said, it depends on how big the asteroid is. If it was smaller, a nuclear bomb could just take care of that one and blow it into a million tiny pieces. Sure. But those are the ones that aren't really a threat to the Earth, like the ones that are big enough to be a threat to the Earth, like hitting it with a nuclear bomb wouldn't even work because it would – the pieces of it would still be big enough to be a problem.

26:23Yeah, even if – so NASA was like, well, let's think this through. If we went out to an asteroid and we landed on the asteroid and we drilled into it and put a nuclear warhead in there and blew it up, or maybe we just left one on the surface, who knows? What would happen? And they were like, it would basically break it into like smaller chunks but still really problematic chunks, and it might not blast them all off of course for Earth, right? So they're like, I don't think blowing up asteroids is a very good way to approach this.

26:54But that doesn't mean that we can't use the world's nuclear arsenals for a really good noble purpose and use nuclear warheads in a different way. And what they figured out is that something called a standoff explosion, where you set these things off near an asteroid on one side of it, that actually could have a pretty pronounced effect on dealing with an asteroid headed for Earth. Yeah, the idea there is to obviously just blow it off its course. There was a report in 2007 from NASA that said planting a nuclear bomb either on the surface or under the surface would fracture it, and it's going to be an issue.

27:32So that was like sort of official confirmation that that wasn't the best plan. So in 2005, I think Congress said, all right, NASA, do your thing. We need some like real plans. We just saw Armageddon. Yeah, they just saw Armageddon. And in 2007, they presented the ideas at what was called the Planetary Defense Conference in D.C. And they said, all right, like Josh Clark will one day say, I think the best idea is to try and nudge these things off course, at least away from the United States.

28:07No, like completely off course from from planet Earth. Sure. Because a nuclear winner affects everybody. I think that was the slogan of the Planetary Defense Conference. Yeah. And on the back, it said, don't be a dinosaurist. That's right. So this staggered explosion where you set off a bunch of nuclear explosions, like all in one place, just off of the surface of an asteroid would actually sear it. And it would vaporize a bunch of the asteroid and it would push the asteroid in the opposite direction.

28:39Yeah. That's like exhaust almost, right? Yeah. It'd go and shoot off somewhere else. That is essentially the only explosive technique that seems to be endorsed by the scientific community that we could conceivably do. The staggered explosion technique. Most of the other ideas are not explosive, which is why they don't get as much press. But they do seem to be even more viable. They all basically fall into the kinetic impactor deflection category.

29:10The KID cat is what I call it. The kid cat? Yeah. That's even better. And essentially what it is, is trying to figure out how to use a spacecraft as a cue ball, hitting an eight ball, the asteroid being the eight ball, and sending the eight ball off into a different trajectory. Yeah. Into the corner pocket, hopefully. And that's basically what they're trying to figure out is like, how many remote controlled spacecrafts would we have to ram an asteroid with to knock it off its course?

29:45Is that an idea that could work? And they're like, yeah, potentially, sure. And then they're like, yeah, that's kind of hard, though. That's I think they likened it to shooting at a speeding cannonball with a bullet. But so the ESA, the European Space Agency, said, all right, we got a plan called the we'll call it the Don Quixote. And we're going to get two spacecraft out there. One's going to land on that asteroid and analyze it for a while and give us all sorts of data points to where we can make sort of a more pinpointed strike and just the right place to maximize it.

30:17So we're not just throwing cue balls at this thing. Or we could just have an unmanned probe, just park it in orbit and shoot lasers at it because Star Wars is a thing, guys. I don't know if you've seen that. Yeah. And people are like, where are you going to get your lasers, Bucko? That requires a lot of energy. And somebody said, I have a witty retort. How about we put a bunch of mirrors on the space probe and concentrate a beam of sunlight and use that as a laser? And that shut those critics up real fast.

30:48Yeah. What was the sunbeam laser years ago that the Mythbusters tested that we covered? Archimedes Ray. That's right. Archimedes Death Ray. So something sort of like that. Not a bad idea. And it's sort of the same thing. Is it that laser is going to heat up? It's not like it shoots it and it blows it up. It just heats it up and bits of steam start popping off as the laser hits it. And that creates, again, like an exhaust, like a jet almost moving it in a different direction.

31:18Yeah. Or like when somebody is in a manned spacecraft and they're using like the little boosters. Mm-hmm. They're not called boosters. They're called, I just had it. Yeah. Or you're just like, you know, evening out or something like that. Thruster? Boosters now? Yes. Okay. And you're creating with this beam of sunlight, this Archimedes Death Ray, little thrusters within the rock as this gas like vaporizes and explodes and all of them start pressing or pushing the asteroid in a different direction.

31:51None of this is going to happen. We should say none of this will happen in any kind of rapid way. We're talking pushing this asteroid with a beam of sunlight, such a minute fraction of a minute fraction of a nanometer that it will take years and years and years and years to actually have the effect that we're looking for, which is why we said earlier we need to start planning for this stuff now and know what we're going to do. Because we might need 30 years of lead time to be successful in moving the asteroid off course using some of these totally viable solutions that we have today.

32:30Yeah. Another idea was like maybe we should just park a probe in its orbit and just leave it there. And if you have enough time, it might, like Jupiter did, it might have a gravitational pull that will pull that asteroid. Again, off this course just enough to where in like 30, 40 years, 50 years, it ends up in a completely different place. Pretty neat, huh? And they call that a gravitational tractor. Yeah. I love that, like a tractor beam. For sure. I saw somewhere a 20-ton probe, essentially, working as a gravitational tractor, could move a 60-million-ton asteroid in less than a year.

33:12Amazing. It is, especially considering this is just something that's messing with its gravity just by orbiting around it. I mean, that's like, you know, Dollar Tree version idea. Like, you don't have to do anything. You just send a probe up there and get it into orbit around the asteroid. Done. I'm glad you didn't say Timu. What is that? Oh, that's the big thing to call the cheap version something, the Timu version. I think it's a Chinese company that does knockoff stuff. Oh, okay. So, everything is like, you're Timu, like, if you look like somebody, you're Timu Ryan Gosling.

33:49I gotcha. That kind of thing. Well, there's a non-zero chance I would have said that had I known about that meme. Yeah, but that's, I love how out of touch you are sometimes with some of that stupid stuff. Yeah, I definitely am kidding. Like, you're better for it, you know? Dollar Tree is better. I appreciate that. I mean, I don't think the Gen Z listeners agree, but I appreciate that. So, we should talk about Project Near because the question here toward the end of this thing is, like, how worried should we be? And the answer is, not super worried.

34:22Like, in our lifetime, and like I said, it could be thousands and thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years that this is going to happen. Or a hundred years. Or a hundred years. You and I don't need to sweat it, pal. I'm 55 years old. I know, who cares? I'll be lucky to make it until 80. And people are like, what about your child, Chuck? I'm not going to be around. I'm not even going to know. Exactly. What do you care?

The NEAR Project and DART Mission

34:47I'm just kidding, of course. But Project Near, capital N-E-A-R, what does that stand for? Do you know? Near Earth Asteroid...

34:57Rolodex? Yes. Okay. That was the... Project Near was the first spacecraft to orbit a small body of the solar system. And it launched in 1996, in February of that year. And at first, it flew by the asteroid Matilda, or Matilde, June 1997. It came within 753 miles, or a little over 1,200 kilometers of its surface. Kept going, and eventually orbited an asteroid called 433 Euros in February of 2000.

35:28Yeah, it went psych, Matilde. Matilde, and headed on to Eros. But Eros is a big deal, because it's a big asteroid, right? It is a big asteroid. Just orbiting Matilde, I think, was like a first-time thing, like just to see that they could do it. So they put it into orbit around Eros, 433 Eros. And it's a potato-shaped, 21-mile-long, 8-mile-wide asteroid. What, like a baker, new potato? Russet. Russet, okay. Everything I saw said Russet.

35:59Okay, I got you. And it's, I mean, it's a ways away from us. So it's a great little test asteroid. But what they did was they put the near spacecraft in orbit around Eros for about a year, just kind of, just to make Eros a little nervous. Like, what's this thing? Four miles over the surface, which is, I mean, like, if you're a high-altitude skydiver, you might be diving, skydiving onto Eros from that height. It was just kind of circling it for a year.

36:31And then it's like, you know what? I'm going to go down and get on Eros. And it did. That's right. And it got data, measured its gravity, took some nice pictures, mapped it out, of course, and made some chemical measurements of the surface. So they're basically proving in real time, like, hey, this is something we have proven that we can do. I think it was in orbit for about a year when it landed on it and was sending back good data until it completely just froze, like the extreme cold just destroyed how it could communicate.

37:04Yes. And so one of the big things about NEAR is that it satisfies that thing that the European Space Agency pointed out, which was like, you really need data on this thing before you actually shoot a probe at it to knock it off course. And so NEAR proved, okay, great, we can send a probe to send back data on it that will need to shoot a probe in exactly the right place. So that was a big deal. Then they came up with the DART test. DART, we don't have to make up the name for.

37:34We understand what that acronym stands for. Yeah, it's the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. And it is a robotic spacecraft that launched a few years ago, I guess five years ago. Jeez, time's flying. November 2021. Yeah. And its mission, they were like, beep, beep, beep, beep, program to slam into an asteroid, dimorphos, at 4.1 miles per second, and see if we can change its orbit. And they did, and it did.

38:05Yes. Now, remember I said we're talking like just minute little amounts that it's moving it, but it adds up over time. So what they figured out, and this is just amazing that there are people here on Earth that can talk about the orbit of an asteroid being moved this slightly. They figured out that DART, when it hit it, it knocked it off of its course at a rate of 11.7 microns. That's one-tenth the width of a human hair per second, which is a crazy small amount.

38:40But over the course of a year, all of those microns per second add up to about 360 meters a year. So it depends on how far you need to move the thing out of orbit. If you have a decade or two heads-up time, you could just do that. So everybody, I just want to make sure this is getting through. We have shown, as of 2022, that we can handle asteroids that are coming near Earth. Isn't that amazing? That makes this an amazing time to be alive, don't you think?

39:12I think so. And just that little nudge, I believe it was former president of the United States, one Barack Obama, who talked about making change and how you might not feel like you're making change when you're making change. But I believe he likened it to a big ship in the ocean. And he said, if you just get that thing a couple of inches in another direction in 10 and 20 years, you'll be surprised about where that ship ends up. Wow. I was not expecting an Obama quote. Just substitute asteroid and outer space, and it's the same sort of idea.

39:47I think that's what he was really saying. If you read between the lines, he was talking about the DART project. That's right. And then he said, don't be a dinosaur. Peace out. I should say, by the way, just to be specific, that one-tenth of a human hair, the width of a human hair, that's if you're using salon selectives. If you're not, it's probably your hair's a little thinner. Yeah. More body, right? Mm-hmm. That's my experience. I knew there was going to be a hair girth joke coming. Well, since Chuck figured out that there was going to be a hair girth joke, I think that

40:22that means Listener Mail's coming up, don't you?

Listener Mail and Closing Thoughts

40:24Yeah. And I think hair girth might rival Diarrhea Planet as one of the worst band names you could think of. I wonder if there's one. I'm going to look it up while you figure out what Listener Mail we're going to read. Can't wait to hear. People are going to actually listen to Listener Mail for change just so they can hear. Hey, guys. First of all, I love the show. I was born in 1970, so I relate to many of the things you guys randomly reminisce about during each episode. This morning, I dragged myself out of bed early to go for a run before work. My back was stiff. My throat was a little sore. But I resisted the temptation to have a handy excuse not to run.

40:56I got dressed, put on my earbuds, and I looked at my app to see if there were any good podcast episodes to listen to, and I gleefully saw your episode on Terry Fox. I remember seeing that movie several times on HBO before I even joined cross-country in junior high. What an inspiration he was for Canadians and Americans and all humans alike. So thanks for this great episode and for being in my ear during many, many runs in the last several years. And that is from Jim. Thanks a lot, Jim. That was a good one. And that was a good episode. We haven't heard from enough Canadians to keep me from being nervous about it still, but I

41:31feel like it was a good one. Yeah. And I imagine if you're debating on whether or not to go for a run and you see that pop up, you're like, I've got to go for the run. Yeah, exactly. You know? Yeah, for sure. You'd just be like, I feel a little slack for not. That's right. So Terry Fox continuing to inspire. I love it. Very nice. Who is that from? That's Jim. Thanks a lot, Jim. I appreciate that. Chuck appreciates it. Jerry does too. And before I tell you where to send your own email to, I want to tell everybody that if you have a band and you want to name it Hair Girth, you will have zero competition out there.

42:05You'll be the only band named Hair Girth as far as the internet reports. Wow. And you know what? I just Googled it in quotes just to see if Hair Girth is a term. And the only thing you see is like Hair, Girth, and Rude Awakenings by somebody named Michael Nader. Oh, Mike Nader said that?

42:27Please tell me you're kidding. Yeah, I am. Okay. I guess it's a book. So yeah, book plug. Okay. Well, way to go, Mike Nader. Does it say the name of the book? That's it. Hair, Girth, and Rude Awakenings. Childhood, Fatherhood, and the Chaos in Between by Michael Nader. Awesome. It's released 2014. It's out there. It's a short, 112 pages. Ooh, that's a slim tome. That's great. Yeah. A brisk read. Yeah. So Anthony Jezelnik, pay attention. You should be in your book club list. Awesome. Well, if you've read any of Michael Nader's work, that would be fantastic to let us know

42:59how it was. We'll let everybody else know. And if you want to just send us an email for any reason at all, you can send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to the iHeartRadio app.

43:30Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to the iHeartRadio app.