Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from housetop were
Speaker 1: On September eight, Osirius REX will launch from Cape Canaveral.
Speaker 1: It will orbit the Sun for a year, then use
Speaker 1: Earth's gravitational field to assist it on its way to
Speaker 1: the asteroid Bayning, utilizing a complex thruster array to match
Speaker 1: its speed, rendezvous with the ancient rock and steal a sample,
Speaker 1: and then return home. The name OSIRIS stands for Origins
Speaker 1: Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security Regular Explorer or Osiris REX.
Speaker 1: But you really can't name a craft like this after
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptian god of the afterlife and transition and
Speaker 1: not expect us to ruminate on it. A god torn
Speaker 1: to pieces and scattered across the cosmos by set, forced
Speaker 1: to descend into the underworld, but not before conceiving a
Speaker 1: miraculous child with isis ensuring the birth of Horace, God
Speaker 1: of Kings, for ages to follow. Because what are asteroids
Speaker 1: but the scattered remnants of the building blocks that are
Speaker 1: created into planetary form and eventually planetary life as we
Speaker 1: know it. They're shards of the nether age in our
Speaker 1: Solar system, and in the case of the Venue asteroid
Speaker 1: a shard that has been witnessed to the Solar System's birth,
Speaker 1: and a shard that might even bring death or at
Speaker 1: least phoenix like rebirth to life on Earth. Hey, welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb and my name is Christian Sager. We have a
Speaker 1: special episode for you today where we are going to
Speaker 1: be talking about the NASA Osyrius REX mission. For the
Speaker 1: first part of the episode, Robert and I are going
Speaker 1: to present to you the information about this mission. Uh
Speaker 1: and in particular asteroid Baynu, which is traveling to and
Speaker 1: then the latter half, we were lucky enough to get
Speaker 1: Dr Amy Simon to do an interview with us. She's
Speaker 1: a senior scientist at NASA on planetary atmospheres and she's
Speaker 1: working on the Osiris REX mission, and she gave us
Speaker 1: some really good answers to some complex questions. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, we in the intro here we hit a
Speaker 1: little bit on the the Egyptian mythology tie and both words,
Speaker 1: you know, one is the god of the of transition
Speaker 1: and the underworld, and the other is kind of the
Speaker 1: menu is the name of kind of an Egyptian phoenix creature.
Speaker 1: So that the question that instantly enters everyone's mind. I
Speaker 1: think when you encounter acronyms like this is uh, is
Speaker 1: it really as cool as Osiris rex sounds because it
Speaker 1: sounds amazing. Cyrus Rex sounds like what the next dinosaur
Speaker 1: in Jurassic World too will be called? Yeah, and I think,
Speaker 1: but I think the answer is yes. This is a
Speaker 1: really fascinating mission. I think it actually holds up rather
Speaker 1: well to the mythic expectations are presented by the name.
Speaker 1: And that's why we're discussing it here on the show.
Speaker 1: So let's start off by getting into Beanu. What is
Speaker 1: this thing? You may have heard about it recently, because
Speaker 1: in the last two to three days before we're recording this,
Speaker 1: there has been a flurry on the internet, especially on
Speaker 1: science sites, of oh, is this asteroid going to hit
Speaker 1: Earth in like a century or two, right, and then
Speaker 1: the the counter headlines that are like, no, stupid, this
Speaker 1: asteroid is not definitely gonna hit Earth. Yeah. Um. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because in those headlines you see our fear
Speaker 1: rising up about the threat of near Earth objects. And
Speaker 1: on one hand, I feel like people should be more fearful,
Speaker 1: but people should I mean more to the point people
Speaker 1: should be more aware of the long term risk posed
Speaker 1: by near earth objects, like it should be a talking
Speaker 1: point for for all political candidates and not just transhumanist candidates. Interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well especially at don't if you remember, but earlier this
Speaker 1: year there was a meteoroid caught on film, like on camera.
Speaker 1: Somebody whipped out their smartphone and caught one crashing into
Speaker 1: Earth and it killed a person. And it was wow,
Speaker 1: like just seeing something like that that was just so real,
Speaker 1: really jaw dropping. Uh. And this is I mean, that
Speaker 1: was tiny compared to Benu Benu is uh. Let me
Speaker 1: see here a thousand, six hundred and fifty ft wide
Speaker 1: or five meters. But according to the people at NASA,
Speaker 1: we don't need to worry because that is well below
Speaker 1: their calculations for what would cause like a mass extinction event. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this isn't gonna be to the twenty till the twenty
Speaker 1: second century, so there's plenty of time for us to
Speaker 1: not worry about it. And it's gonna be a one
Speaker 1: chants that it'll impact the Earth. But but more to
Speaker 1: the point, it's just the general idea I think of,
Speaker 1: like being aware of near earth objects in the threat
Speaker 1: they posed learning more about those objects so that we
Speaker 1: we we can potentially intercede and protect ourselves. I think
Speaker 1: that is a very important issue for for humans in general. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And when we talked to Dr Amy Simon later in
Speaker 1: this episode, you know, she makes it clear this isn't
Speaker 1: why they chose this particular asteroid, but yes, planetary defense
Speaker 1: is a part of their mission. It is something that
Speaker 1: the people that has to think about. So what do
Speaker 1: we know about this asteroid? Well, near Earth asteroid is
Speaker 1: a is a weird term, but it's It was formally
Speaker 1: called it had a very generic name r Q thirty six. Uh. And,
Speaker 1: as Amy tells us later on, they renamed it Banu
Speaker 1: after a contest with students coming up with names. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh. And I think there's one one in large
Speaker 1: part because it ties into the Egyptian themes President Osiris. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: And what's important about it is it's carbon rich. Uh.
Speaker 1: And because of that, it may contain clues to the
Speaker 1: origins of life in the universe and especially here on Earth.
Speaker 1: It's thought to be the remnant of the building blocks
Speaker 1: that formed planets, so it might contain natural resources like water, organics,
Speaker 1: or metals. Uh, and I realized as we were talking
Speaker 1: to Amy, because she she reminded us that it's so black,
Speaker 1: it's blacker than like black ink here on Earth. It
Speaker 1: only reflects three percent of the light that comes at it.
Speaker 1: So this is really I mean, if it's made of metal,
Speaker 1: it is the blackest of metals. It is the most
Speaker 1: metal thing in space. Like imagine wearing all black on
Speaker 1: a really hot day. You're getting a sense of the
Speaker 1: of the situation that's going here and the resulting Yarkovsky
Speaker 1: effect that that gradually pushes it, and this gradually changes
Speaker 1: the the orbit of this asteroid over time, pushes it
Speaker 1: causes them to migrate until it encounters the gravitational residents
Speaker 1: of Saturn, and the regular tugging effective effect here eventually
Speaker 1: pushes Banu into the inner Solar System, where the experience
Speaker 1: is close encounters with Venus and Earth, encounters that then
Speaker 1: pull apart the rubble kind of reshape it, turn it
Speaker 1: inside out. Because it's worth mentioning here that it's dark, yes,
Speaker 1: but it's also just kind of a loose collection of
Speaker 1: boulders and rock and dust, And there's actually a theory.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you ran across this one and
Speaker 1: the Nathi materials that a billion years ago, the venue
Speaker 1: was part of a larger proto planet and he got
Speaker 1: shattered by a space collision with another asteroid. And this
Speaker 1: is just kind of the rough remnants of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The theory that I read was that it was thought
Speaker 1: to have been the material of a nebula and that
Speaker 1: was disrupted by an exploding star. Yeah, well that was
Speaker 1: the original. Yeah. Basically, if you go back far enough,
Speaker 1: about four point five billion years, you just have a
Speaker 1: stellar nursery of hydrogen, helium, and dust and this is
Speaker 1: the birthplace of our son. The surrounding solar system. A
Speaker 1: supernova of a nearby star stirs all of this into action,
Speaker 1: spinning off the cretion disc that births the star and
Speaker 1: uh yeah, and so everything else is in this mix
Speaker 1: as well. And this uh, this asteroid Ben who was
Speaker 1: essentially you know, a call back to these earlier Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the idea is essentially right like that. It's just
Speaker 1: bits of dust that were like super flash heated together
Speaker 1: into this molten rock that like you you refer to
Speaker 1: it's sort of like a rubble pile. They think it's
Speaker 1: not like one big rock. It's just like a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff fused together. Uh, and it's being propelled by
Speaker 1: the Rakovsky effect that you mentioned earlier. Now, okay, just
Speaker 1: real quick, some numbers on the whole, whether it's going
Speaker 1: to hit us thing or not. NASA does officially classify
Speaker 1: it as quote potentially dangerous, but there's only a point
Speaker 1: zero three seven percent chance that it will strike Earth
Speaker 1: according to their calculation. So, like, if you think about
Speaker 1: this in terms of say Batman's rogue gallery, this is
Speaker 1: not the Joker um, but this is also maybe not
Speaker 1: what's the Vincent Price character Egghead? Yeah, it's not Egghead.
Speaker 1: It would be somewhere you tell me you're the comics,
Speaker 1: a real rare Batman villain like that. But the threat threat, uh,
Speaker 1: one that I would immediately go to would be a
Speaker 1: character named Anarchy. And the anarchy is spelled with the K.
Speaker 1: It's a teenager. He's just running around Gotham causing chaotic anarchy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's pretty low on Batman's road gallery. That's not
Speaker 1: one of his priorities. He lets Robin handle that, right.
Speaker 1: But if that, but if that particular villain is just
Speaker 1: going to be close enough for study, then it might
Speaker 1: be a way to additionally learn how you handle villains
Speaker 1: and what how villains are put together? Right? Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so according to Scientific American, if Benu did hit Earth,
Speaker 1: even if we did get within that very very tiny
Speaker 1: window of probability, yes, it would devastate a local area,
Speaker 1: but it's not gonna wipe out civilization. It's something we
Speaker 1: would know is coming. We would be able to evacuate people.
Speaker 1: Is to do something like on a large level, uh,
Speaker 1: that would possibly cause mass extinction. The asteroid has to
Speaker 1: be at least point six miles wide or out one kilometer,
Speaker 1: So Bannu is nowhere near that. Um, don't worry about it,
Speaker 1: no matter what headlines you see this week. All right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will dive into the mission itself. Osiris Rex. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're back now, Osiris Rex. What is this all about?
Speaker 1: What's the goal? Let's start there. It's a spacecraft, but
Speaker 1: let's start with why they're building this spacecraft. What's the
Speaker 1: whole point of it? Right? Uh? They want to take
Speaker 1: this spacecraft to Banu and bring back at least two
Speaker 1: point one ounces or around four pounds of sample soil
Speaker 1: and rock from Banu to bring back to Earth. And
Speaker 1: it's the first mission to ever try this with an asteroid, right,
Speaker 1: and I want to stress it in the name itself.
Speaker 1: That's the REX Regular Explore and that's all about documenting
Speaker 1: the regular the layer of loose outer material at the
Speaker 1: sampling site. Uh and you know, scaling down from there.
Speaker 1: So you might be asking yourself, well, why do these
Speaker 1: scientists just want to get this little tiny piece of
Speaker 1: soil and rock bring it back here? What good is
Speaker 1: that going to do us? Right? Well, the answer is
Speaker 1: they think it will help us investigate how planets formed
Speaker 1: and how life began because of you know that origin
Speaker 1: story that we gave you earlier about Benu, and it's
Speaker 1: uh history going so far back, you know, there may
Speaker 1: be traces there. Yeah, there was a period of time
Speaker 1: where the asteroid, these asteroids are just like pushed back
Speaker 1: into the inner sellular system and they're just crashing into everything,
Speaker 1: crashing into Earth. And this could have been a way
Speaker 1: that some of these vital materials that would lead to
Speaker 1: a life on Earth might have gotten here. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so this mission, it's the mission is there's so many
Speaker 1: people contributing to there's NASA, there's several universities involved. Lockheed
Speaker 1: Martin built some of the materials that are on the spacecraft,
Speaker 1: but it's managed out of NASA's Godard's Space Flight Center,
Speaker 1: which is up in Green Maryland for us here in America. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, the how Stuff Works team visited there, I
Speaker 1: want to say, like six months ago and shot a
Speaker 1: bunch of videos just talking to different scientists there about
Speaker 1: the missions that they were performing. Uh. The thing is
Speaker 1: too about this is like they can look at Banu
Speaker 1: with a telescope and they have lots of interpretations about
Speaker 1: what its composition is. Uh, but they want to be
Speaker 1: able to prove that. So part of sending the spacecraft
Speaker 1: there is also to confirm or maybe deny some of
Speaker 1: their interpretations and observations from a telescope. Uh. So they're
Speaker 1: gonna be doing things like measuring the effect of sunlight
Speaker 1: on the orbit of the asteroid. And we've mentioned this before.
Speaker 1: Let me clarify this is the Yarkovsky effect. What it
Speaker 1: is is when the asteroid absorbs sunlight then re emits
Speaker 1: that sunlight as heat and it gets a slight push.
Speaker 1: And Amy talks with us about that later. But can
Speaker 1: do all sorts of things that change the trajectory of
Speaker 1: the asteroid. So I think we've hit on all of
Speaker 1: the key points in the name of the craft. We
Speaker 1: have the origins the sea of the spectral interpretation, resource identification,
Speaker 1: security and that actually refer that actually deals with the
Speaker 1: measure of the measuring the effect of the sunlight on
Speaker 1: the orbit and the Acosmy effect. And then the regular explore.
Speaker 1: Now regulthe was a term I wasn't familiar with. It
Speaker 1: means the layer of loose outer material that's on the
Speaker 1: asteroid that they're going to sample, basically, right, That's that's
Speaker 1: why it's a regular if explorer. Here's the real quick,
Speaker 1: down and dirty stats on the spacecraft. Spacecraft of os
Speaker 1: Iris REX. Uh. It's twenty point to five feet long,
Speaker 1: eight feet wide, and ten point three three ft tall,
Speaker 1: so it's no small thing. Uh. It weighs a thousand,
Speaker 1: nine forty pounds, but that's without fuel. When you put
Speaker 1: fuel into this thing, it weighs four thousand, six hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty pounds. They're also going to have two solar
Speaker 1: panels on it to generate wattage to power the thing
Speaker 1: as well as the fuel that's in there. And in addition,
Speaker 1: it has this y it array of communication systems so
Speaker 1: that it can relay back to Earth both its scientific
Speaker 1: findings and what they refer to as its health status.
Speaker 1: So basically you know whether it's malfunctioning or not. Uh.
Speaker 1: So they perform a lot of detailed tests on these
Speaker 1: system to make sure that they survived the journey. That's
Speaker 1: something we talked to Amy about later. But everything from
Speaker 1: vibrational testing to heat and cold uh and then um
Speaker 1: loud loud noises. They literally blast these things with air horns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've really put it through hell, because that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of what leaving the planet it amounts to. And the
Speaker 1: reason why it has to have so many communication systems
Speaker 1: on board is that it's going to be communicating not
Speaker 1: just with NASA, but with three different facilities on Earth,
Speaker 1: one in Goldstone, California, one in Spain, and one in Canberra, Australia. Uh.
Speaker 1: They each have huge two and thirty foot diameter dishes
Speaker 1: for communication, so they can talk to things like this
Speaker 1: up to the size of a pizza box. Now, uh
Speaker 1: osiris Rex is much bigger than that, obviously given the
Speaker 1: stats I just gave you. But you know, the communication
Speaker 1: systems on board might not be all right, So what
Speaker 1: kind of payload are we we're talking about here. They've
Speaker 1: built a lot of different little I'm gonna just call
Speaker 1: him gizmos and widgets to put on board the spacecraft
Speaker 1: for its mission. And the first one that the one
Speaker 1: that said they seem the most proud of. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of material on Nassa's side about This is called
Speaker 1: oviars UH and it is the Osiris REX Visible and
Speaker 1: infrared spectrometer UH. So basically, this is going to look
Speaker 1: at the asteroids spectral signature and detect whether there's organics
Speaker 1: or other mineral materials there. It measures visible and near
Speaker 1: infrared light that's reflected and emitted from BEANU and it's key.
Speaker 1: It is key to their search for organics. This is
Speaker 1: because minerals and other materials have unique what they refer
Speaker 1: to as fingerprints within these spectrums, so they'll hopefully be
Speaker 1: able to see these things even before they actually touched
Speaker 1: down for that brief second with their arm. UH. It
Speaker 1: only operates. This is OVIRS an auto cyrus rex at
Speaker 1: ten watts. It's less power than your standard household light bulb,
Speaker 1: and they've built it with no moving parts to reduce
Speaker 1: the risk of malfunctions. So this is like a pretty
Speaker 1: pared down invention for them to measure these things and
Speaker 1: to avoid it getting overheated by all the light and
Speaker 1: thermal radiation that's going to be bombarding them while they're
Speaker 1: out there. The whole thing has been analyzed to scatter
Speaker 1: light around it and make it resistant to corrosion as well.
Speaker 1: Now I have to admit, when it comes to space missions, UM,
Speaker 1: I always returned to like the eight year old me
Speaker 1: and UH and assembling Lego kits, And maybe part of
Speaker 1: that is also also that I'm now assembling Lego kits
Speaker 1: with with my son. But I get excited about little
Speaker 1: robot arms, h any kind of grabb or any type
Speaker 1: type of you know, UM, fine manipulation device on a
Speaker 1: land or a spacecraft. And there is a really cool
Speaker 1: one here with a very fun name. It's called togasm
Speaker 1: or tagasm or tag asm. Tag as definitely an ASTHM
Speaker 1: in there, the touch and go sample acquisition mechanism. So
Speaker 1: we kind of joke with Amy later on when we
Speaker 1: talked to her about all these acronyms that NASA comes
Speaker 1: up with, and she was a good sport about it,
Speaker 1: and explained why. But yet, So the arm it has
Speaker 1: a sample return capsule that's attached to it to protect
Speaker 1: the sample that with both a heat shield and parachutes
Speaker 1: upon reentry. And that's important because we we talk about
Speaker 1: um planetary contamination as a possibility with amy, So they
Speaker 1: really want to seal this thing up tight. The arm
Speaker 1: reaches out, grabs it, seals it within this capsule, and
Speaker 1: then keeps it safe all the way back to its
Speaker 1: journey to Earth through our our atmosphere. And then they're
Speaker 1: gonna put it into a very high security laboratory here
Speaker 1: on Earth because the sample retrieval aspects of this. And
Speaker 1: we get into this little bit in the interview whether
Speaker 1: here it's just amazing here this is it's quite a
Speaker 1: feat to to send this device reach out into the
Speaker 1: void with your technology, pinch off a little bit of
Speaker 1: rock and bring it back. Yeah. Yeah, I mean we've
Speaker 1: never done it before. It sounds it sounds easy when
Speaker 1: you think about like sci fi type stuff, right, like
Speaker 1: like just take your average summer blockbuster movie, Like if
Speaker 1: you saw something like this happen in it, you'd go, sure,
Speaker 1: I happen all the time. You can do that. But no,
Speaker 1: we haven't done it yet before, Yeah, not not in
Speaker 1: the the exact way that this one is carrying it out.
Speaker 1: So they have another really high tech acronym device on
Speaker 1: board this ship. It's called oh cams uh, and this
Speaker 1: is the camera suite of three cameras that are going
Speaker 1: to allow them to globally image and map Banu. There's
Speaker 1: also a laser altimeter on board that they'll use to
Speaker 1: measure the distance between the craft and Banu as it
Speaker 1: gets closer. Uh. Now, the point of these tools is
Speaker 1: to help them map the asteroid and recon for possible
Speaker 1: sampling sites as they get closer. This is so detailed
Speaker 1: that they can spot individual pebbles on its surface. Now,
Speaker 1: remember Banu we referred to it before. It's just like
Speaker 1: a pile of rubble in space, right. It's not smooth.
Speaker 1: It's a lumpy, irregular shape. So it's going to need
Speaker 1: this kind of data before they approach it. They also
Speaker 1: have a thermal emission spectrometer that just provides them, you know,
Speaker 1: standard temperature information. And then this is cool. M I.
Speaker 1: T And Harvard students and some faculty got together and
Speaker 1: put together an X ray imaging spectrometer that will observe
Speaker 1: the X ray spectrum around Benu as well, So there's
Speaker 1: some involvement there. And you know what, I'm gonna add
Speaker 1: this here. I was gonna save it from the end
Speaker 1: of the episode, but you mentioned, uh, you know the
Speaker 1: fun part about playing with legos and kind of building
Speaker 1: your own thing. So one of the project scientists on
Speaker 1: the Osiris REX mission, his name is Jason Dwarkin, and
Speaker 1: there's a video game called Cerbal Space Program. I hadn't
Speaker 1: heard about it before this, but it's basically like a
Speaker 1: simulator for building devices that you would launch into space
Speaker 1: and see how they react. Right. He presented to the
Speaker 1: fans of the video game in their forum. He said, hey,
Speaker 1: I got a challenge for you. Can you build a
Speaker 1: replica of Osiris Rex and successfully return an asteroid sample
Speaker 1: to Earth? And he himself tried to do it over
Speaker 1: and over again and he didn't have very good results. Uh.
Speaker 1: The game essentially simulates what it's like running a space
Speaker 1: agency on like a a sort of like alternate version
Speaker 1: of Earth. Uh. And he found that within the game
Speaker 1: he couldn't get the spacecraft or launch using the realistic matches,
Speaker 1: uh sorry, masses that they're using in real time here
Speaker 1: on Earth. But still he said, hey, I want to
Speaker 1: see you guys do it. And there is a big
Speaker 1: response and lots of people have been attempting this in
Speaker 1: this video game. So this is a very fact based,
Speaker 1: science based video game on games. That's what it sounded like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't be able to pull off what I
Speaker 1: instantly think about, and this kind of unreal reality would
Speaker 1: be to actually put the ghost of Wu tang Rapper
Speaker 1: d ak O Cyrus. He would power it the stead
Speaker 1: of the Yarkovsky effect. It's the big baby Jesus effect.
Speaker 1: That would be pretty cool. Uh yeah, yeah, So, I
Speaker 1: mean they're they've they've got so many collaborators on this thing.
Speaker 1: They've got m I T, the multiple universities that contributed
Speaker 1: to the research, NASA, Lockeed Martin, other companies. It's we
Speaker 1: We asked her about this later, but I can't imagine
Speaker 1: being the project manager on this thing, just trying to
Speaker 1: keep everybody in uh communication and and and keep this
Speaker 1: on track. Yeah. Indeed, now we've already touched a little
Speaker 1: bit on the itinerary. It's gonna launch September eight, two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen. It's seven oh five pm eastern daylight time.
Speaker 1: It will be a position on the nose of an
Speaker 1: Atlas five rocket for launch, and it's going to orbit
Speaker 1: the Sun for a year, using Earth's gravitational field to
Speaker 1: help assess its journey to being. The only thing that
Speaker 1: I like immediately think of when I hear something like
Speaker 1: that is the old thing they do in Star Trek
Speaker 1: whenever they travel back in time, and they like it
Speaker 1: them around the Sun and somehow that works and then
Speaker 1: they go back. Yeah, this one will not be going
Speaker 1: back in time though, it's traveling through spacetime as everything is.
Speaker 1: So you want to get technical about it. Yes, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's not going to reach Banu though until and it's
Speaker 1: going to approach in August of that year. It's got
Speaker 1: rocket thrusters that will help slow it down over the
Speaker 1: course of that year, and then it will briefly touch it,
Speaker 1: like very briefly to retrieve that sample. So it's just
Speaker 1: gonna come up very slowly, touch it, grab a sample
Speaker 1: of that arm, and then move away. And it's the
Speaker 1: arm is built to release nitrogen gas that will stir
Speaker 1: up the rocks so that the surface sample will be
Speaker 1: easier to grab. And it has about three attempts worth
Speaker 1: of nitrogen on it. But obviously they're hopening, you know,
Speaker 1: just right on the first try it we'll get it
Speaker 1: all right. So that's then when did when do we
Speaker 1: get it back? One is when it's going to have
Speaker 1: a window for departure and then it's going to return
Speaker 1: to Earth in three uh And as we talk about
Speaker 1: with Amy, the sample will come back. It will be
Speaker 1: taken to the Utah Test and Training Range where it
Speaker 1: will be studied, and then after it's vigorously studied, probably
Speaker 1: for a couple of years, it will then be moved
Speaker 1: to NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. So get ready,
Speaker 1: I mean, uh, mark your calendars because that might be
Speaker 1: when it comes back. And then we'll do another episode. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about how everything panned out. Yeah, it's assuming
Speaker 1: I'm still alive. I don't know. Three feels like a
Speaker 1: long ways away. I know, you start looking at That's
Speaker 1: one of the fascinating things about these missions, right, is
Speaker 1: their their long form missions. Yeah, and I guess it's
Speaker 1: always been the case. Really, I mean look back to
Speaker 1: to to any of the the large scale mega projects
Speaker 1: in space. You know, some of the earlier ones definitely
Speaker 1: had a more accelerated time frame in many respects, but
Speaker 1: still things like like the Voider and Pioneer missions, those
Speaker 1: were those were in for the long haul. Yeah, absolutely, um,
Speaker 1: and I would imagine that if you're on these teams too,
Speaker 1: you have to think in longitudinal terms like that too.
Speaker 1: Is even in terms of staffing, right, like like some
Speaker 1: of the staff members may be older now and may
Speaker 1: not be expecting to be on the team when it
Speaker 1: comes back. They may be retired by them. So that's
Speaker 1: what we've got for you on Osiris. Those are the
Speaker 1: general facts. That's the plan, the mission, the itinerary, all
Speaker 1: the stuff that's on board it. Now we're going to
Speaker 1: talk to Dr Amy Simon and she's going to fill
Speaker 1: us in on the war complicated scientific matters behind the mission.
Speaker 1: What is it about Benner that makes the team think
Speaker 1: that it may contain clues to the origins of life?
Speaker 1: So when we were proposing the Osiros rets mission, you know,
Speaker 1: we had a choice of hundreds of thousands of asteroids
Speaker 1: to pick from, and the reason that menu stuck out
Speaker 1: in the first place is, for one thing, it's a
Speaker 1: very very dark asteroid. It's extremely black. It only reflects
Speaker 1: about three of the sunlight that that hits it UM.
Speaker 1: So you know, if you look around your room at
Speaker 1: black things, so the blackest paint at your ink to
Speaker 1: owner um, that's probably still about five six percent reflectants,
Speaker 1: so it's even blacker than that. And the reason that
Speaker 1: color is so important is that things that are black
Speaker 1: tend to have a lot of carbon on them, and
Speaker 1: most of the building blocks of life, I mean no
Speaker 1: acids um involves hydrocarbons, and so we want to find
Speaker 1: something that has a lot of carbon on it because
Speaker 1: that's our best chance of looking for those building blocks,
Speaker 1: and so that's why it was particularly interesting this asteroid UM.
Speaker 1: It was also nice because this asteroid is an Earth
Speaker 1: crossing asteroid. It's a near Earth asteroid, so it's easier
Speaker 1: to get to than some of the ones farther out
Speaker 1: in the Solar system UM. And you know, it's just
Speaker 1: an interesting object because it does cross the Earth's path
Speaker 1: and so this is the type of thing we think
Speaker 1: back in the formation of the planet and Earth that
Speaker 1: might have helped put those hydrocarbons and things that we
Speaker 1: needed for life here. So that's why we want to
Speaker 1: study this particular asteroid Okay, so, so to clarify, you
Speaker 1: mean asteroids like this potentially impacted with Earth bringing materials
Speaker 1: like this here. That's right. We we certainly know that
Speaker 1: at various points in the Solar System history and the
Speaker 1: formation of the planets, that all these bodies were floating
Speaker 1: around and a lot of them would have hit the
Speaker 1: surfaces of the planets as they were forming. Um. And
Speaker 1: we think commets brought water, for example, but we think
Speaker 1: that asteroids in particular, because those are the primitive leftover
Speaker 1: pieces from forming the Solar System, will tell us about
Speaker 1: those things that hint very early on. Okay, uh So,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I read about in the
Speaker 1: fact sheets and the research that NASA has put up
Speaker 1: online about this mission was that you're hoping that this
Speaker 1: will affect the future of space exploration as well, because
Speaker 1: you may rely on the materials that are found on
Speaker 1: asteroids like this. Can you explain that a little bit further? Sure, So,
Speaker 1: as we want to go farther out in the Solar System,
Speaker 1: particularly with people, we run into the problem that you
Speaker 1: can't bring everything with you that you need because humans
Speaker 1: require a lot of resources water for example. UM. So,
Speaker 1: what we want to do is study these objects that
Speaker 1: are on the way to more distant places and see
Speaker 1: what's on their surfaces. So, for example, if there was
Speaker 1: a big cache of water ice, that's something that a
Speaker 1: mission could go pick up and bring its water along
Speaker 1: the way instead of having to carry everything from launch
Speaker 1: all the way out. Got it, Okay? Like to look
Speaker 1: for those resources, okay, And so I'm imagining that you
Speaker 1: would either have previously identified these asteroids as water sources
Speaker 1: through telescopic means or maybe with the spectrometer like likes
Speaker 1: on Osiris Rex. Well, ideally we would have mapped out
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of near Earth asteroids so that we
Speaker 1: know those were great stopping points essentially you know, gas
Speaker 1: stations on the way. Um. But the reality is we
Speaker 1: won't be able to send a mission to every possible asteroids.
Speaker 1: So what we can also do is look at the
Speaker 1: class of asteroid. So from Earth based observations, we've been
Speaker 1: able to put asteroids in different categories, and so if
Speaker 1: we go to one and realize this category tends to
Speaker 1: have a lot of water, that's probably a good stopping point.
Speaker 1: So this is a kind of an odd ball question,
Speaker 1: But I was going through all the literature about this
Speaker 1: mission and all the devices that are part of its payload,
Speaker 1: and I have to ask, why is it that NASA
Speaker 1: loves acronyms so much. Is there a specific kind of
Speaker 1: you know, work operating procedure that makes them useful for
Speaker 1: your classification systems? So that's that's kind of a funny question. Um.
Speaker 1: There's no official policy that says everything has to be
Speaker 1: an acronym. UM, But I was thinking about this, and
Speaker 1: I think there's two different categories of why this happens.
Speaker 1: And one is of course that we like catching names,
Speaker 1: you know, and and early missions Apollo Gemini, those had
Speaker 1: obvious names. But you know, as scientists and engineers, we
Speaker 1: tend to be pretty practical when we name things, and
Speaker 1: so that the names get very complicated very quickly. And
Speaker 1: so that's sort of the practical reason for doing an
Speaker 1: acronym is that we can take something that you know,
Speaker 1: would take forever to spill out and say every time
Speaker 1: we say it, condense it down into an acronym, and
Speaker 1: then just use that as a word going forward. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of what you're seeing. And then if it
Speaker 1: happens to be catchy at the same time, even better too.
Speaker 1: For one so whose job is it to do that?
Speaker 1: Is it like somebody's sitting down and has come up
Speaker 1: with the long name and they just make it into
Speaker 1: an acronym or they try to find like like for instance,
Speaker 1: so cyrus obviously has some symbolic meaning to it. Is
Speaker 1: there like a I don't know, like some kind of
Speaker 1: public relations team that works together with you on that.
Speaker 1: Um No. A lot of times early on the names
Speaker 1: like O cyrus, you know, the science team comes up
Speaker 1: with it or the principal investigator does. But sometimes we
Speaker 1: do have naming contests. Um Benu, for example, was actually
Speaker 1: part of a contest where students got to write in
Speaker 1: what they thought it should be named and why, and
Speaker 1: you know they could have chosen an acronym in this case,
Speaker 1: they pick something along the same. Uh. You know mythology
Speaker 1: is a cyrus That worked out very well. But there's no,
Speaker 1: like I said, no official policy and you know we
Speaker 1: have fun. It cool. Yeah, that sounds great. Now, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of outside partners involved in this mission,
Speaker 1: university's companies, students, and many of NASA's own separate units.
Speaker 1: How do you manage the project between so many entities? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that can be pretty complicated. Um, the reason, you know,
Speaker 1: there's so many entities. In the first places, this is
Speaker 1: a rather big mission and there are so many parts
Speaker 1: to it, so anyone group probably couldn't handle the whole
Speaker 1: thing by themselves, so you bring in the experts for
Speaker 1: each different area. Uh. The entire mission gets managed by
Speaker 1: NASA Goddard and so our folks are in charge of
Speaker 1: making sure everything keeps running. And then on the science
Speaker 1: and the mission is really managed by University of Arizona,
Speaker 1: so they're in charge of making sure that we're going
Speaker 1: to do all the right science and that all the
Speaker 1: instruments are going to meet their requirements. So it's it's
Speaker 1: even a little bit of a distributed management actually, just
Speaker 1: to keep it all running and all the parts going smoothly. Uh.
Speaker 1: So getting back to you were talking about how heavily
Speaker 1: carbon based venu is, can you talk us through how
Speaker 1: it is that you interpret what the asteroids composition is
Speaker 1: just based on telescopic observations and then when Osirius rex
Speaker 1: get that gets there, how will the spectrometer observations either
Speaker 1: confirm or refute the interpretations you've made from telescopes. So
Speaker 1: with telescope observations even though it is an earth crossing asteroid,
Speaker 1: it doesn't get that close to us. So when we
Speaker 1: observe it from a ground based telescope, we don't see
Speaker 1: the surface in detail, and so we'll get say, for example,
Speaker 1: spectrum or imaging in different colors, and we can get
Speaker 1: some sense of what's probably on the surface. Again that
Speaker 1: this object is very black, it probably has carbon, but
Speaker 1: what we can't see is a very fine composition. So
Speaker 1: if there is that little pocket of hydrocarbons or water
Speaker 1: or some other mineral that we're interested in, we can't
Speaker 1: see that from the ground based observations because we're not
Speaker 1: really resolving the surface. We just don't have that kind
Speaker 1: of spatial resolution. So when we get there with our spectrometers,
Speaker 1: we're going to map out the entire surface, and so
Speaker 1: for example, if there's small craters, or there's little pockets
Speaker 1: of of soil and regulars that are really rich in
Speaker 1: some mineral, we'll see that when we can't see that
Speaker 1: from the earth based observation. So it's kind of taking
Speaker 1: that really distant view and zooming in now and now
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at it very up close and try
Speaker 1: to find those little pockets of of interesting material. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm particularly interested in the testing. I watched a
Speaker 1: video that I think you you might have been featured
Speaker 1: in actually talking about UM the spaceship, sorry, the spacecraft
Speaker 1: and how it's going to survive its journey and the
Speaker 1: vibration tests you've put it through. But through other research
Speaker 1: we've done here at how stuff works, I know about
Speaker 1: like creating really loud air horns to test space machinery.
Speaker 1: So what other stuff have you done to torture this
Speaker 1: thing and make sure that it can survive its journey. Yes,
Speaker 1: we we torture these spacecraft and the instruments pretty hard,
Speaker 1: um in part because you know, they have to survive
Speaker 1: the launch, and once they're out there, we can't go
Speaker 1: back and fix them. And so what we do is, UM,
Speaker 1: this is a case where we have these crazy test
Speaker 1: procedures written up where we're going to test everything to
Speaker 1: the limits we think is going to see in space,
Speaker 1: and then a little bit beyond that. And so one
Speaker 1: of the first things we do is vibration testing. And
Speaker 1: in that case, what we do is basically we're gonna
Speaker 1: shake the instrument or the spacecraft as hard as we
Speaker 1: expect to see it launch because that's typically your your
Speaker 1: biggest vibration sources, that that huge launch vehicle. So we'll
Speaker 1: shake it really hard to make sure nothing falls off,
Speaker 1: nothing breaks, everything is still working. So that's that's one
Speaker 1: of the critical tests that we do. Another one we
Speaker 1: do is is basically electromagnetic interference. So we want to
Speaker 1: make sure that none of the different instruments or spacecraft
Speaker 1: systems are going to interfere with each other, and so
Speaker 1: we'll basically blast it with different uh types of electromagnetic
Speaker 1: radiation and make sure nothing breaks. And so that's probably
Speaker 1: when you don't hear is much about make sure they
Speaker 1: electronics don't get affected by each other. Essentially, um we
Speaker 1: do as the thermal testing. That one is actually quite interesting,
Speaker 1: thermal vacuum testing, and so you know, we take things
Speaker 1: to very extremely cold temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero.
Speaker 1: And most people would probably believe that about space, that
Speaker 1: it gets that that cold, but what they don't probably
Speaker 1: consider is that we also take it to you know,
Speaker 1: four hundred degrees above zero, because things also get very
Speaker 1: hot in space, and that's because you're directly exposed to
Speaker 1: the sun with no atmosphere in between. So we don't
Speaker 1: tend to think about those temperatures here on Earth, but
Speaker 1: that atmosphere protects you from cold and hot and so
Speaker 1: we take it, you know, ridiculously cold temperatures and extremely
Speaker 1: hot temperatures and we make sure again nothing breaks. We
Speaker 1: have you know, special epoxies and seals and things like
Speaker 1: that on different parts of the spacecraft and instruments, so
Speaker 1: you want to make sure that those things aren't going
Speaker 1: to be affected by the temperature. So you know, we
Speaker 1: do this in stages. You'll do one of these tests
Speaker 1: UM for example, uh, this thermal tests, and then you'll
Speaker 1: take it's a vibration, and then you'll take it back
Speaker 1: to the thermal tests. So we do it a couple
Speaker 1: of different ways to make sure none of these things
Speaker 1: have affected any part of the spacecraft. Okay, wow, so
Speaker 1: that's yeah, that's like years of work, I would assume,
Speaker 1: doing all of that testing and making sure that it
Speaker 1: can survive all those scenarios. It is and when you know,
Speaker 1: this testing is fairly complicated. To get to those cold temperatures,
Speaker 1: we use liquid nitrogen and in some cases liquid helium
Speaker 1: even UM, and that sort of test is is fairly
Speaker 1: complicated and expensive. So it's not something that you just
Speaker 1: do during normal work hours. You have to do this
Speaker 1: testing seven because when you're in the chamber and running
Speaker 1: those things, you don't want to stop the test. So
Speaker 1: so not only is it long, it's also you know,
Speaker 1: very long hours. We have people working over night ships
Speaker 1: to do this testing. Okay, yeah that I remember reading
Speaker 1: about one of the air horns that the European Space
Speaker 1: Agency has and that could just like absolutely annihilate a
Speaker 1: human being if you were exposed to it. So we
Speaker 1: have warning like fall over the place during testing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll
Speaker 1: be right back with Dr Amy A. Simon. Hey, everybody,
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Speaker 1: stamps dot com, enter stuff and start mailing things. So
Speaker 1: the planetary defense angle of the mission has received a
Speaker 1: lot of attention recently due to frankly hysterical reports in
Speaker 1: the media about to ben whose a slim chance of
Speaker 1: hitting our then I believe the century. How big of
Speaker 1: a factor is that in this mission? And can you
Speaker 1: explain to our audience why it is a ultimately a
Speaker 1: slim chance? Right? So you know, it was not a
Speaker 1: deciding factor in which asteroid we went to um. It
Speaker 1: is an Earth crossing asteroid and it turns out it
Speaker 1: does have currently about a one um of impacting. But
Speaker 1: what people need to understand is how we come up
Speaker 1: with that number. And so when an asteroids first discovered,
Speaker 1: we have one point of data where it was in
Speaker 1: the sky, and to actually make it a discovery, we
Speaker 1: need a second point. So we follow it up. Um,
Speaker 1: we take those two points or three points however a
Speaker 1: few we have, and we actually run it through a
Speaker 1: model assuming all the gravity we know about from the
Speaker 1: planets in the Sun, and we run it forward and
Speaker 1: we basically see when it would cross the Earth orbit
Speaker 1: at the same time the Earth is nearby, and we
Speaker 1: put error bars on that, and that's how we come
Speaker 1: up with a number. And basically what happens is going forward,
Speaker 1: people take more and more observation, and so every once
Speaker 1: in a while, I see about an asteroid that has
Speaker 1: a one and one chance, one and two chance of
Speaker 1: hitting us, and then we take some more observations and
Speaker 1: suddenly it's one in a million. And it's because these
Speaker 1: things don't move in a straight line, right, So so
Speaker 1: we need more observations to basically fill in that curve
Speaker 1: and figure out where it's going to go. But there's
Speaker 1: one other factor that we don't know about, and that's
Speaker 1: how the asteroid is reacting to being pushed by sunlight effect, right,
Speaker 1: the Arkowski effect, which is actually kind of complicated where
Speaker 1: you have sunlight and in this case that the photons
Speaker 1: coming out the sun act as particles, so they exert
Speaker 1: a pressure. They're pushing on the asteroid in one direction,
Speaker 1: but especially these very black asteroids, they heat up. Now
Speaker 1: they're also rotating, so as it turns and it's cooling off,
Speaker 1: it radiates to space. Well, now it's going to get
Speaker 1: pushed in a different direction. And so it's a very
Speaker 1: very very tiny effect, but it adds up over a century,
Speaker 1: and that's a tiny little tweak on that orbit that's
Speaker 1: really hard to quantify. And so that's one of the
Speaker 1: goals of our mission is to actually measure that effect,
Speaker 1: be able to look at the incoming and outgoing radiation
Speaker 1: and figure out how much does that work, because that
Speaker 1: that's one big unknown and a lot of our models
Speaker 1: of these asteroid trajectories. It was kind of fascinating to
Speaker 1: me Amy because you know, I spent time researching all
Speaker 1: about the mission, and then it wasn't until after I
Speaker 1: had read probably for like three hours about your mission
Speaker 1: that I googled asteroid Benu, and just every news story
Speaker 1: that came up was like, oh my god, this asteroid
Speaker 1: may hit Earth, and you know, and it just was
Speaker 1: so interesting to me that to see how the media
Speaker 1: had absolutely like blown this so out of proportion for
Speaker 1: a good click baby headline. It does happen. But but
Speaker 1: again typically, and you know, we we scientists, reports the numbers,
Speaker 1: and what people do with those numbers is always you know,
Speaker 1: hard and hard to predict, I guess, but again, they
Speaker 1: tend to come out with with a very higher number,
Speaker 1: you know, one and three thousand chance, but if you
Speaker 1: looked at the uncertainty on that, it's huge, and as
Speaker 1: the uncertainty comes down on you know, it becomes that
Speaker 1: one in a million probability. So you know, we're we're
Speaker 1: again just reporting numbers and people don't necesarily understand how
Speaker 1: we interpret that. But as we get more information, typically
Speaker 1: that chance goes way down. So one last question, and
Speaker 1: this is kind of a weird one, but I'm curious
Speaker 1: is the Cyrus rex team at all concerned about the hypothetical,
Speaker 1: sort of science fiction possibility of planetary contamination from the
Speaker 1: sample being brought back to Earth from Benu. That's actually
Speaker 1: a very good question. Um. So when we have Mars missions,
Speaker 1: we worry about forward contamination. We don't want to bring
Speaker 1: Earth stuff to Mars and which would basically make it
Speaker 1: difficult for us to interpret anything we found on Mars
Speaker 1: in this case, because that surface has been exposed you
Speaker 1: know for um, you know, many millions, billions of years.
Speaker 1: We're not too worried about Earth contamination, although we do
Speaker 1: have a requirement on our spacecraft to keep it very
Speaker 1: very clean because again we want to interpret anything we
Speaker 1: see or find there um. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: coming back act, so that's you know, backwards contamination Earth
Speaker 1: is important on every sample return mission, and so this
Speaker 1: actually goes into a Level four biohazard lab. It'll be
Speaker 1: yet basically a sealed container and it won't be opened
Speaker 1: until it's in a very special safe lab. Not because
Speaker 1: we're worried about space microbes or anything really, but mostly
Speaker 1: we don't want to contaminate our sample. Um. But we
Speaker 1: we do have requirements on how the sample is handled.
Speaker 1: And there's a whole Planetary Protection office that now, so
Speaker 1: that's dedicated to this topic and tells us what we
Speaker 1: must do to make sure that we don't have contamination
Speaker 1: in either direction. Oh okay, wow. I thought that this
Speaker 1: was just maybe some kind of thing that I had
Speaker 1: cooked up in my own head that would be like
Speaker 1: a problem. But it seems like it's a very realistic
Speaker 1: thing that you have your best people working on. Oh. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: you know, And again I wasn't classified as a problem
Speaker 1: so much as we we do have people that that
Speaker 1: worry about such things and and have very strict protocols
Speaker 1: and procedures in place, just even to ensure the integrity
Speaker 1: of the science. That's great now in terms of of
Speaker 1: missions that have essentially you reached out into space and
Speaker 1: brought back material samples. Just to give everyone a little
Speaker 1: little more scope, like how does that how does this
Speaker 1: fit in with the with the collection of samples, Like
Speaker 1: how how many different samples roughly have been brought back
Speaker 1: from asteroids or the moon, et cetera. So during the
Speaker 1: Apollo years we brought back quite a few moon rocks.
Speaker 1: So that's that's a pretty big cache of of samples
Speaker 1: right there. But in that case, you know, we had
Speaker 1: astronauts who could pick them up and bring them back,
Speaker 1: so we could bring back um, I want to stay
Speaker 1: on the order of of rocks. I'm not sure the
Speaker 1: exact number, but in terms of actually doing this robotically,
Speaker 1: that's been a lot more of a challenge because you
Speaker 1: have to figure out how are you going to pick
Speaker 1: these things up. And so we have samples from the
Speaker 1: Stardust mission, which essentially used what's called aero jail to
Speaker 1: catch dust screens that flew into the spacecraft. Um, it's
Speaker 1: very tiny, tiny amounts. Uh in Genesis also did something similar,
Speaker 1: and then the Japanese mission how Abusa, brought back some
Speaker 1: grains from an asteroid surface, but again it was kind
Speaker 1: of just what they could capture without touching. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is the first mission that's actually going to try to
Speaker 1: touch the surface and pick up a pretty big sample,
Speaker 1: and so we can bring up we have a requirement
Speaker 1: for sixty grams, but we can pick up to two
Speaker 1: of soil and rocks at small rocks, and so you
Speaker 1: know that's our goal is to have a pretty big sample.
Speaker 1: This will be the first time we've done that robotically.
Speaker 1: All right, Amy, Well, thank you for joining us here
Speaker 1: on Stuffed to Boil your Mind. We really enjoyed getting
Speaker 1: to pick your brain a bit about this. Uh, this
Speaker 1: just really fascinating mission. Well, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: having me on. All right, so there you have it,
Speaker 1: an introduction to this fascinating mission o Cyrus Rex. We've
Speaker 1: got to discuss the craft, the destination and we got
Speaker 1: to talk to an expert about it. And if you
Speaker 1: want more information about it, if you want to just
Speaker 1: really get into the nitty ready and just follow the
Speaker 1: Osiris Rex odyssey, you can head on over to Asteroid
Speaker 1: Mission dot org. Yeah, they have tons of materials on
Speaker 1: their NASA's public relations team is working over time to
Speaker 1: educate us the public about what they're doing with this mission.
Speaker 1: They have like stream of blog posts up to the
Speaker 1: Dave videos and it's it's really cool. Uh And I,
Speaker 1: you know, honestly wish that we had had more time
Speaker 1: with it, but I took a good three or four
Speaker 1: hours with it to get us prep to talk to Amy.
Speaker 1: So if you have, you know, maybe some more ideas
Speaker 1: about Osiris Rex, or maybe maybe there's a mission that
Speaker 1: NASA is doing that you think we should cover, or
Speaker 1: there's something more space related that you'd like us to cover,
Speaker 1: because we just did uh moons of Saturn. We've talked
Speaker 1: about Jupiter before I personally would love to take a
Speaker 1: look at Mars' moon Phobos. Oh yeah, there are more
Speaker 1: moons out there, so we have to go check those
Speaker 1: out as well. But if you've got suggestions like that,
Speaker 1: or you just want to reach out to us, you
Speaker 1: can do that on social media. We are on on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
Speaker 1: and Instagram, all those platforms. Pretty much our handle is
Speaker 1: blow the Mind. It might be a little bit different,
Speaker 1: but you'll find us if you search for that. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you can always go to stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That is the mothership where we have everything,
Speaker 1: every podcast, every video, every article that we work on
Speaker 1: on these things. Not to mention that those social media
Speaker 1: feeds have us sharing all the weird science stuff that
Speaker 1: we come across throughout the week as well. Indeed, and
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with us the
Speaker 1: old fashioned way, if you want to hit us up
Speaker 1: with an email, you can find us at blow the Mind,
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com well more. Almost the
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