You Can Be a Real-Life Bruce Willis!

Learn about Near Earth Objects and how asteroids can pose a threat to our planet. Dr. Ed Lu, co-founder and CEO of the B612 Foundation and former NASA astronaut, explains how the Sentinel Space Telescope will keep us from going the way of the dinosaurs!

Transcript

1. astroEdLu #B612
2. I’m Ed. #B612
3. I’ve been to space. Three times. #B612
4. Why am I here today? #B612
5. #B612 On February 15, 2013, a meteor exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk.
6. #B612 “How much warning did the people of Chelyabinsk have?”
7. #B612 “None…. We didn’t see it coming. It was coming from the general direction of the sun.”
8. #B612 “So, how did you nd out about it?”
9. #B612 “Twitter and Youtube.”
10. The asteroid was only 20 meters, slightly bigger than this room. #B612
11. Yet it weighed more than the Eiffel Tower #B612 Wikipedia/NonOmnisMoriar
12. It hit Earth traveling 50 times faster than a bullet. #B612
13. That’s fast enough to y from SF to LA in about 30 seconds. (Or, fast enough to cross San Francisco in less than 0.6 seconds!)
14. Kinetic energy F=½mv² #B612
15. The Chelyabinsk asteroid released 30x the energy of the Hiroshima bomb
16. The people of Chelyabinsk were lucky. #B612
17. It exploded three times higher than commercial jets y. This high. The low angle dissipated most of the blast energy into the atmosphere before reaching the ground.
18. A 40m rock can destroy the entire Bay Area. #B612
19. This has happened before. Tunguska,1908: A 40m rock levels everything for 830 square miles.
20. These events are rare, right? #B612
21. The stakes are this: #B612
22. Asteroids hit the Earth– just look at the moon. #B612
23. #B612 That’s what Earth would look like without erosion.
24. #B612 And losing a major city could do global economic damage.
25. There’s probably a question in your mind, so I’ll just answer it… #B612
26. …because Bruce Willis isn’t a real astronaut and Michael Bay doesn’t have a PhD in applied physics.
27. Actually, asteroid de ection is easy. #B612
28. In 2002, I co-founded the B612 Foundation to save Earth from asteroids. For those of you who’ve read The Little Prince, you might get the reference…
30. B612 started out researching asteroid de ection. #B612
31. All you have to do is change its velocity by a few mm/second. #B612
32. Here’s two options: - Hit it with a small spacecraft (Deep Impact) - Use a gravity tug—a small spacecraft using gravity to pull asteroid over many months #B612
33. If de ection is easy, why am I here? #B612
34. You can’t stop what you can’t see. #B612
35. Here’s the big picture: #B612
36. #B612 We’ve discovered 10,665 Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) total. And that’s less than 1% of how many there actually are. And we’re playing cosmic roulette with them. I’ll let you in on a secret. We’re not the house.
37. We know asteroids follow a power law distribution. #B612
38. That is, there are a few large asteroids #B612
39. Many medium size asteroids #B612
40. #B612 And a “Trouble with Tribbles” number of small asteroids
41. As of today, only 10,665 Near Earth Asteroids have been discovered. #B612
42. But there are ~1 million asteroids large enough to destroy a city. #B612
43. #B612 It’s like crossing the street, and the cars are driving by at 10-20 miles a second. except only 1% of the cars are visible Wikipedia/Ravenperch
44. #B612 So why doesn’t somebody just go and nd all of these asteroids?
45. #B612 Senator Nelson: “Maybe we should have Bruce Willis do another Armageddon movie to raise awareness…”
46. #B612 And this is how Congress looks at the issue…
47. #B612 If you want to understand priorities, you just have to look at budgets. $20M/year is spent on asteroid detection and de ection.
48. #B612 Members of Congress have a free postage perk that they spend $45M/year on.
49. If it’s everybody’s problem, it’s nobody’s problem. #B612 Wikipedia/John Snape
50. Finding asteroids is the hard part! #B612
51. We know the orbits of the most of the 1km+ asteroids. #B612
52. But below that size, we really have no idea. #B612 CALL ME MAYBE?
53. And you must know an asteroid’s velocity to within a few mm/second. #B612
54. And you must do this a decade or more in advance. #B612
55. Early detection makes asteroid de ection easy. #B612
56. The 3 rules for protecting Earth from asteroids: Find them early, nd them early, and nd them early. #B612
57. Three years ago, I was giving a tech talk at Google. #B612
58. Somebody came up to me after the talk and asked, #B612
59. So, how much would it cost to build a telescope to nd those asteroids? #B612
60. So you’re telling me that if the people of San Francisco can raise $450M to build the wing of an art museum… #B612
61. You can’t raise less than that to save the world? #B612
62. #B612 Sentinel Sentinel is our delivery truck sized space telescope…
63. Asteroids are hard to see: They’re small They’re dark And they’re far away #B612
64. It’s being built by the best team on the planet. (Even better than Bruce Willis.) #B612 Here’s a piece of a meteorite, same composition as an asteroid. Very dark, really hard to see in visible light.
65. It’s being built by the best team on the planet. (Even better than Bruce Willis.) #B612 But when I use my infrared camera, wow, it shows right up! This is the advantage Sentinel has for infrared detection of asteroids.
66. Sentinel’s being built by the best team on the planet. (Even better than Bruce Willis.) #B612
67. Our team has over 400 years experience building and operating spacecraft. #B612
68. More than 2/3 of all successful interplanetary missions own from Planet Earth were led by someone on our team. #B612
69. #B612 Sentinel will use Venus to insert into a Venus-like orbit. That saves money. And allows Sentinel to see asteroids we can’t see from Earth: Asteroids between the Earth and the Sun, and ones on the other side of the sun.
70. Sentinel will increase asteroid detection rate from 1K per year to over 100K per year. #B612
71. We humans now have a ghting chance the dinosaurs didn’t. #B612
72. Even NASA is donating help with this. #B612
73. NASA is letting us use the Deep Space Network.
74. In exchange, we’re making all our data public. #B612
75. U.S. Air Force/Michael Peterson Sentinel launches in July 2018 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. #B612 NASA/Alan Ault
76. 100 years ago, we knew almost nothing about asteroids… #B612 NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
77. Asteroids are the rst natural disaster humans can prevent. #B612
78. 100 years ago, if we were wiped out by an asteroid, that would have just been bad luck. Today, if we are hit by a major asteroid, that is not bad luck anymore, it’s negligence. #B612
79. There are two distinguishing things about Sentinel: #B612
80. 1. It’s non-governmental, being done by a private organization #B612
81. Because the government isn’t. #B612
82. And because we can. #B612
83. And #2 #B612
84. We’re funding it philanthropically. #B612
85. Because we have the technology to prevent our own extinction. #B612
86. And the craziest thing we can do is nothing. #B612
87. If SF MOMA can raise $450 million dollars for a new art wing… #B612
88. Don’t tell me we can’t raise less than that to save the world. #B612
89. You can be real-life Bruce Willis. #B612
90. Donate $50 https://b612foundation.org/donate #B612
91. Also, we have 0.007% as many followers as Justin Bieber. Help us change that? @b612foundation #B612
92. Thanks! https://speakerdeck.com/ edlu/you-can-be-a-real-life- bruce-willis @astroEdLu @b612foundation #B612