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Violent and volatile, our 4 12 billiony old sun becomes more dangerous as it ages. The sun's chaotic behavior threatens technology across the planet. Weather forecasting, communication, banking, the internet, all of that would be damaged if not destroyed by a big solar storm. The warning system that we have in place now is better than nothing. Certainly. Um, is it enough? I would say no. This desert boasts a striking geological formation. Meanwhile, a prime tourist destination. Even a layman will guess that here some violent cataclysm has inscribed itself in the geological record. But he is not a layman.
Christian Cobberl from Vienna University is an impact expert and this feature is among his specialties. Its name says it all. Christian tries to visualize the scale of an event that would leave behind such a crater. About 50,000 years ago, an asteroid was hurtling towards Earth with a speed of maybe 15 20 kilometers per second and it was crashing through the atmosphere and the asteroid was buring into the ground a little bit and then exploding. The energy that was released was so large that within a few seconds a crater about 20 times the diameter of the asteroid itself was excavated. Not only
the energies involved which are about 1,000 times that of a Hiroshima atomic bomb, but also the speed with which all this happens. So this is something that we don't see anywhere else in the geological record. There are no other geological processes that can do things like this. Meteor crater is the best preserved meteorite impact site on Earth. Upon impact, the meteorite vaporized almost completely. Huge chunks of bedrock lie scattered around the crater rim. Other bits were hurled several miles into the surrounding landscape. moonrise in the night sky, Earth's natural satellite, is itself the result of a cosmic crash.
The assumption is that a small body called Thea collided with young planet Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. The debris hurled into space was eventually compacted into a new object, a natural satellite circling the young earth. Some 4.1 billion years ago, this new moon suffered a phase of massive bombardment. This bombardment has pockmarked the face of the moon forever. Over billions of years, meteorite showers have continued to scar the lunar surface. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is taking a close look at the moon. Its craters are carved in stone. Without atmosphere or liquid water, there is no erosion. So, the scars remain unchanged until new collisions create more craters.
The young earth was also hit by countless meteorites. They brought precious gifts from the universe. Gold, platinum, and iridium. Cosmic missiles have continued to leave ever knew traces on our planet. And yet, very few impact craters are known. A mere 180. Why is that? On the one hand, almost 3/4 of the Earth's surface is ocean. On the other, impact traces on land have been eroded and erased by water, wind, and ice. But cosmic missiles are still peppering the Earth. And we can even see them shooting stars and fireballs in the night sky.
February 15th, 2013. Out of the ethereal blue over Russia's Chelmen's region, a giant fireball suddenly appears. A cosmic body has approached undetected. The location of the impact is in Russia, east of the Eural Mountains near the Kazakhstan border. It's an asteroid about 66 ft in diameter and it explodes in the Earth's atmosphere near the city of Chelavinsk. The massive shock wave of the exploding meteoroid shatters windows and glass fronts of thousands of buildings. Even a factory roof collapses. The total damage is enormous.
This incident left some 1500 people injured, mostly from flying glass. It's an historic event. Never before in recorded history has a civilization been hit so dramatically by a cosmic body. Fortunately, this cosmic bomb never hit the ground, but exploded up in the atmosphere some 15 m high. Here is an event happening that uh shows us that this is not just a theoretical subject, one that happens every few million years in Earth history. It happens now. It happens all the time and it is something that we can learn a lot from. This gravel pit of the solar system is the scene of frequent collisions which send asteroids on trajectories close to Earth.
Some of these near-Earth objects or NEOs are potential threats to our planet. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the main center for detecting and tracking near-Earth objects. Don Yman's is head of the NEO program. Well, it's uh nearearth object uh potential impacts is a relatively new field because until the 1990s, astronomers really weren't looking for these objects. And it was only about 1998 when NASA supported facilities started looking every night for these objects that we discovered so many. So, it's comforting to me now that we are looking and we are finding these objects and once we find them, we can track them with additional observations. We can
compute their orbits, trace their trajectories for 100 years into the future and see if there's any interesting close Earth approaches or there any uh possible impacts. These radar images show the asteroid 2012 DA14. By coincidence, on the same day a meteorite air blasted over Russia, this 130 ft object was also heading towards the Earth. The asteroid passed above Indonesia at a distance of only about 18,000 miles within the orbits of geostationary satellites. Such small objects that are in the 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 meter range, they can come anytime out of the blue sky. And I think this is one of the main messages that the events uh on the 15th of
February 2013 tell us. There's a lot out there. Let's watch out. Mount Halakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui. 10,000 ft above sea level, astronomers are searching for near-earth objects. The centerpiece of the international pan stars project is a unique telescope. PS1 is a giant wide angle lens. It surveys a much larger section of the sky than normal telescopes. Pan stars is also equipped with the world's biggest digital camera. Each image has 1,400 megapixels, roughly 100 times the resolution of an average SLR camera.
The telescope is operated from the control center at the foot of Mount Halakala, an hour's drive from the summit. Um, each night surveys are coordinated from here. The telescope captures huge sections of the sky with extreme accuracy. In addition, the system scans for moving or changing objects. 140 150. In this search for near-Earth objects, sections of the sky are defined and systematically surveyed. The telescope scans each field twice at 15minute intervals. The result is a massive amount of data to be processed by astronomers at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
Hand stars any other discoveries at the time of discovery. So officially the telescope on Mount Halakala has been in operation since May 2010. Meanwhile, some 300 near-Earth objects have been detected. Max, Larry Deno uses a special program to visualize newly discovered NEOs. The red paths show those near-earth asteroids and comets discovered by pan stars. Several of them seem to almost touch the Earth, but this image only shows one level. Many objects speed past far above or below it without endangering Earth. The scientists have ways to spot suspicious objects in their images.
We do a mathematical operation we call image subtraction from those using those two images. And what you're left over with when you do an image subtraction is something that's moving will have positive pixels in the first image and negative pixels in the second image. So on the screen we have the first image which is what the sky would look like if pan stars took a picture of it. 15 minutes later we have the same part of sky. Um and there's an asteroid in the data that's hard to see but it's moved a little bit in those 15 minutes. And when we subtract the second image from the first, most of the stars disappear. And what you have in the middle is this asteroid that's moved a little bit over the 15 minutes.
According to a new NASA study, there are approximately 5,000 potentially hazardous asteroids wider than 300 ft. So far, the search programs have only been able to identify one out of four. What we need is are telescopes like pan stars that have very wide fields of view that can be read out very quickly that have a lot of data processing capabilities so that you can analyze the images very quickly and uh detect the asteroids efficiently. So we know how to do that but having bigger telescopes having more telescopes and also having some small telescopes that have extremely wide fields of view that can image the entire sky every single night could be really important.
A second Panstar's telescope is already in development. Black holes were once just a theory, a prediction made by Einstein. Now we know they control galaxies and power the brightest lights in the cosmos. But they still hide a secret. Something that even Einstein couldn't see. What happens if we venture inside the event horizon, the boundary surrounding a black hole from which light cannot escape?
I think that would be a pretty cool mission. Just the idea of exploring something like that, I think that would be quite an opportunity for the astronauts of the future. We actually have a pretty good understanding of what happens outside of a black hole. But we don't know what happens at that final split second, that shaved slice of time when you pass that point of no return and hit the event horizon. In Scotland, a remarkable experiment intends to reveal what's beyond the event horizon. It's the brainchild of Danielle Fatio.
It's basically unexplored territory and that's where we can really push the boundaries of our knowledge. Fatio doesn't use a telescope and he's not an astronaut. Instead, he makes black holes in his lab. His key ingredient is light. We have extremely powerful lasers which force the light to start to behave and start to flow as if it were a fluid. Near a black hole, space also flows like a fluid. It moves towards the event horizon like a river heading downstream. Imagine a flowing body of water and you're trying to swim against this flow.
What you'll feel is the river will try to drag you along with it. And this is exactly what a gravitational field is doing outside the black hole. Vacio forces light into a tight whirlpool. Just like matter descending into a real black hole. and he's making scientific breakthroughs. When he fires a wave of light towards one of his black holes, something strange happens. You can see these waves, which aren't moving. They're essentially frozen at the boundary of the horizon that we've generated.
These frozen waves confirm a prediction of Einstein's most famous theory, relativity. Einstein thought that near a black hole, gravity would start stretching time. A second would expand to years or even centuries. Seen from a distance, objects would seem frozen in time. Exactly what Fatio sees with his experimental black holes. He is confident the same thing happens in space. If you were to observe a spaceship or someone falling into a black hole from very far away, you would actually never see that person pass through the event horizon. You would see them
approach the event horizon. time as seen from us would slow down and we'd see them slow down and essentially remain frozen on the event horizon forever. But the astronauts inside the spaceship wouldn't notice time being stretched. They'd experience the same gravity changes as their surroundings. For them, time passes normally while gravity drags them to the event horizon. Even Einstein didn't know what happens next. But Fatio thinks his experiment will one day solve this scientific mystery.
It's as if this was a slice directly through the sphere of a real black hole. This allows him to see beyond the event horizon and prove the inner workings of a black hole for the first time. This is really exciting. I think this is where all the new physics is hiding. With this new scientific knowledge, we would finally explain what happens inside a black hole. For now, what lies beyond the event horizon remains a mystery. Some think there's a fiery inferno. It could be like a giant firewall that everything gets sucked in at once that all smashes together and kind of vaporizes in a big explosion.
Others predict something called a singularity. It's where all space and time converge into a single point. And time too, time comes to a stop, which is crazy to think about. While some think the black hole spaghettifies everything that enters. If you go into a black hole feet first, then the force of gravity at your feet will be much stronger than the force of gravity at your head. And you get stretched out into this long thin strip till eventually your molecules break apart and your atoms break apart. And you basically go into the black hole as a thin strip of vapor. But theoretically, there could be something even stranger out there.
Instead of sucking matter in, it spits it out into a frantic volcano of energy. White holes could open up new horizons for humanity. One of the amazing properties of black holes and white holes is that sometimes they can link to form a wormhole. And when that happens, you can enter the black hole at one place in the universe and exit the white hole at a very different place. So in essence, the black hole sucks you in and the white hole spits you out. The beauty of a wormhole is that it allows us to travel vast distances in almost no time at all.
Imagine if I wanted to travel to the Milky Way galaxy that in this example is at this end of the paper to the Andromeda galaxy at this end of the paper. That's 2 million light years. Even if I traveled at the speed of light, it would take me 2 million years. But with a wormhole, you can bend space sufficiently that you can go from this side to that side in almost no time at all. Entering a wormhole would make unimaginable journeys possible. We could take trips in days or even hours that would previously take billions of years.
Barreling through this tear in the fabric of space. The white hole would catapult you out in a completely different place and maybe even time. If we can overcome one technical obstacle. The problem is as soon as you enter the mouth of a wormhole, it collapses. It's like trying to get inside of a soap bubble. As soon as you pierce that bubble, it pops. So, there have been some scientists who say, "Gee, maybe there's a way we can stop them from disappearing." What do you do if you're at a restaurant and your table is a little bit wobbly and your drinks keep spilling? Well, you wedge something under it to make it so it doesn't shake and it's nice and
stable. It's possible that something like that might exist for wormholes. The cosmos is full of minute particles like electrons and protons. When they interact, they project short-lived bursts of energy. Scientists called them virtual particles and believe these surges in power could pry open a wormhole. It sounds like science fiction, but in Los Angeles, a group of scientists is attacking the problem. Umar Mohedin is building a device he hopes could allow humans to enter a wormhole. It's exciting to be doing this kind of research. I mean it's very motivating and there is the opportunity to make uh new discoveries. You know that's part of
the excitement of doing the research. A component deep inside his machine has the power to revolutionize space exploration. a microscopic metal ball. Umar mounts this sphere next to a metal plate, leaving only a minute gap between them. The separation is very small. In this case, on the order of a micron, which is about a 50th of the width of your hair. So, it's awfully small separation distance. This tiny gap traps virtual particles. And Umar thinks we can use these bursts of energy to try and force open a wormhole.
This is a frontier that you're trying to understand physical phenomena and properties of nature that are still under debate. That's part of the excitement. Umar's device only generates minute forces, To pry open a wormhole, we'd have to build a huge metal sphere millions of miles wide. Then build another one right next to it, no further away than a single atom. Finally, we'd have to drop both spheres right into the mouth of a black hole. Then we could travel to the furthest corners of the universe. When humanity has been able to expand the range over which we can travel and look and see and come to comprehend
that has always led to new knowledge that we've used to increase the quality of human life. Mastering wormholes would likely continue that process. Just because we don't have the technology today, that doesn't mean we're not going to have it in the future. Think about it. It was just about a hundred years ago that the Wright brothers took to the air. Even if wormholes don't exist, even if wormholes can't exist, the mathematics, the science, the physics of figuring them out theoretically can lead to new discoveries and things that we can use, things that do exist and that can
benefit humanity. It is always worth investigating things like this. It's why we call it exploration. The summit of Monacaya, the giant volcano on Hawaii's Big Island, home to some of the Earth's most powerful telescopes. This is where astronomers keep watch on the night skies, looking for asteroids and comets that threaten the Earth. Astronomer Rob Werrick is part of this vitally important search. At the end of my email signature, I just write Guardian of Earth. It's kind of a joke between my colleagues and me. My official title is planetary defense researcher, but we're basically looking to protect the planet from hazardous asteroids and comets. On October 19th, 2017, Rob spots a mysterious object streaking through
space like a rogue missile. We actually had a new candidate detection. It was moving very fast. It appeared as a streak in the image. The object is moving so fast that it appears as a faint gray line. At this speed, it will hit the Earth with more force than a nuclear bomb, powerful enough to destroy a city. Rob and the team set up camp at the Canada France Hawaii telescope to plot the object's trajectory. The data they capture confirms that this object is heading away from our planet.
The Earth is safe for now, but the object's orbit is unlike anything Rob has seen before. Everything that belongs in our solar system travels in closed loops around the sun. The sun holds the planets in near circular orbits. Smaller bodies like comets move in vast elliptical orbits that take them to the edges of the solar system before looping back towards the sun. But Rob's data reveals that this mysterious object is different. Its orbit is open, not closed. This means that it must come from outside the solar system, from interstellar space. It's our first confirmed alien visitor.
Astronomers named it Omua Mua, Hawaiian for messenger. It's an incredible discovery. And that's what really told us right then that this object came from outside the solar system. Mulo was like nothing we had ever seen before. And think about that. That's literally true. This was actually a completely alien object. And you know that day I kind of got shivers, right? But a MUA travels so fast that astronomers have just weeks to study it before it disappears beyond the reach of Earth's telescopes. The best estimate we had, we would see it for about 2 or 3 weeks. So we had to get as much data as we could as soon as we could on as many telescopes as we could.
It's now a race against time to learn as much about a MUA as possible. Astronomers start with the most important question. What is OMOA MUA? The main candidates are two forms of space debris routinely hurled out of developing solar systems. When our solar system first formed, we think that a huge number of comets and asteroids were ejected away by Jupiter, its gravity. This must have happened around other stars as well. In all likelihood, Omu Mua is an interstellar asteroid or comet. Could a Muam Mua be an asteroid or comet tossed into interstellar space during the birth of an alien solar system?
Astronomer Meg Schwab studies asteroids and comets in our solar system. She and her team race to observe the object using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. Astronomers hope to get an idea of Omuamu's shape and size, a vital clue as to what it is. There are no telescopes powerful enough to determine the size and shape directly. All they have to go on is the fact that Omuamu's dimensions affect how much light it reflects back towards Earth. This is actually data from many, many telescopes from around the world watching Omu. So this is brightness over
time. It gets brighter and fainter and brighter again. What could make the light from a Mua brighten and dim? Rob thinks it's because of the object's shape and the way it's moving. If you can imagine this shape here, you're looking on the longest edge. It has the greater surface area. This reflects more light. But when you look at the smaller end, it doesn't reflect as much light. Therefore, it's not going to appear as bright. So this is similar to a mumu where we think it's a very elongated object and as it's tumbling through space, the different size of the reflective surface gives you the variation in brightness you see.
Astronomers use this difference in light to determine exactly how elongated and how big a Mua is. Based on the variation in the light curve of Muam Mua, we know that it's approximately a length to width ratio of 6:1. Amua Mua is six times longer than it is wide. This makes it exceptionally tall and thin. It soarses between 650 to 785 ft high. It's a skyscraper that could be as big as the Empire State Building tumbling through our solar system. Determining Amuam Mui's shape is a fantastic bit of detective work, but astronomers are no closer to saying whether the alien
visitor is an asteroid or a comet because they've never seen anything with this shape before. Astronomers scrambled to explain what Muam Mua is. First up, could it be an asteroid? Investigators turned to lab experiments to try to solve this mystery. Planetary scientist Peter Schultz has spent his career recreating violent collisions in space. He wants to know if an almighty collision can make a rocky splinter the size and shape of Mua. Muam Mua is really interesting because we've never seen an asteroid that is shaped like a cigar. That's just strange. And so we have to figure out why.
At the NASA Ames vertical gun range, planetary scientist Peter Schultz uses a giant hypervelocity gun to recreate some of the most violent collisions in the solar system to understand the forces at work. Here we are at the NASA as vertical gun range. It's a allows us to fire projectiles at 22 times the speed of sound. Over the last 40 years, Peter's investigated everything from moon-shaping collisions to determining what type of impact killed the dinosaurs. Most of Peter's epic collisions create short and lumpy debris, shaped like most of the asteroids seen in our solar system. But drawing on his experience, Peter believes that one very specific type of collision might just generate something
that looks long and thin, like a MUA, the first interstellar visitor to our solar system. Right now, we are in the impact chamber. This is where we slam into things. This is our projectile, which represents an asteroid. And today, we're going to be slamming into the cylinder. Now imagine that this is a planet or another asteroid. It will be coming in and slamming in an oblique angle. Charges loaded. That's good to go. Ready to bring the gun up. Peter believes that as the small body smashes into the larger object at an angle, the glancing blow could create
something the shape of a Mua, but the shot has to be incredibly precise to work. Okay, we are arc and reset. My voltage is on. Firing paddles in. Here we go. Rolling. Whoa. Yep, we hit it. Okay, this went well. The projectile successfully slams into the cylinder at 22 times the speed of sound. But has the ferocious impact generated any fragments the shape of a MUA. These are actual fragments of the projectile itself. These black shapes are pieces of the now shattered ball bearing. There's a fragment here that's elongate.
A fragment here that's elongate. That's almost a 5:1 ratio. So this is a fragment that looks very much like a raw. As it slams into the cylinder, the top half of the small ball shears off and breaks into long thin shards a similar shape to a mua. We've basically shown here that it's possible to produce an elongate fragment from an impact between two bodies. These sorts of omua mua forming collisions are thought to happen in the violent conditions that exist when a solar system is born. As a solar system forms, a dense cloud of material swirls around a young star. Inside the cloud, asteroids collide, throwing out a barrage of rocky fragments.
Some of them are long and thin, just like a Mua. But in the maelstrom of a young solar system, they don't last long. After multiple collisions, only a small fraction of the thin fragments survive. And even fewer escape into interstellar space. It's certainly possible that an asteroid the size and shape of a Mua can escape from a developing solar system. But these shards survive so rarely that astronomers can't say for sure if OMUA MUA is an asteroid. With time running out, astronomers must investigate the other options. Omo MUA is getting fainter every single day, every single hour. So, the race is on to collect as much information as we can before it fades forever into nothingness. As the alien visitor speeds
away, is there any evidence that it could be an icy comet or perhaps an alien spaceship on a mission to explore other worlds, violent and volatile, our 4 billionyear-old son becomes more dangerous as it ages. The sun's chaotic behavior threatens technology across the planet. weather forecasting, communication, banking, the internet, all of that would be damaged if not destroyed by a big solar storm. The warning system that we have in place now is better than nothing, certainly. Um, is it enough? I would say no. But the sun offers clues that can help us predict its behavior.
Pulling away the loose gases of the sun's atmosphere reveals black discs the size of a planet that drift on a layer of boiling plasma. Slicing through them reveals they are more than skin deep. Areas of darkened plasma extend far below, stretching thousands of miles into the sun's interior. Whenever you see these spots, you know that the magnetic field is very intense and very violent in those areas. So when you see lots of sunspots, you will also see flares and prominences and things being thrown off the sun. But by the time we see sunspots from
Earth, we can already be under attack. How these dark patches form could be the missing link in predicting solar storms. At the University of Birmingham, Bill Chaplan is on a mission to increase solar warning times from minutes to days. Bill thinks the key is not just watching the sun, but also listening to it. And just below the visible surface of the sun, then the gas is very turbulent. So there are lots of very rapid changes in pressure. The gas is whizzing everywhere. And what that does is it makes sound. And what we're doing is we're actually measuring the effects of these sound waves inside the sun.
Bill's network of six observatories around the world detects the sun's surface moving back and forth and records the sound this motion creates. These realtime sounds reveal what is happening below the surface. If he can identify what causes the sound waves, Bill can predict when the sunspots will occur. Bill believes the source of these sounds lies deep inside the sun where sunspots are born. 40,000 m down, huge convection currents swirl the plasma in endless circles. When magnetic disturbances touch the currents, the plasma cools and darkens
before rising at 1300 mph, creating turbulent sound waves. Two days later, it emerges as a sunspot. A warning that a deadly eruption could be just days away. For Bill, recording the sound of the sun is the easy part. Determining what the data means is the real challenge. So the sun is playing these notes all the time. But if those the notes get a little bit higher or lower, it's telling us about ways in which the conditions in the sun are changing. So if the sun were to get a bit more active, then the sound of the note might get a little bit higher. And then as the sun goes into a less active phase, when it's much quieter, the sound will be lower.
The goal now is to predict the sun's behavior several days in advance. In terms of being able to predict what's happening in the future, the more we carry on listening to the sun, uh, the more we will understand about it. Sunspots do more than unlock the mysteries of our own star. They also highlight just how odd our solar system is compared to the rest of the cosmos. Evolving here on the Earth, we've developed this wonderful blind spot. We sort of look at the conditions around us and we say, "Hey, those must be the normal conditions for the rest of the universe." But in fact, there are some
ways that we are substantially different from the norm. And one is that we only have one star in our solar system. Most stars in the sky live in binary star systems where there would be two stars. When you have two stars living together, evolving together, there's no reason the relationship has to be equal. There's a seriously dysfunctional relationship playing out only 90 light years from Earth. VW CPI. It's not just one star, but two joined together. The smaller parasitic twin slowly feeds off the bigger one, which drives the stars magnetic fields crazy.
This creates so many star spots that more than half of VWCI surface is cloaked in darkness. The sun contains over 99% of all the mass in the solar system. It produces 9 million times the United States annual energy consumption every second. The source of this enormous power lies deep inside the sun. The core 10 times denser than lead. It burns at 27 million degrees F and behaves like a gas. Extreme pressure fuses hydrogen atoms into helium, spitting out the energy of 100 billion tons of dynamite every second.
This gigantic thermonuclear warhead powers all life on our planet. When you get up in the morning and flip on a light switch, turn on your computer, get in your car and turn it on, you're using energy that was generated by the sun and has been stored here on Earth for tens or even hundreds of millions of years. A team of engineers prepares to harvest the sun's energy with a radically new type of power plant. It's a solar plant, but it's not a solar plant you're normally used to. It's not the panels you see on people's houses. It's different than most anything you've ever seen. For solar engineer Stacy Browning, the sun is her most important resource.
to harness the sun's rays. Stacy's team uses over 300,000 mirrors to power more than 140,000 homes. They're called the solar field. These don't absorb the heat and the energy from the sun. These are mirrors. They truly reflect the sun's rays up onto this boiler. And we boil water, we make steam, and we make electricity. The mirrors funnel the sun's energy particles to a single point four stories high. It's called a power tower. It turns water into steam at 1,000°, driving three turbines to produce electricity.
Harnessing sunlight this way requires ultimate accuracy. If the mirrors miss their target, the turbines will grind to a halt. So, the accuracy of the mirrors out here in the field is one of the most important things. When all of these were put in, they were geollocated and had to be within half an inch of the planned location. The light hitting the tower left the sun only 8 minutes earlier. But this was just the final stage in an epic journey that began a millennia ago. Before light can emerge from the surface of the sun, it must undergo an incredible transformation. It all starts deep in the heart of our star.
The nuclear furnace in the core expels energy as lethal gamma radiation. Unfiltered, straight from the core, these rays would destroy life on Earth. But there's more to the sun than just the core. A layer of plasma 10 times denser than rock wraps around the core. As radiation squeezes through the dense body of the sun, it becomes less and less aggressive. And after 170,000 years, it finally reaches the surface, transformed into the sunlight we see. Capturing this sunlight at the solar field isn't easy. With the planted maximum capacity, Stacy discovers an issue. One of the mirrors has stopped pointing at the power tower. She heads to the solar field to track down the rogue reflector.
ID number is hotel echo Charlie. I will put it back in its original state. Thank you. 140,000 homes rely on the power the field generates. All better. An average of 340 days of sunshine a year makes Stacy's plant the perfect way to harness the sun's energy. Our sun is not the only star in the cosmos with such a huge energy output. The sun is really close and so therefore it has a huge consequence for life here on Earth. It looks big compared to the other stars, but actually the sun is a really small star. There are some absolute monsters out there.
One of the most extreme monsters in the galaxy lurks 250 lighty years away from Earth. The giant star Bellatrix. Six times bigger than our sun. It shines 4,000 times brighter with its blue fire. Bellatrix burns its fuel so fiercely it will live fast and die young. If the lifetime of our sun were a single day. Bellatrix would only live for a few minutes. Our star may be small but its stable core means that it will continue burning steadily for 5 billion more years. The cheeks impact proves a single asteroid strike could wipe out an entire species. To protect ourselves, we need to know
more about the threat. And as we discover more about asteroids, we could also unlock the secrets of our universe. Asteroids are remnants from the earliest stages of the evolution of the solar system. Studying them tells us about our own world, the processes that gave rise to Earth. If you go to an asteroid, you can actually pluck out a piece of the solar system very close to its birth. So, one of the fascinating explorations is to form a mission to go to an asteroid. Here in Denver, Colorado, a team of scientists prepares to launch an unmanned probe to study an asteroid in more detail than ever before.
Tim Lynn is the project's chief systems engineer. So, we've done a lot of groundbased measurements of asteroids and other bodies throughout our solar system. But what we've never been able to do is actually go grab a sample, bring it back to Earth, and then discover where we really came from as a solar system. These samples could contain pristine minerals from billions of years ago. The minerals could help scientists understand the conditions that went into the making of our solar system. The spacecraft's mission is to pull up alongside a spinning asteroid, use its articulated arm to touch the surface, collect a sample, and stow it in a removable capsule, which will travel back to Earth.
First task, choose the right asteroid. We actually have 500,000 asteroids in our main asteroid belt. And of those, there's a small number of them that actually made it close to Earth, which we call near-Earth asteroids. And those are the ones that we really were interested in. The team needs a rock that is close enough, big enough, and slow enough for their lander to make contact. The probe's target is an asteroid, 1600 ft wide. It's called Bennu. Bennu's orbit will bring it within 190,000 m of Earth, closer than the moon.
It's not just one lump of rock. Beneath its loose, dusty shell is a cluster of boulders and rubble. Held in place by a gravitational field 10 million times weaker than Earth's. Bennu's carbon-rich rocks are perfectly preserved. And now, for the first time, scientists will be able to take a closer look. On its mission, the space probe captures highresolution images of Bennu's surface. A team here at the University of Arizona is designing the onboard cameras. Bashar Risk knows that space will push the cameras to their limits.
We're going to a place that humanity's never been before. We think we know what we're going to expect, but we don't really know. The team was under huge pressure to have their equipment ready for the mission's 2016 launch. The planets wait for nobody. You these deadlines that we're working to are hard deadlines, okay? It's very rare that you're going to be able to wait a year and then be able to pick up where you left off and go on the mission that you thought you'd be going on. The spacecraft has three cameras on board to photograph the surface of the asteroid and search for a suitable landing site. Okay, let's take some data.
We go to new places hoping we'll learn something so compelling that it'll force us to reexamine the way we think about any number of fields. The team hopes that their images of Bennu will tell us more about the history of our own planet. 4.6 billion years ago. As the sun begins to form, the early solar system swirls with gas and dust. Inside this giant spinning disc, particles of dust fuse to become rocks and boulders. they stick together and the boulders get bigger. Over millions of years, the collisions in this dust cloud will form the planets. The rocks left over become the asteroids like Bennu.
This mission isn't just about photographing Bennu. The team also plans to bring a piece of it back to Earth. In Denver, a second team tests the probe's mechanical arm. This arm is really the heart of the mission. It's the one that's actually going to go grab the sample, capture the sample inside the mechanism, stow the sample into our sample return capsule, and then bring that back. All right. The team plans to analyze over 2 ounces of asteroid dust to learn more about the chemical conditions of the very early solar system. Tim hopes this could explain how planets form and even how life began.
This will be the biggest sample of this kind of asteroid that we've ever been able to get. And so I know we'll be rewriting the textbooks. You're really bringing back billion-year-old information that is going to truly change what we know about our solar system, about the history of our solar system. But Bennu's easy to reach location also makes it one of the biggest threats to Earth. It's big enough that it will cause a considerable amount of damage if it hits the Earth. And it comes around often enough that the chances of a collision are not small. You know, as these things go, they're pretty large.
NASA keeps a hit list of almost 1,500 asteroids that threaten Earth. Each asteroid is over 300 ft wide and ranked according to its size, speed, and chance of hitting the Earth. Bennu's close orbit makes it number two on the list of the most dangerous. None of these asteroids pose an imminent threat to Earth, but any one of them could cause the most destructive event in human history. Thanks to groundbreaking missions, asteroids are beginning to reveal their secrets. But to protect ourselves from an impact, we need to understand what sends some of them spinning into a collision course with the Earth. At the heart of our solar system is the
sun. Its massive gravity holds the planets and the asteroids in orbit. But the sun isn't the only object creating huge gravitational forces. At almost 90,000 m in diameter, Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system. Beneath its violent atmosphere is an ocean of hydrogen. The pressure is so high that the gas behaves like a soup of liquid metal. Deep inside at the heart of the planet appears to be a partially dissolved core of rock, metal, and ice. Jupiter's huge mass creates a giant gravitational force that pulls on everything, especially the asteroids traveling close to it.
When it comes to the real movers and shakers in our solar system, you've got the sun and you've got Jupiter. Those really are the major bodies. And when Jupiter formed, it sort of limited the formation of other planets. The asteroid belt is an area where Jupiter pulled apart gravitationally any planet that tried to form there. So, the asteroid belt is where it is because of the effect of Jupiter's gravity. Jupiter now holds its army of asteroids in orbit around the sun. But any small disturbance can send an asteroid hurtling out of the belt and potentially onto a collision course with Earth.
Just one stray space rock could destroy life on our planet. To protect ourselves, we need to find a way to deflect incoming objects. Orbits of the asteroids are absolutely gigantic all the way around the sun, hundreds of millions of miles. So, if you can change the angle they're moving at, just by a little tiny hair over millions of miles, that will change the course of the asteroid and miss us entirely. A team in Scotland thinks they have a solution. The experiment is to test if we can deflect an using a highly intense laser light.
Masameliano Vasile believes that the heat of this laser light is enough to move an asteroid in space. Our strategy is to have a swarm of spacecraft following the asteroid and each one of them is carrying a laser. The team places a rock sample that was once part of an asteroid into a vacuum chamber to simulate space. Let's go. The laser heats a small spot up to 5,000° F, causing vaporized material to shoot from the rock. In space, the thrust from this blast would push the asteroid. This jet of particles from the rock acts exactly as in a rocket engine and is producing a thrust that is moving the asteroid away.
The exact amount of laser power they will need depends on what type of asteroid they're trying to deflect. Not all asteroids are chunks of rock. Some of the biggest asteroids in our solar system are more like planets. These Goliaths are hundreds of miles wide. Beneath their rocky crust is a layer rich in minerals that wraps around a metallic core. The metal makes these objects far heavier than a rocky asteroid of the same size and much harder to deflect. Masameilliano needs many more laser carrying spacecraft in his swarm to deflect an asteroid the size of a planet. But he believes that one day
this might be Earth's best option. The hope of course is that the results of this research will be useful in the future to save the Earth from a an impact. Asteroids will continue to escape Jupiter's gravity and hurdle towards Earth for millennia to come. But luckily, most keep a stable orbit millions of miles away from our planet. And rather than destroying us, some of these objects contain valuable resources on a colossal scale. Asteroids are full of resources that humans can use. There are asteroids that are abundant in water. There are asteroids that are abundant in rare metals.
The resources in these asteroids could be the key to survival beyond planet Earth, allowing humans to travel deeper into space than ever before.
