Secrets of Asteroid Bennu with Harold Connolly Jr.

Could the ingredients for life have arrived on asteroids? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice unpack what the sample collected from asteroid Bennu is teaching us about the origins of life itself with Harold Connolly, geologist and mission scientist for OSIRIS-REx.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we're long overdue for devoting a show to asteroid Ben New. Not only have been there, it has Earth in its sights as a near Earth asteroid that might hit us in 200 years.

• 0:11Chuck Nice?

  As a matter of fact, going to talk to Harold Connolly Jr. And if you want to find out exactly when the Earth is going to be destroyed, just stay tuned. Down to the hour.

• 0:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck Nice is with me in the house. Chuck, how you doing, man?

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  I'm good. I'm in my house.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in the house remotely.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you doing, man?

• 0:55Chuck Nice?

  I am doing great.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what we're going to do today? Something I think we're long should have done long, long ago. We're going to take a look at the ingredients for life as they exist in the rest of the universe and how some of those ingredients may have influenced what happened on the early Earth.

• 1:15Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. And we have, we have a record of what the early solar system was like, and it's contained within our comets and asteroids. They've just been orbiting the sun since like day one, and they haven't been absorbed into a volcano. They haven't been rained on. They haven't been peed on by any animals. And so there's a pristine...

• 1:42Chuck Nice?

  I've never considered that as a...

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, right?

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  That could totally be an obstacle for finding our origins. Well, you know, we would have found out, guys, but unfortunately, do you see how much deer pee is on this?

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we have one of the world's experts in this and Harold Connolly Jr. Harold Connolly, welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a great pleasure and honor to be here.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Your founding chair, I love those, Chair and Professor of the Department of Geology in Rowan University and co-investigator, COI is the abbreviation of that, and mission sample scientist for the Osiris Rex mission. Oh, that's big stuff. I know. So first of all, we have to give the test, you have to give every principal investigator. Okay, please tell us what Osiris stands for, because it's an acronym.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Okay, but I'm not the PI, just mission sample scientist.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  As well.

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Analyze the sample return.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  That conducts 260 people around the world. But yeah, so Osiris Rex is NASA's New Frontiers 3 Asteroid Sample Return Mission and it stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation. See, now, now my brain is fried because I'm laughing so much.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I told you it messes with us, these tortured acronyms.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Origins Spectral Interpretation, I think I know it after all these, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, and Regularly Exploded.

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. Wow. That's very tortured right there. Well, that's, that's, no, next.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll help NASA next time they need an acronym.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Origins, yeah, right, but Origins is easy, right?

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, we got that. So the thing is, we know that asteroids have hit Earth before, and we call them meteors coming through the atmosphere meteorite when you pick it up. And so we have quite a large catalog of space rocks on Earth. So what is your motivation for going to an asteroid that's out there in space?

• 4:03Speaker 02

  That's a great question. A couple of motivations and they're fit into that strange, you know, acronym we just discussed. And there's one particular branch of meteorites, which I'm just going to show you both right here because I'm holding up my hand, which is known as carbonaceous chondrite. There are several different kinds of meteorites we have on Earth. And these are really old. This is what gives us the age of the solar system, the 4.567 billion years old.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're putting your grubby hands on a meteorite.

• 4:35Chuck Nice?

  If it made it this far, if it made it after 4.7 billion years, I don't think Harold's fingerprints are gonna screw it up.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My boy just finished eating buffalo wings and he's licking his fingers, touching this hunk of coal.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  We'll get back to that, but that's a great point. But this one comes from sub-Saharan Africa, so it's probably had camel dung in it sometime, as our analysis or analog earlier. Anyway, so, yeah, the key is, we don't know exactly what meteorites come from what asteroids. We have some spectral identification, meaning we look at different wavelengths of light or identify asteroids. And we want to be able to understand the geologic context of these meteorites, because any rock the geologist has, you can only tell so much about the story without putting it into the chorus that it's been singing in to know what is the larger picture. Furthermore, these carbonaceous chondrites are full of what we call volatiles.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  They have water in them. They have minerals that require water to form. They have organic compounds in them, the prebiotic compounds that we need in order for life to have developed. And those are some of the key issues, including, as we said, security, which is we don't understand exactly how asteroids move very well, because we make these predictions about how they're gonna possibly hit the Earth in the end of the 22nd century. And we have what we call a probability. But that probability also needs to know what's the composition of the asteroid in order to predict well.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. But let's back up for a second. The geologist, first, let me celebrate the fact that geologists are now holding hands with astronomers, astrophysicists, to explore.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The rest of the universe because we we're trained to look up and we're not trained to understand rocks that might be at our destinations. And so we we tag team with you geologists to help us interpret what's out there. But you use the word volatile in a way that the general public does not. To us, if something's volatile, it's like ready to explode.

• 6:47Chuck Nice?

  Unstable.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Ah, very good point.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, tell me what you mean by volatile, that a rock would have volatiles.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when we talk about rocks that have volatiles, then we're talking about the kinds of compounds that would quickly evaporate when you raise the temperature of the rock from basically background temperature.

• 7:06Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so so water, for example, you know, everybody knows water will boil, you know, at 100 degrees C or 212 Fahrenheit. So, you know, that that's something that these rocks contain, and that water is 4.567 roughly billion years old, and was moving around the the actual original body, that what we call the parent body of the asteroids that we see now. What we see now are basically bits and pieces of what was once much larger bodies that were internally geologically active.

• 7:41Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay, okay. So this is a time machine for you?

• 7:45Chuck Nice?

  Definitely.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Time capsule, time capsule, that's right.

• 7:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better word, yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  And going back to your analogy of the dog pee, many of these, in fact, they get contaminated, the meteorites, as they fall to earth very, very quickly. So within a day or two, you've already contaminated, and you're interacting with the atmosphere, little microbes start to eat them. I mean, imagine you're sitting around for four and a half billion years, as Neil said, and you've got nothing, nothing to do, nobody to bother you really, except occasional collision and the sun hit you. So the other idea is to bring back, was to bring back a sample of pristine material, keep it in a nitrogen environment and analyze it. And that turns out to be, as we'll see, absolutely critical to what we have been finding in both asteroid Grugu sample and of course asteroid Danus sample.

• 8:33Chuck Nice?

  So let me, let me start some trouble. Yeah. What, what will we find more from?

• 8:41Chuck Nice?

  Because a comet has the water, it's ice, right? So would you, what, what would we benefit more from? A sample collection of an actual asteroid, which we've done, that's what you guys did, or being able to kind of either trail and capture or capture a piece of a comet, which has, you know, which will give you the water?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Well, that's a great question, and capturing the water and bringing it back to Earth is incredibly tricky. We have, we have sampled from the back of comets in its coma and brought back the minerals that were actually in that comet material, but not the ices. To actually freeze a sample and bring it back is really complicated and really expensive, most likely.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying it's hard to bring back, it's hard to bring back the volatiles is the point here?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  It's hard to bring back the volatiles and the ices and stuff because you gotta keep them cold the whole time and keep them cold coming through the atmosphere and, and, and then not interact with their, with their Earth too much. Actually, this brings, stop me if you want, but this brings sort of a square root of one question is that the Osiris Rex mission is a special class of missions, which is a sample return mission, of which if we don't include the Cold War Apollo and Luna samples, you know, we've only had a couple of handfuls of those in the course of history.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Basically, three of them by the US, two by Japan and two by China. So you're looking at basically a large sack of potatoes of, of extraterrestrial material that was brought back to Earth, roughly eight pounds or so of material that was little over $2 billion worth of money spent to get these samples back for scientific community that conservatively, probably only a hundred, maybe, well, I'd say, maybe 1,500 people in the world work full time at trying to understand.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't have a problem with that.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  I don't, last year, you know, the American people spent $4 billion on candy for Halloween.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  You know, here we're pushing the frontiers of our origins, understanding where we come from.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The dentist needs you to spend that much on, Kaylee.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  I have to get a crown tomorrow. I have to get a crown tomorrow before I move to England for three months. Thank you. I know.

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's, let's, let's back up again. The, of all the asteroids that orbit the sun, the most, of course, are in the asteroid belt. Those are harder to get to, I guess, because a whole bunch of them cross Earth's orbit. So one of them you picked, I happen to know, Bennu crosses Earth's orbit. So does that, is that what makes it a little more attractive and accept because of how accessible it is?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Our scientific goals were to get to an asteroid. Well, our, our goals were to get to an asteroid that we could get to safely and come home. And that was within some kind of cost cap or wasn't cost prohibited. And that asteroid we determined to meet our scientific goals has to be a carbonaceous asteroid because we needed to look for what we know already is contained within the asteroids. Fragments, meteorites, scourge of the life, volatiles, et cetera.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to contrast that with what many people stereotype as an asteroid, a metallic asteroid. You know, and here at the American Museum of Natural History, our two biggest asteroids are iron and nickel. And they're huge, some of the biggest, you know, out there. And so many people, when they just come to, uh, you know, to a museum, it's the metal ones that, that get all the attention, uh, because the other ones just kind of look like rocks, you know?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Because they are.

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that why they look like rocks?

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, so I, it seemed to me that it would be harder to sample return from a metallic asteroid because you can't sort of pick up dirt on its surface. Is that, is that a true fact?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  I think that's right, Neil. Yeah, we have a mission NASA has a mission going to study asteroid psyche, which is, you know, supposed to be an iron nickel asteroid. But it's not bringing sample back. It would be a lot harder to drill and actually get a piece of metal out of the asteroid and bring it back.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just Bruce Willis could take care of that. No problem. Okay, so, so you, we go to this asteroid. If I remember correctly, this mission was a touch and go, right?

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Perfect. Yep, it was.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And so it comes down, punches up some material, captures it in a capsule. When I rethink what this mission did, I'm just saying, as a matter of fact, it is rocket science, right? So you launch Osiris Rex from a moving platform, Earth, to intersect a moving target, Ben Nu, you do a touch and go, grab material, come back to Earth, deploy the capsule onto a rotating Earth so that it lands where?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Utah desert.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Utah. As well as should.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  And a gentle plop, nothing else.

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So of all, you know, on the rotating Earth, all this has got to work out. And then, that's when my worst nightmares begin because one of the earliest novels I ever read in my life was Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, where they brought back, where they brought back a, basically a sample return from, I don't remember where, just from space. And it had a bug that started killing people. And so let me ask you, tell me about NASA's protection protocols for this.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. So the

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Asteroids are are considered non hazardous with respect to any sort of biological threat. They've been sitting in space for four and a half billion years and been cooked by the sun's radiation and cosmic rays in the background on the surface and are deemed not hazardous with respect to any kind of biological issues, right? So planetary bodies like Mars, that's a whole different issue and requires a whole different set of of of responsibilities and care that have to be taken if you want to bring sample back from there.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the the pictures I saw with people analyzing, maybe your hands were among those, inside that that sealed cavity where the dust from the capsule was getting analyzed, that was really just to prevent a sample contamination, not to prevent you from getting some kind of bug.

• 15:30Chuck Nice?

  Right, being contaminated by some kind of alien. Now, with that, Harold, have you had any compulsions since you've handled this material that you have not understood?

• 15:50Speaker 02

  As a matter of fact, yes, I drink less gin than I used to.

• 15:53Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay, all right.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much meteorite material did we bring back?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Um, roughly a hundred and twenty-two grams of material and that's basically, it sounds like it's small, but it's basically a cup full of particles, but that cup full of particles is a lot.

• 16:45Chuck Nice?

  That's a lot.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  It's a lot.

• 16:47Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, but now, when you, when you make the collection, because it is a rock, and I don't know a lot about rocks, but I know some rocks are harder than other rocks, and I also know from a conversation with Neil, that some asteroids are kind of like...

• 17:06Chuck Nice?

  Pebbly because they're held together. They're not really a big solid rock. They're kind of pebbly and held together, you know, and it's easy to go in and do whatever you want to do. If we were talking about mining asteroids, if I recall the conversation.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, very important point there. So Harold, what was your confidence in the structural integrity of Bennu to just come down and do a touch and go? Did you know enough about its structure to know that that would succeed in advance?

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, great questions from both of you. First of all, Bennu is what we call a rubble pile asteroid. So it's literally an asteroid made up of accumulation of large boulders and teeny tiny little grains. And it rotates around its own axis in 4.2 hours. Actually rotates retrograde, which means opposite than what we normally would think it rotates. And all the information we had, we had designed originally the spacecraft for big ponds on a surface of really fine grained material. We're talking about less than an inch size material, because our data, our science showed us that there should be a lot of it. We got there, we screamed because there were boulders 11 stories high. And it wasn't quite what we expected.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't fit a boulder 11 stories high into your canister.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  We can't. It's sorry, it's not that big.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better boat.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  And you know, the problem is when you fly down to the surface of the asteroid, you may not come back out the same way either. So there's challenges with the navigation that you have to think about. And to get to your questions and your comments here, we had designed the touch and go sample acquisition mechanism to basically just touch the surface, as Neil said, and we fire some nitrogen gas, and it basically fluidizes or moves the gravel up, and then it gets collected into this little sort of reverse Hoover or vacuum head. And then we would pull back. The autonomous spacecraft pulls back from the surface. But what happened was is we went in 48 centimeters, you know,

• 19:12Speaker 02

  banked them with our arm almost, down into the surface of the asteroid, which wasn't, you know, right through it, which we did not really expect. Some folks on the mission will say, well, we had some models that showed it could be about, yeah, okay, it could be. But that was a good thing. Actually, because it taught us that gravity itself is basically what's holding the asteroid together. Tensile forces between particles is not really doing it very well. Hey Neil, see, I learned some physics over the last 20 years.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  And, um, and the other thing is, we're penetrating deeper into the surface. So, um, the surface of the asteroid's been caught a lot, depending on how much the surface is moving based on the rotation and landslides and impacts. So we're getting down to the stuff that might be fresher, quote fresher.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that was, that's better for you?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Correct. Absolutely correct.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  The problem, the problem was, and you did ask another question there when I get to that, the problem was that when we pulled back up, you know, and, and did the first test to see what kind of sample we got, we literally moved that three meter arm backwards to a camera to take picture. And I can remember about four o'clock in the morning, waking up and downloading from our mainframe, the images and start looking at it. It had all these little spots all over the place. I'm thinking, what the heck are these spots? Long story short, as the world knows, several stones got caught keeping the flap open. And this, that we were losing sample every time we articulated the arm.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  There's another PhD thesis. There's another PhD thesis. Come on, come on, come on, you know?

• 20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's tough.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, always right. So, yeah, that was, so the PI had to make some quick decisions with the associate administrator of NASA and other people, uh, to basically stow the sample much quicker than we had expected to prevent more from, from loss. But of course, as you know, we got 122 grams of sample, 121.6, and we needed to get 60 grams to meet our scientific goals.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a success.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a success. Yeah. So, so you bring it back to Earth and now it's, you've got it in the lab. And so you're a geologist. I don't know, do you guys use microscopes? So do you use stuff that dissolves the material and you do mass spectrometer? What, what's your, what's a geologist's dream lab when you have something from space?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a great question. Uh, you know, we brought the sample out of the field. By the way, the sample cavister, the SRC sample return capsule landed in the Utah desert, basically perfectly in the end. Uh, it had rained there three days earlier, but it chose to land in a dry spot, which was perfect. And then we take it to a makeshift facility at the U T T R Utah Test and Training Range. We get the sample canister and it's, you know, the guts of the sample return capsule out and get it under nitrogen so that the sample is constantly bathed in nitrogen. So, I mean, that took literally almost four hours to the mark to get that under the perfect timing.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A quick chemistry question.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You speak of nitrogen as though it's neutral. And in fact, there are some sort of wine air replacement canisters that send nitrogen in as the air comes out. But to me nitrogen can make ammonia, you know, nitrous oxide. It's not like argon where we're taught in chemistry class is just inert because it's got no electrons available.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Just nothing to do.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No interaction. So, so why is, why does nitrogen work for you? I just never understood that chemically.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  In this case, we know we have, we have the samples of the nitrogen. So we know what the composition of the nitrogen is, not just nitrogen, but it's isotope composition. If there's any impurities in it, which of course is not. And it doesn't react with normal minerals and rocks in any way, shape or form.

• 23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  I shouldn't say normal. I shouldn't say normal. There's nothing normal about it. For example, typical thing. And then we get to the, I'll just tell you real quick. Then we get to the lab, we open up the canister and the first thing you do as a geologist is you look at it with your eye. The most important thing is that it's a rock. Before you begin to slice it up to make polished sections, before you send it off to the, to the folks at Goddard Space White Center to analyze organics before they dissolve it up to get their analysis, you must know what the rock is because the context is absolutely critical. Without the context of the rock, you may not be able to interpret your results.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So different labs had different objectives in the samples that they were given.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it possible that your priors, I don't mean to get philosophical on you, but is it possible that your prior expectations for what the sample is can bias your conclusions that you draw from it?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  We had a, we had a, if I may, we had an amazing aha moment when we discovered, uh, which we should have more or less known we were going to discover, but because we find so few of these minerals in meteorites that we pick up on Earth, it didn't got a process that the asteroid samples could be rich in evaporite minerals. What is an evaporite mineral? A mineral that forms in a water-rich solution as that water evaporates. A classic example? Table salt. Right.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Table salt is in the rocks from Bennu. It's in the rocks from Rugu.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so is the Utah salt flats and it landed in Utah.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  We have samples to prove it's not from there.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just, I'm just saying, you landed in Utah and you say, we found salts.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to alert our, our, our listeners and, and viewers, when a geologist analyzes a sample, in most cases, the sample is destroyed when you're done. Isn't that correct?

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Well, yes and no, actually, because I'm the kind of geologist that's called a petrologist, and my job is to tell the stories that the rock contained. And that means looking at them with my eye, looking at them with a microscope, as Neil said, and then actually cutting them and polishing them and looking at them with a special microscope, either one that's optical, that sees through to the thin, thin, thick, thin, uh, coatings of the, uh, rock on a, basically a glass slide, or put them in an electron microscope or a scanning electron microscope, where then you begin to analyze in detail their composition of the minerals and how the rocks, minerals arrange themselves and why they're the way they are. All these little

• 25:53Speaker 02

  details, it's like being a, a detective. The tiniest little clue may actually open up a whole world of being able to understand geology. Now, other folks, other scientists do dissolve samples. But if you dissolve the sample without knowing what you dissolved other than it came from this mountain, I mean, you know, how many different layers of rock are in the mountain and you say it came from that mountain? Well, I don't know where it came from. That doesn't help you recreate the geology and then put it into context of a special question such as, you know, looking at the potential origins of what we know is like.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't, I don't mean to diss your entire profession, but most people, when we look out into, into space rocks, we're kind of interested in the organics, not in the minerals. And I know geologists love them some minerals, but at the end of the day, the headline is not what kind of new rock you found, it's what kind of organics might be there. So how close were you to that analysis or was that a whole other group?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  So, uh, that's a very good point you raise and, uh, the problem with the organic chemistry, not a problem, but the challenge is that you have to know what the rock is that you're analyzing. What has, what processes, geologic processes have, has it been through? In order to know the geologic processes that rock has been to, in this case, in a parent body that was probably the size of, of Ceres, asteroid Ceres, for example, um, uh, that fluid moved through that asteroid four and a half billion years ago because the asteroid became active. When the asteroid had created rock in the, in the earliest time period, it had created ices, not just water ice, but ammonia, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide,

• 27:36Speaker 02

  et cetera. And then the asteroid internally began to heat up and you have fluid moving through. Now, why is that any, any relevance whatsoever to prebiotic compound? Because prebiotic compounds may very well have formed in that aqueous or water-rich environment. The evaporite minerals that we talked about are the late-stage product of the fluid that moved through, that formed other minerals first, and they're the very last stage. Now, if you're an organic chemist and you want to get organics to come out of a solution, one of the time classic methods of doing that in a laboratory is you salt the solution and the evap, and the organics go with the evaporite minerals on the salt when you evaporate the fluid.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta correct you on something. You called Ceres an asteroid, but it got promoted to dwarf planet.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  We're right. I'm sorry.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get with the program here.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. I'm, I'm behind 30 years, right?

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to remind people, it's the only asteroid that's large enough for its gravity to have shaped it into a sphere. And that's a sufficient, sufficient qualifications to be a dwarf planet, just like Pluto.

• 28:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. By the way, Pluto sends its regards and says, "F you."

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Chuck, for that. Poor Pluto, poor old. For that telegram. So what do we know? I seem to remember a research paper, or it might have just been a review in the New York Times, that talked about, was it amino acids that were found in the rock?

• 29:10Speaker 02

  We've found a lot in the rock, and we're finding more. And they also found a lot of organic compounds, because we're talking about organic compounds, and minerals associated with it in the Rugu sample. The difference is that in Hayabusa II, which was a Jackson mission to asteroid Rugu that brought back sample, they brought back 5.2 gram. So they have a lot less. So for us, we were able to do work for organics on individual stones from Bennu, and also homogenized powder of more than six grams that we homogenized up to really understand the chemistry well. And indeed, they have found that the main headlines is, you know, 14 of the 20 amino acids that are needed for life, but really, it's probably 15, because a paper by Mahara

• 29:55Speaker 02

  et al. that came out in November, found the 15th one. We have to reproduce it, but that was right near Thanksgiving, and that 15th one was tryptophan, which is the same stuff. You're getting turkeys that make you sleepy, right?

• 30:09Chuck Nice?

  That's why Bennu was rotating so slowly.

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Chuck, for that scientific analysis. When is the paper coming out on that?

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot that tryptophan is an amino acid. I've forgotten that. And the famous one from Jurassic Park is of course, what is it, lysine? Lysine. Wanted to make sure that the dinosaurs were dependent on that. And therefore they would die had they escaped. But of course, together now, life finds a way.

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Harold, I remember, because I'm that old, back in the 90s, when we analyzed A L H. Eighty-four? Eighty-four zero zero one, something like that. This potato-shaped meteorite on Earth, which was deduced that it came from Mars. And I thought it was brilliant. They found a little air inclusions within it and analyzed it. Had the exact atmospheric composition of Mars. So this rock came from Mars and there was no dispute about that. But it also had some inclusions within it that if memory serves,

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it had oxidized minerals sitting right adjacent to non-oxidized minerals. And typically, in any geologic environment that you have, it's either oxygen-rich or not, right? And if it's oxygen-rich, then everything gets oxidized. And if it's oxygen-poor, then nothing is oxidized. But life does both in the same vessel, right? We inhale and oxidize our hemoglobin. And then the oxygen gets ripped away. Hemoglobin goes back for more oxygen. So we have oxidized and non-oxidized molecules in the very same vessel. So the fact that they were together on the rock would require you to believe,

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  if you're going to explain it abiotically, that the rock was like over here for a while and was getting oxygenated. And then it rolled somewhere else where there was no oxygen. And then it had some other participating molecules. You have to really Ruben Goldberg your way into that answer. Or it was breathing.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It had lungs.

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So with these inclusions at this new site on Mars, at the Chiaoba Falls site, if...

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you find more than that, there might be, it might be really hard, if not impossible, to completely explain it abiotically. So do you know what else was discovered in those, in those inclusions?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so the report, and, and the report talked about basically the five products of breaking down fatty acids, as my memory serves me, right? And alk, alkenes, and some single sort of chain, uh, uh, organic molecules, and

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't want any fatty rocks on Mars.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  No, no, no, we don't want them.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Said Pete, said. No fat, no fatty. We'll take some acid, but no fatty acids.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  So, I think that's one of the other data points that they're using to, uh, the scientists who wrote that paper are using to argue that, uh, there's additional evidence of potential biological processes that were around at that time, 80 million years ago, which is the Cretaceous period here on Earth. So here on Earth, dinosaurs would have been walking around at that same time period. Um, and that's a lot younger than the 84, Allen Hills 84 old, and that rock is, because that's about 4.1 or 2 billion years old, that rock. So, um, the likelihood, at least more confidence can be given that that's, that's a nicer way to construct a hypothesis. But again, we still have so much to learn about the

• 34:15Speaker 02

  formation of organic compounds in the relationship to geology and the rocks. And to, you know, to go off too much in one direction or the other, I think the middle path is required here.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Raigoo, who, whose, whose mission was that one?

• 34:30Speaker 02

  So, uh, the JAXA, the Japanese space agency sent, uh, have sent two, has had two sample return missions. Hayabusa 1, which went to an asteroid called Itokawa, and brought back tiny, teeny tiny little grains because the collecting mechanism didn't quite work the way it was supposed to. But then Hayabusa 2, which went to the carbonaceous asteroid Rugu, which was actually Osiris Rex's backup plan in case we, we couldn't figure out how to get to bed. And they chose Rugu and went to Rugu and came home, uh, Basically, uh, earlier than we did, the analysis started, um, in June of 2021 and I was living in Tokyo at that time period, uh, for the beginning of the analysis of their sample

• 35:14Speaker 02

  from asteroid, Rupert. Now, think about that. It was a pandemic.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  I was crazy.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it Woo Boo, eh, the name of a Star Wars character? I have some, it ought to be if it's not.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  It's pretty cool, man, yeah.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, just to sort of celebrate the scientific profession, tell me what role the researcher Rigou played in your guys' approach to Ben? Because, you know, one mission stands on the shoulders of the previous mission. That's, that's how science works. So, were you able to answer or ask different questions of your samples because of what was learned in the previous sample returns?

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's both scientific, engineering, and cultural in, in the exchange. Uh, we had, uh, co-eyes on each other's team, which means members of each other's teams. Uh, I was a member on both teams and Shogo Teshibana from the University of Tokyo was a member on Osiris Rex, as well as in charge of analysis sample for Hyabusa 2. And indeed, the early analysis, uh, of their sample, which they analyzed only 100 milligrams of, we had, we had 15 grams to work with with ours. And actually, we, we were good boys and girls and didn't even get to 13 and managed to get our goals achieved. Um, and, uh, they informed us on what the chemistry we should expect, what the minerals are we should expect, and

• 36:44Speaker 02

  how to take a deep dive into certain areas that, um, turned out to be very important for, uh, findings, as you just talked about moments ago.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Now, uh, is it true that every asteroid is the fragment of some larger parent body that got shattered early in the solar system? And I, I ask that because Ben New, last I checked, is bigger than the Empire State Building, something like 500 meters across. And so, that, that seems like- A big enough body to be its own body in the universe. But tell me, turn the clock back on this. Was there some protoplanet that had already sort of, as you, the gel just say, differentiated its materials? And then shattered to become Bennu? And if that's the case, you might be able to find other rocks that are like Bennu that are out there.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Great question. First of all, the main type of meteorite we find on Earth that's like Bennu is called a CI-like meteorite. And there's only two handfuls of them in existence. And it's very clear from both studying the sample from Oogoo and a sample from Bennu that our sample collection is biased on Earth. Not only is the sample collection contaminated, but what actually is out in space is biased because we have a lot of carbonic asteroids. Now, turn the clock backward. Bennu is fragments from collisions that occurred of different bodies together. One of those bodies was a parent body, as we call, a previous incarnation of Bennu at a much larger scale.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  And that was something that was indeed, Neil, forming probably some of the early protoplanets that may have existed. And once the objects get to a certain size, around 10 kilometers or so in diameter, the internal mechanism begins to turn on for geologic process. That internal mechanism is heat begins to move around. It's generated from the decay of radioactivity and pressure.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It becomes a cosmic body at that level.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  It becomes a cosmic body. It begins to melt the ices that were accreted with it. It begins to have fluid, and we call that the early stages of metamorphism in geology. And the early stages of metamorphosis, that fluid moves through and begins to interact with the minerals that are there. And it begins to change those minerals and pick up different kinds of chemicals as it's moving through the fluid. It moves in different parts of the asteroid because it cracked and all kinds of things that happened. And then what we think happened is that at some point, the poor parent body asteroid gets collided into with something else, and it stops the process. So you have a snapshot in geologic time of that moment, and all the processes geologically were active stopped.

• 39:29Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's not big enough to sustain it anymore and it gets frozen in that state.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  It got knocked up, it got knocked up and you know, it hangs around and you know, that's it.

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so because it's relatively recent, well, recent in my professional life, last several decades, that we came to learn that star systems, like we take the solar system, for example, with its eight planets.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that, if you, if you run the models, that star systems such as ours likely began with like thirty planets or something, but, or planetesimals, and many of those orbits are just unstable and they collide with each other and it gets resolved. And so it takes a while for that to sort of shake out and find out who's, who's left.

• 40:19Chuck Nice?

  You just described the coolest game of billiards ever.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Who survives?

• 40:25Chuck Nice?

  Survivor billiards.

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And don't you even have, there's some asteroids where there look like there were two pieces that are stuck together that didn't break apart?

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, they're, they're also, they're also asteroids that have satellites that go around from collisions, most likely so.

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Even, even asteroid Bennu, although we don't have a satellite, didn't find a satellite, it was geologically active on the surface and we had these explosions that pushed material up, uh, which was not commentary like, but we had looked, going back to the comet discussion, we had looked for commentary action because one of the hypotheses for Bennu before we got there was it could have been a thing comet core. But it, but it is, but it isn't, at least most of us will say it is.

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. It's not a clean boundary between asteroids and comets, right?

• 41:11Speaker 02

  No, sir. No, sir. It is not. You know that better now. Yep, it is not.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so now when we think of life, you know, I think of we're carbon based, that's, you know, everybody knows that. And we, we eat food and we have crops and we eat plants and animals and every, we, I always see phosphorus showing up as some key ingredient. And not being a biologist, I've never fully come to appreciate what role that plays. So could you just tell me about phosphorus? I know it's, it's an element on the periodic table. And did you find it in this asteroid sample? And what role does it play on, in sustaining life as we know it?

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Right, so let's go back to again the square root of one and that phosphorus is of course one of them, one of the elements on the periodic table as you said. And the accretion time period of the asteroid, you have all this material creating which contains all the different elements that we have on our table, you know, to, to some extent, not things like hydrogen and helium and stuff. Then as time goes on, minerals start to form through the interaction of water with these rocks that we talked about. And that water is moving through with different, what I call nutrients, in this case, it's not for biological system, but geologic system. And things like sodium, like in sodium chloride table salt and chlorine and phosphorus are in this fluid and then-

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that reference, the geologic nutrients. That's a cool, that's a cool thought.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  To me, they were alive at one time.

• 42:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I get, okay. You know, to you, rocks are alive. That's fine.

• 42:49Chuck Nice?

  Don't worry. Give it time, some influencers on the social media will be pushing geologic nutrients for your health at some point.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. I was hard when I was in high school. Let me just say that, I was a geek. Anyway, um, yeah, so, uh, we, so there's a whole sequence that forms of these different minerals, the calcium-rich ones, then the phosphorus-rich ones, right? And they go down through what's left in the fluid to come out of the fluid and start forming new minerals. You get things like sodium, et cetera. And phosphorus is one of those key minerals that makes things like phosphates. And of course, phosphorus is one of the key kind of elements that gets bound together with things like carbon and hydrogen, et cetera, to form prebiotic compounds that are important.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  And it's the whole suite of these evaporate minerals, not just the phosphorus. The phosphorus is critical, though, but it's, it's not just that, it's the whole suite in them that we, as life, have to have in different ways and different proportions. Now, I'm not a biologist, so keep that in mind.

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so tell me about pre-solar grains. There's a lot of research papers on this. In fact, we have some on display here at the Rhodes Center for Earth and Sprays. In fact, they're pre-solar diamonds, I think. And there's some, there's some, and I think it's kind of cool. I just don't know its relevance. It's, it's cool to think of grains that might have predated the formation of the solar system, which gets you even farther back than the four and a half billion years. So I think that's kind of cool. But is it just sort of cool to know? Or does it have other relevance to any of this?

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you know, you know, they're saying better than I, you know, we are stardust. We are made up of stardust, right? And stardust means dust that literally comes from stars, either evolving stars or dying stars that eject material. And in that ejection, that gas that comes out, like the fluid with minerals condensing, these new minerals condense out of the gas. And these are from stars that are not part of our, were not part of our solar system, and seeded what was there in the beginning before our solar system formed, which was a molecular cloud. And there are different kinds of pre-solar grains. Diamonds are one of them. We had downstairs in the museums,

• 45:16Speaker 02

  meteorite hall, there are diamonds in a little capsule in there, which is fantastic. It looks like a slip, you know, like a grayish mixture inside of a little vial. There are silicon carbine grains, but then there are what we call corundum, or little teeny tiny, and we're talking really so small, smaller than, you know, we can see certainly with the naked eye, nanometer size.

• 45:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't some of these that you're describing used as fake diamonds on Earth? Or corundum? I have some memory.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  That's ruby or sapphire is what that is, yeah.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there are silicates. Silicates being the most, most abundant minerals that we see on Earth, like quartz is a silicate mineral, for example. Olivine or peridot, the gemstone peridot is another one. So these grains predate the origin of the solar system, and they provided the nutrients, if you will, for the beginning. Beginning of the formation of rocky materials and minerals in this solar system. Because everything got crunched as it as the gas began to collapse to form the sun. And things heated up and then they cooled down and stuff came out. But these grains survived that process. So they're actually older than our solar system, which is really, really cool.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  And there are people who spend their whole life studying these pre-solar grains. And it's incredible.

• 46:36Chuck Nice?

  So the so the solar system was basically able to form because it was on a whole grain diet. Is what you're saying?

• 46:45Speaker 02

  I love it. A whole grain diet.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Maybe even vegans.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, didn't it be seven grains there? I thought there were seven grains there.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Oh, and just one more point about the pre-solar grains is that these we find them in the mirrors. That means they survive the geologic processes such as the water moving through or heat beginning to generate. And many of them survived to different degrees depending on where we're getting the sample from. And what was the original pair of five?

• 47:13Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's let's pivot to other places where these search for ingredients of life have been in the news. Such as Mars, right? We're not quite there yet with Europa. We've got a nice Clipper mission en route. We have a whole episode of of StarTalk where we toured the Jet Propulsion Labs and spoke to the folks. It was right around the launch time of the Europa Clipper mission to look for life under the with ice penetrating radar. To look under the ice, that icy moon with its ocean of liquid water. But if we go to Mars where there's no water today, but such ample evidence that there was once running water. Do you do you?

• 48:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Compare notes with the your fellow Mars geologist or Marsologists, whatever the word is you might call them to see, uh, cause I, I remember it. There's a recent news where there was some inclusions in some kind of clay or something that people felt pretty sure is a, is a record of some kind of microbial life thriving in a distant past. And they're inclusion that, that only a geologist would recognize as being something interesting. And then you pair that up with the biologists and the, all the astronomer can do is just watch you guys have a conversation about it.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Well, you could talk to us about it as you do.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but yeah, no, that, yeah, that's a great, I like the way you drew that. Uh, that's, that's so from lessons learned from analyzing Bennu, for example, and Rugu, and there's several more papers coming out in the near future from the Osiris Rex mission that are gonna detail even more interesting results about prebiotic compounds. So keep, keep to the literature for that. See, look for that very soon.

• 49:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear for everyone in this modern era, it means a research paper with many collaborators that has been submitted for peer review, has been revised according to whatever the peer review might have recommended, then it shows up in the journal, online or otherwise. And that then gets disseminated around the world for others to comment on, to, to stand on the shoulders of what was there. That's what's going on here. He's not making a YouTube video.

• 49:56Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah. It's either that or, um, he goes on Joe Rogan for two hours.

• 50:05Chuck Nice?

  It's either the first or Rogan's two hours, which is the same, by the way.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  So yeah, so on, on, in the area of Mars, um, what was it called? I forgot. Um, Shiana Falls, is that what it was? Yeah. Recently came out, um, the, um, the minerals that were there in large veins of what are probably a mineral called gypsum and associated minerals, uh, are minerals that form through a fluid, precipitation, evaporate minerals. They have to come out of the, of this fluid that is there and the fluid's evaporating. And other minerals that are there such as, uh, vivinite, which is a phosphate mineral. Here we go phosphorus again, one of the key ingredients for life.

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't gypsum on the Mohs scale? I have some memory of that. So I got, I got that right?

• 51:01Speaker 02

  You got that right. You got that right.

• 51:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gypsum is very soft. It's like one or two or...

• 51:07Speaker 02

  It's, it's a hydrated mineral. So it has water attached to it, which makes it structure. And then, um, gray guy is, um, another mineral that formed, and that's an iron sulfur-rich mineral. But that is an interesting mineral because it's a, on a pathway, the, the final product forming would be pyrite, which everybody knows is a school scope. The mineral before that is mackinallite, big name, but that mineral was recently discovered in both Rugu and Bennu for the first time. Now, why is this mineral, gray guy, important? Because it's sampling different abundances of oxygen that is around in order to produce itself.

• 51:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Now, oxygen is not uncommon in the universe, but it's highly reactive, right? So it's going to be binding with almost everything. And so where's it getting its oxygen from? What's, what's its source?

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a great question. We assume it's coming from a fluid interaction, um, a fluid that has evolved. But how that fluid's evolving? I don't know. When that fluid evolved? I don't know. And the landscape certainly is such that you know fluid was moving around, water.

• 52:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, in the Chayva Falls, in that, those deposits, that, I don't know, is that the right word? Inclusions, those?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, the sedimentary rock deposits.

• 52:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Are you convinced that there was a, an active biota in the, in the distant past from that evidence? Or is there another way to explain that that does not involve life? Because life would be extraordinary and fun, but you know, you geologists have all kinds of ways you can make stuff, even without life.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Oh, I know it. Yeah, so I'm not sure if life was actually part of that process, but I'm not going to eliminate it as a scientist from that process. It could be what we call abiotic or not requiring life. But it may be that life was there. There are other evidence to suggest that, and I don't know the details of the organic compounds. There's simple organic compounds that were also found there that may, may indicate that life was there. But as we know from working with Bennu, we're beginning to understand that the organic compounds that we're finding in Bennu are much greater than what we see in the meteorites.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  And the process which formed them, most likely it occurred inside of a great parent body or on, on, on surface or subsurface of Mars, for example, or Earth. And that is an important punctuation point that we have to know. Meteorites are definitely contaminated. So we're learning a lot about organic chemistry in the solar system and the prebiotic chemistry from the meteorites, I mean, from the asteroid samples, that the meteorites are definitely contaminated.

• 53:53Chuck Nice?

  If you look at that and you look at, let's say you find these evidences on Mars. And then we already know that they're in the asteroids. Is that, I don't want to make a big leap. Would that be any indication that there is this so-called lithopamspermia that seeds planets like ours to create life? Or would it mean that, hey, man, this is just the stuff that shows up under the right conditions? Doesn't make a difference where you are?

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. Um, the latter certainly more or less what we've kind of been leaning towards here in that the asteroids themselves could be seeding Mars and Earth with the prebiotic compounds that are needed for life to have evolved. But I'm old enough to know that we, we have meteorites on Mars on the surface of Earth. And I'm old enough to know that there was a time period when certain physicists said you couldn't get rocks off of Mars to Earth. And when we finally proved that these are, essentially proved to a, you know, high level confidence that these are from Mars, the calculations showed that you can. So it's certainly not impossible, but I mean, why, why go there where we can go with a

• 55:17Speaker 02

  more simple answer, at least at first to eliminate that. But, um.

• 55:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, I found it fascinating concept. I'll just share it with you and tell me if you agree. So the biologist sees life on Earth and we don't see life elsewhere as thriving as it is on Earth. So it's easy to just come up with the, the singular genesis of life on Earth by whatever cause. And then you have, and we see, we know how complex the DNA molecule is. So we can ask ourselves, could that have happened on any other surface of any other planet? And we say, look how complex it is. No, it's unlikely. However, geologic processes, I can send you to any planet and you'll be familiar.

• 56:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There might be some fun, interesting things you, that you're, that, uh, you've only read about or heard about in abundance there, but, but geology, when you subject minerals and, and, and ingredients to the same temperatures, pressures will get you the same results every time. So if you create a biological analog to that and say, given the right temperatures and pressures and, and time, you'll make a DNA molecule every time. Uh, do you, what do you say to that? That that may be, you know, if if geology is If it's for geology, why wouldn't it do it for us? Why wouldn't it do it for biology? Yeah.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, the short answer is yes.

• 56:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But but I have another, I have an issue with the panspermia hypothesis. Okay.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 57:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the, that's an hypothesis surely named by men. Oh, without a doubt.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 57:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, without a doubt. Okay. Yeah. So, so, you know, life begins in one location and then spreads to other location, which, by the way, I don't think we, getting back to your, your, your ignorant physicist comment, I think no one knew how to do that until we can computer model major impacts on planetary surfaces that can then flowing rocks back into space. And you, you couldn't just deduce that. You had to like calculate what happens to the energy of the impactor and how it gets manifested. So in all fairness to the ignorant physicist, computers help us out.

• 57:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the cocky physicist.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, it was my chance to have fun, fun at you.

• 57:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, by the way, just, just further in your defense, one of our greatest physicists, Lord Kelvin, of the Kelvin temperature scale, was telling geologists, geologists said, look, we need a billion years to make these ravines, we need a billion years. And the biologists were saying, we need a billion years to evolve everything. And he was saying, I'm only giving you 10 million years. Because that's the lifetime of the sun. And there's no way we can make the sun live longer than that. And so that he, he, then he got his, you know, ass handed to him. When we discovered that there's thermonuclear fusion in the sun.

• 58:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a whole other thing that was, that was discovered after he made this proclamation. So, but he had the cockiness of a physicist, knowing that physics is pretty fundamental. From that day forward, nobody believed his sports predictions.

• 58:54Chuck Nice?

  I'm taking the Patriots and 30 points.

• 59:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 59:03Speaker 04

  I will cry over.

• 59:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my issue with panspermia is if you can make amino acids on rocks in space or in the parent body from which it came, you can make amino acids on earth without the rock. Earth has got all the same ingredients and then some. So, so this urge to appeal to panspermia for me seemed less urgent. The urge was less urgent when I look at it that way. So maybe the, but maybe the, the argument in favor of it is it is really, really hard to make

• 59:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  life. So if it happens in one place, the chances are it's not going to happen in other places. And if it's going to get there, it's going to have to travel. I think that's the out for, that's the argument in favor of panspermia. But yeah, because if it's easy to make amino acids, but harder to make a DNA molecule, maybe that's what it comes down.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  There's, there's one little catch to that in the sense of geology and that the oldest rocks we have on earth are from four to about 4.4 billion years, which is one of many reasons we study the new samples, ruglu samples and meteorites. Because in part the, the earth is dynamic, it's active, it's moving, the surface is constantly moving, but also the very, you know, few tens of millions of years of the earth's existence, the surface was really molten before the crust formed. And that's what a lot of the scientific hypothesis hit at, that it was cooked too much for these kinds of compounds to survive on earth. Now maybe inside is another issue and maybe the meteorites coming down and seeding after

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  the cooling happened either on earth or on bars is, is, is, you know, much more probable now than it was, I think, before we flew both missions. And in fact, we have sugar too now. We have RNA sugars. That's a really big deal too.

• 1:01:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. The ribos, right? Or?

• 1:01:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Your sugar's to go with your multi-grain cereals.

• 1:01:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catalogues better get a handle on this one.

• 1:01:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, as scientists, we need to be sort of skeptical of extraordinary claims. If life can explain some of this evidence, can you get to that same evidence by not invoking life at all?

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Well, that's what we're learning from the study of Anew samples and Ruger samples. And, you know, I can't give you an answer, yes or no, but it looking like a lot of it, a lot of the ingredients, yes, they can happen abiotically. At least the ingredients for life, what happens after life comes about, how it changes that is another issue. But that is where we're going right now.

• 1:01:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a person who is in front of the public explaining all of this, I have challenges because, for example, when we see methane on Mars, and we know methane is a product of anaerobic metabolism.

• 1:02:12Chuck Nice?

  Better known as Mexican food.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  I ain't going there.

• 1:02:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. Yeah, it's what happens deep in your gut, right? The microbes operate anaerobically, releasing methane. And so, but yet, the surface of Saturn's moon Titan has lakes of liquid methane. And so, but there are no cows on Titan that we know of. So clearly methane is coming from non-biotic means. And so, so it's, you know, to jump for joy when we see a chemical signature of something that we know can come from life, we have to be very honest about all the ways that it might not.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's and that's also, I think, to bring it back a little bit to Bennu. I think that's why it's also so important that we know the context of what we're analyzing and understand very clearly what kind of geologic processes occurred to that particular rock or rocks. Because organic chemists, for example, they don't know geology, they don't need to know the geology, but we geologists have been very poor over the course of time at explaining what we mean when we say things are geologically processed. And it's much more complicated than what often is interpreted either by the organic chemist, biologist, or even, you know, the general public. So we have to be very careful about that.

• 1:03:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned the possibility or being cautious about a rock that might hit Earth by, you know, 2200. I don't think you pulled that number out of your ass. Bennu, in...

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  Not this time. Not this time.

• 1:04:00Chuck Nice?

  Either way, whether you pulled it out of your ass or not, either way, good luck to those people. I mean, like, I'm good. You said 2200? Okay.

• 1:04:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, you're out of the picture by then. But the next close encounter, if my records are correct, is in 2182 for Bennu. And there's a, and given our orbital uncertainties, I think there's a chance it could hit Earth in 2182. That should be plenty of time to build a defense system to deflect it. It should be, unless funding continues to wane.

• 1:04:41Chuck Nice?

  Then we're screwed.

• 1:04:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, but as geologists, you probably don't think much about asteroid collisions the way the astronomers do. Is that correct?

• 1:04:53Speaker 04

  Probably, we look at what's left over.

• 1:05:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's very blunt there.

• 1:05:09Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome. When life gives you lemons, right? What are you gonna do?

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  I'm dizzy, dizzy, I'm laughing so hard.

• 1:05:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the probability that I last remembered, maybe it's been refined since I last checked.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  You're absolutely right, Neil.

• 1:05:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth in September of 2182.

• 1:05:36Chuck Nice?

  And as I said, that's a non-zero chance.

• 1:05:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A non-zero, and it sounds like, oh, that won't happen then, but there are people who go to Vegas betting on way worse odds than that, expecting to win. So, so these are near-Earth asteroids that we want to keep an eye on, and the more we know about them, the more we can maybe go back to them in the future and nudge them out of harm's way.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right, 100%. You got it, yep. Now that we understand the composition better, that's a refined value that you gave, and that's, you know, that's probably as accurate as we're gonna get, which is pretty accurate, because I think it's September 24th of that year, the prediction is. So that's pretty, that's pretty accurate, but I may be wrong, but.

• 1:06:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Just to bring this to closure, could you just reflect on where you guys are as geologists? When I think of the history of collaborations, if we go back before 1968 and the photo of Earthrise over the lunar surface, it was not until NOAA was founded in the year 1970 that I ever saw the ocean and the atmosphere in the same phrase. NOAA is National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and my sense was they were ocean scientists and they were atmosphere scientists, and of course you have geologists on the land.

• 1:07:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then as time moved on, the interplay of these major forces on Earth's surface required you guys to play nice in the sandbox. And then eventually. We find is it more than half of the biotic mass on Earth is below Earth's surface? There's some staggering fraction of the mass of biology below Earth's surface, which means the geologist has to walk in the room and have something to say about that. So could you just reflect on the state of collaborations among the biologists, the geologists, and of course, the astro folk today?

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  Right. I think because of these sample return missions and other space missions, we're really in an exciting time period in our history. And the way to get to this is simply talk about the connection between life and prebiotic compounds. We know life exists. We know that the prebiotic compounds exist. And there's a gap between the two. How do you get from one to the other? Right? And in the middle of that gap, we know you need things like oxygen, you need water, you need energy. But everybody forgets that to get that, what you need is a planet. And understanding how planets are formed and the baseline geology that then the final baseline below geology, the physics can all play into

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  and then work with the astronomers, the remote sensors, the biologists, to put our various hypotheses together to test them with our knowledge in a big picture scope.

• 1:08:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because of course, the universe doesn't care about how we have divided our sciences. The universe is just the universe.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  That's very true.

• 1:08:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's our problem that we have walls between the offices of what we study. Well, Howard, this has been a delight for you to participate in this conversation. I've long wanted to do a show on Bennu because it's been in the news a bit now. So I'm glad we could speak about it with the benefit of the analysis that has been ongoing. And just to toot the horns of scientists, I presume that parts of your sample return from Bennu have been shared with other labs so that whatever your results are could be verified?

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, so NASA archives about seventy percent of the sample, the sample team, analysis team doesn't get more than a very small amount of a total sample. And then we had it exclusively for a two-year period. And then the community at large, scientists at large, begin to apply for samples at Johnson Space Center, that they can look up samples in the catalog. And then they're all currently, those people have samples from around the world are, that are not part of the science team for Osiris Rex. Our team at Global, too, are analyzing the sample as we speak, and several papers have already been submitted to the scientific journals to talk about their findings in print. And yeah, it's incredible.

• 1:10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how science works.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Science works. Our government shared sample with the Japanese government as well, and our Japanese colleague, meaning Osiris Rex sample, Iabusa sample were shared. And each nation is also looking at their samples as well. So it's great.

• 1:10:20Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Impressive.

• 1:10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As science, that's how science works. The path to objective truths in this world is not from any one lab.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  No, it can't be.

• 1:10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's checking your ass, okay?

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  That's right. That's the creative process. That's exactly right. Yeah.

• 1:10:39Chuck Nice?

  Thanks for actually setting the example that none of us are gonna follow.

• 1:10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, good luck for this. And what will you be doing in London? You're headed off there now?

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, first let me say thank you very much for the invitation and to join you both. It's been a lot of fun, and I've learned a lot myself, and I really appreciate your kindness. And I'm going to London for a three-month stay at the work at the Natural History Museum in London, where we'll be going back to the square root of one and learn, taking what we learned from studying Astra Bennu and Astra Aurio samples back into the lab and looking at our meteorite collections. And then I'll be doing a bunch of lectures around the UK as well on Osiris Rex.

• 1:11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's time to go have a little bit of...

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit of rest and recharge the batteries.

• 1:11:24Chuck Nice?

  Very nice.

• 1:11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how do we, where's our best source to keep current with Bennu? Does there, JPL have a page on that, or is it Johnson? Or do you have a page from your lab that you founded, co-founded?

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I post some things on my website, and generally, different members of the team, we have no centralized area other than NASA making its usual posts about what we find.

• 1:11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your website is what?

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Oh, it's Harold Connolly at wordpress.com.

• 1:11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  WordPress, okay.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All good, sir.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  I try to keep it updated, but I'm bad at it.

• 1:12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Thank you for this. Chuck, we're done here.

• 1:12:05Chuck Nice?

  Well, this was great, I have to say. Um, I've, I've learned more about Bennu than I ever thought I would, and I'm happy that I did.

• 1:12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I learned that you don't care if it hits Earth in September 2018.

• 1:12:17Chuck Nice?

  I'm good.

• 1:12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm 2182.

• 1:12:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, let me just tell you something. If it does, my only regret is that I can't do my own touch and go mission where I collect nothing but spray paint hello dumbasses on the side of the Ask You All.

• 1:12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For not deflecting me.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Right. You've had all this time to do something.

• 1:12:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, all this time.

• 1:12:47Speaker 04

  You're screwing it up, you moron.

• 1:12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that, that's all the time we have. Uh, Harold Connolly Jr., thank, thanks for, for participating.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  Nice to meet you, Chuck. Thank you so much.

• 1:13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, always good to have you, man.

• 1:13:02Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been StarTalk, the Bennu Edition. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.