OSIRIS-REx & Asteroid Mining with Natalie Starkey

Will an asteroid hit Earth in 2182? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice learn about asteroid mining, OSIRIS-REx sample-return, and the origins of life with cosmochemist Natalie Starkey.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up next on StarTalk, our go-to cosmochemist Natalie Starkey from the UK returns, and we talk about NASA's Osiris Rex sample return mission from the Earth-crossing asteroid Bennu. What we learned, how did we accomplish this feat, what do we hope to find, and will asteroid Bennu ultimately hit Earth in the year 2182? All that and more on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, you're a personal astrophysicist. We're doing cosmic queries, cosmic queries today, and you know I can't do that without Chuck Nice. Chuck, how you doing, man?

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, what's happening, buddy?

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Guess who we have as a guest today?

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  I'll play along, even though I can see her on the screen right now.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can see her.

• 1:12Chuck Nice?

  Who could that be?

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who could that be? She's our resident cosmochemist.

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many people get to say that? Nobody gets, we get to say that.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  No, yeah. Not even the people who work at Cosmo get to say that they're a cosmochemist.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Natalie Starkey, thanks for coming back to StarTalk.

• 1:31Natalie Starkey?

  Oh, no problem. I love to be here. I want to chat, I want to chat cosmic chemistry.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, that's your professional expertise, and you know, people don't think that the universe involves other fields, right? You start out as a geologist, and of course, there's geology on rocky planets, and then you want to know what the chemistry is. We got to tap people who've got these kind of expertise, and you're just that kind of person. That plugs one field into another or cross pollinates.

• 2:01Natalie Starkey?

  I never realized myself, you know, when I started out, I just liked rocks, I liked volcanoes. And then, you know, slowly you start to learn more and then you realize, of course, all the planets are made of rock. And so you get to start doing geology in space and looking at chemistry in space. So, yeah, it just, and then you get cooler names like cosmochemistry.

• 2:16Chuck Nice?

  Now, what, what happens when you encounter a gas giant? Are you like foiled again? Ugh.

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Chuck, didn't you hear that bias? Well, planets are made of rock.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  No, that's what made me, that's what made me say it. Planets are rocky. I'm like, hmm, really? Really, Natalie?

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just a bias.

• 2:34Natalie Starkey?

  I too much prefer the rocky ones.

• 2:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we can give Natalie a hall pass on the bias there. That's fine. If, if all planets are rocky to, to a, a cosmochemist, then I'm okay with that. So, so Natalie, of late, you were with the Royal Society of Chemistry? And I guess that's in London? Is that correct?

• 2:53Natalie Starkey?

  Um, it's based in London, also in Cambridge, just outside London.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Cambridge, okay. And you're a writer and science communicator with them. Um, you've written two of my favorite books that are out there. Fire and Ice, The Volcanoes of the Solar System. We did a whole show on that.

• 3:07Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we did.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where we talked about ice volcanoes. Oh my God. That was fun. And a book a few years before that, back in 2018, Catching Stardust. Comets, Asteroids, and the Birth of the Solar System. And that's why we have you on now. Because the space mission Osiris Rex is bringing back samples from an asteroid. And was it a comet? Which, so we, we want to, first, people have asked questions about this, but, but I'm not going to go to it till I'm done with you. Okay?

• 3:44Natalie Starkey?

  Okay.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not done with you on this. So, Osiris Rex, that's an acronym. So what, do you remember what it stands for?

• 3:51Natalie Starkey?

  Oh, it's like, yes, uh, it's like some maybe optical spectral, uh, regolith explorer or something like that. There's a really long name. Um, I, I was worried you were gonna test me on that. No one ever, no one ever asked that. It's, it's always.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, I gotta hear my notes. I just found it in my notes. You ready? It's, it's very forced, I might add.

• 4:11Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 4:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Origins, spectral interpretation, resource identification, and security regolith explorer.

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's ridiculous.

• 4:21Natalie Starkey?

  I knew, I knew regolith was in there.

• 4:23Chuck Nice?

  That's ridiculous. Somebody said, I wanna name it Osiris. Get us there. That's, that's how that happened. I wanna name it Osiris.

• 4:31Natalie Starkey?

  It's not the worst I've heard. It's not the worst. There's, there's, but yeah, we, we do like to make nice space, uh, things like Juice, I think was, is my favorite, but um, yeah, the juicy moon, it, it doesn't even work, but you know, we like nice names in space.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. You want, so it could be easy, but yeah, okay. So, so this, uh, this mission went to the asteroid Bennu.

• 4:51Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bennu. And that's an, that's an Earth crossing asteroid, if memory serves, correct?

• 4:57Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you say that so calmly.

• 4:59Natalie Starkey?

  It's fine. There's loads of them.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. No.

• 5:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a possibility that we might bump into one another one day. Just, you know.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 5:11Natalie Starkey?

  Well, this is precisely why we're looking at them because, you know, there's these, there are a lot of what we call near Earth asteroids. Um, and they're sort of in this Earth environment, space within, within, you know, this sort of similar orbits or could be Earth crossing in the future. Bennu just takes about just over a year to go around the sun. And about every, I think it's every five or six years, it comes fairly close to our planet. But for the next, say a hundred years, it's not really thought to be a problem. It's, uh, we, it's not gonna hit us, but there, there is the potential in, uh, maybe, I think they're saying 2182 or something.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, November 2182.

• 5:48Natalie Starkey?

  There is the possibility that it could collide with us. Now, obviously, don't expect any of us to be around by then unless, uh, medical technology improves dramatically between now and then. Um, but yeah, so.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. Natalie, you can't say it that way. You can't say, uh, I don't, might strike Earth in 2180. We're not gonna be around, so not to worry.

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  That's right. You know what, I got a feeling my grandchildren are gonna be, you know, kinda a-holes anyway, so guess what? Guess what? They get what they deserve.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Natalie, just help us out here. Because the headlines say, this same asteroid that we sample-collected is, may hit Earth in 2182. And then I looked at the likelihood of it hitting Earth, and the probability is around 1 in 3,000.

• 6:36Chuck Nice?

  You know, now listen, that doesn't sound insignificant, 1 in 3,000. Those are better odds than you get in many games.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lottery.

• 6:45Chuck Nice?

  And definitely better odds than the lottery, so...

• 6:49Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah. Okay, there's a few things, though.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What level do they say it may hit versus won't likely hit? Is there a boundary between those two terms?

• 7:00Natalie Starkey?

  The problem is, there's a few little things you have to unpick here. And part of it is that actually, we need to go up and study these objects to understand exactly what the orbit's gonna be. So at this moment in time, we can give it that probability that it will hit Earth. But as we get closer to that date, we refine these figures. So it may get like higher possibility that it's gonna hit Earth, but it may go down, and that is often what happens. One of these things we're trying to understand is called the Arkowski effect. And this is the effect that the sun, the heat of the sun has on an object orbiting around the sun. And it's quite, it's not a new phenomenon, but it's something new that we're kind of studying in detail, understanding how that's gonna affect the orbit. So basically, it heats up maybe one side of the asteroid more than the other, and creates more of a spin.

• 7:44Natalie Starkey?

  And therefore, it can very slightly change the orbit of that object over time. But that phenomenon is quite hard to predict. So we have to study the object more to understand how it's gonna change in the future.

• 7:54Chuck Nice?

  So what is the difference? I'm sorry, I'm just curious here. If the heating is the same as when they refer to solar winds, or would that be a different? Phenomenon and does that have any effect on it, the radiation of the sun itself, not just the heat?

• 8:10Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, there's different effects. So yeah, there's, there's, there's another well-known effect and it's another starts with another Y. So you've got, you definitely have different effects that happen to the objects in space as they go around the sun. There's other things, for example, as, for example, a comet.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yarkovsky effect, Yarkovsky?

• 8:26Natalie Starkey?

  Yarkovsky, yeah.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, is that the one you just talked about or is that the one you?

• 8:29Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, that's, that's the one I've just spoken about. But there's other things like if you take an object with a lot of water in, so there's a lot of ice and water in comets and asteroids sometimes, as they go close to the sun and that water evaporates off or sublimates away, that also affects the orbit of that object because obviously it's getting smaller and it's, it's shedding material all the time. So these are active environments. These rocks are not just sitting in space, just sitting there as a rock. They're changing as every time they orbit the sun. And that's something, that's one of the reasons we go to study them in space because if we get up close to them, we can see exactly what they're doing. We see what they're made of, what shape they are and, and what is sitting on their surface that's going to affect all of these things. And, and then

• 9:10Natalie Starkey?

  we can kind of refine our thoughts about whether they're going to collide with us in the future.

• 9:15Chuck Nice?

  It's kind of like predicting a storm, a, a, in a meteor, like a meteorologist, like, you know, eight or 12 days out, who knows what the path of the storm is. But then as we get closer, we know, okay, once again, Florida, you're doomed. So.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, so, so what we, what we're saying here then is if you didn't have all these extra effects, we would know the orbit precisely, right? And then we, it would either hit us or not hit us. It wouldn't be a chance of either. It would just be a binary kind of understanding.

• 9:49Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, we'd probably know exactly where it was going to hit. But, you know, this is a 500 meter wide object. So in terms of things that you can get in space.

• 9:57Chuck Nice?

  Speak American, Natalie. Speak American.

• 10:02Natalie Starkey?

  I've no idea what that is.

• 10:03Chuck Nice?

  500 meters. I'm like, okay, how many football fields is that?

• 10:07Natalie Starkey?

  I don't know. I don't do football fields. I do swimming pools. So let's take an Olympic sized swimming pool. You know, it takes me a while to get down Olympic sized swimming pool. They're about 50 meters. So it's it's 10 of these end to end. And it's it's a really big object, but in terms of space, that's quite small, obviously, compared to a planet. And so if this were to collide with our planet, and if it were to make it all the way to the surface without breaking up on the way in through, you know, atmospheric entry, if it made it as a block to the surface, it would probably create about a six mile wide crater or more. And so we're talking about kind of localized damage. It's not going to be like earth shattering, earth changing, you know, the whole globe is not going to change.

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Extinction level.

• 10:45Natalie Starkey?

  Right. Yeah.

• 10:46Chuck Nice?

  After it hits, Morgan Freeman won't have to come out and comfort us all, right?

• 10:53Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, he could do that. You never know.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd still want him to do that.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, yeah, but another issue, of course, if it hits the ocean, then you could have tsunamis that would totally terrify coastlines. Probably doing more damage than if it just hit land is my guess.

• 11:12Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, I think it would be really hard. I mean, obviously, if it hits somewhere in, you know, somewhere very remote, that's going to have less effect than if it hits New York City, which is usually what they use in the movies, isn't it? It's always New York for some reason.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. Okay, so now, now, now, Natalie, before we continue this podcast, I want you to promise me that NASA going to Bennu to bring back samples didn't affect its orbit such that it's now going to hit Earth.

• 11:40Chuck Nice?

  Wow, oh, man.

• 11:43Natalie Starkey?

  That would be bad.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because how is it that we go to, we go to an asteroid?

• 11:47Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then all of a sudden, we have headlines, say asteroid might hit Earth. So now you're going to promise me NASA had nothing to do with that.

• 11:53Natalie Starkey?

  You're right. Let's let's not make that link. Let's not expose them. Uh, no, but you know what? That is funny to say that because that is actually a way that we could think about redirecting these objects. And there was a mission called DART, which is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. That acronym works. I like that one.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That totally works.

• 12:10Natalie Starkey?

  And they they did this just a couple of years ago. They they basically put an impact, a kinetic impact into the side of a very small asteroid called Didymus. And they changed its orbit very slightly. So we've proven, or NASA have proven, and EISA working on this project, that you can move an asteroid if you want to. If you've got enough time, you can change its orbit. So actually.

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be, just to clarify. We changed its orbit around its its host asteroid.

• 12:37Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it was a binary asteroid. That's the double asteroid.

• 12:40Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, it was like a baby asteroid.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly.

• 12:42Natalie Starkey?

  Next to a big asteroid.

• 12:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's it's hard because that orbit is very well determined, right? You can time that. It's just an orbit around an asteroid moonlit orbiting an asteroid. So um so that made for a very uh reliable scenario to test what what effect you had. Yeah.

• 13:04Natalie Starkey?

  Exactly, and we weren't endangering anybody if it went kind of a little bit wrong. Um because you don't want things to go a little bit wrong and then redirect something into an Earth crossing orbit. But you know, we've we've tested that technology and that is what we could use in the future. But one of the things you've got to also remember is that all of these objects are completely different to each other. So um Benue, for example, is what's known as a rubble pile asteroid. So it's not like a big lump of just solid rock. It's actually made up of lots of little and bigger pieces, maybe boulders up to 10 meters in size. Again, a fifth of a football field. Um and and smaller pieces that are all kind of held together, but it's not it's not like a solid, solid piece of rock. So if you were to push a kinetic impactor into the side to try and nudge it out of the way onto a different orbit,

• 13:47Natalie Starkey?

  it might be that it broke up instead of, you know, just just move slightly, which might be worse. You then have more pieces to deal with.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these experiments are very important to establish the structural integrity

• 13:57Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of the object.

• 13:58Chuck Nice?

  Now, if it's so loosely held together, I mean, that would affect the way that it breaks up when it hits the Earth's atmosphere as well, too.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so yeah, there's so many sort of, I don't want to call them unknowns because they're they're knowns, but um we don't know exactly how it would react. And and if, you know, parts within the internal parts of it are held together better, would that maintain itself? Or, you know, if bits are flying off and as it comes in, it's very hard to know. And literally every asteroid is different. So, you know, we have a lot of unknowns that we're just like, OK, we just have to wait and see.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Natalie, I'm old enough to remember when this was first discovered, where people, the the first measurements of the density of some asteroids. And these are rocky asteroids and they measured the density. And the density was less than the density of rocks.

• 14:48Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how can you have a rocky astro- a rock asteroid where its density is less than that of rock? And people say, yeah, maybe it's a collection of rocks and there's like, and there's, yeah, pockets of whatever that's not rock.

• 15:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the overall density is less. And then we just call them rubble piles, I think.

• 15:06Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah. And you've got, you know, you've got other components in there too. You've got different types of ices, not just water ice. You've got other elements of ice and you've got, yeah, you've got pore space in there. So they're incredibly complicated objects and there's a whole, you know, you've got extreme end members, all ice and all rock and then everything in between. So yeah, this is why we need to study them in space to get up close. You can't get this information really with a telescope. You've got to be in orbit around these objects with, you know, advanced cameras to have a look at the surface in detail.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so this, so this sample is arriving now, okay?

• 16:13Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what, it'll be a while before we get to analyze it. We, those who, of course, it's their mission. What do you expect to find?

• 16:23Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a geo- you're a geochemist, so why don't you put just be ordinary geochemical things that you'd expect?

• 16:30Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, I guess the thing is we're not going to expect to find anything, I'm going to say alien, there's nothing alien in it. We know kind of what we expect to find, but there will be interesting things that we will be able to confirm along the way. So they expected to collect, they wanted to collect about 60 grams of rock. I think that's two ounces, maybe?

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, two ounces.

• 16:47Natalie Starkey?

  I'm trying to. Very quick.

• 16:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's two ounces. Thank you.

• 16:51Natalie Starkey?

  But they actually think they've collected quite a bit more. Now, until they open that canister, which lands in the Utah desert and they're going to collect it and and take it back to the Johnson Space Center, until they open that canister, they don't know exactly how much they got. They think they might have up to a kilogram of rock in there, which is absolutely phenomenal. That's so much rock. And actually, the kind of work that I used to do was on these kind of rocks. And I was always working on literally tiny, tiny pieces of dust. And the amount of detail we can get out of that piece of dust of a comet or an asteroid is phenomenal. So the fact they've got a kilogram potentially is going to be absolutely amazing for the sample analysis community.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. So how is it that they were after two ounces and might have gotten a kilogram? Two point two pounds. How do you accidentally, how do you accidentally get twenty times?

• 17:38Natalie Starkey?

  Set your standards low, right? And then you always achieve, you know? It's better to overachieve. I think the problem was, they didn't know necessarily what the surface was going to look like till they got there. And this is always the same with these missions. It was the same with the Rosetta mission that went to comet Churyov-Gerasimenko, that 67P. They didn't know what to expect until they got there. And then they got to land on this thing. Well, Asaurus Rex didn't land exactly. It did what we call a touch and go. So it kind of dropped down to the surface. It has this instrument called the TagSam, which was collecting the rock. And it blew nightstones to the surface and that kind of blew up rock into the capsule. And so they just didn't know how much they were going to get because that depended if they were landing on a piece of

• 18:18Natalie Starkey?

  solid rock or dusty material or what it might be. Obviously, when they they mapped the object first, so they did all this amazing, you know, the whole object was mapped and the cameras got an image of every single part of it. When they saw a big 10 meter boulder, they were like, well, we're not going to land there because we're not going to be able to pick up a 10 meter boulder. We need to land somewhere where it looks a bit finer grained and we can pick up material. So that had to be very carefully mapped out before they did that sample analysis. But yeah, hopefully, they've got quite a bit in there.

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Natalie, you were previously involved in sample return missions, but just not this one. Which ones were you involved in?

• 18:52Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so I've been really lucky to work on initially the Stardust mission, which was the first sample return mission from a comet or asteroid. And it went to an asteroid. And, oh, sorry, it went to a comet. What am I talking about? And this wasn't landing on the comet. What they did was flew through the tail of the comet. So this comet was just going around the sun, materials flying off the back the whole time. And they had what they call a tennis racket style collector that kind of popped up off the spacecraft. And the particle just flew into that and they collected them at high speed as high speed impacts. And they brought that capsule back.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, didn't that use aerogel?

• 19:28Natalie Starkey?

  It did, yeah. So I love that stuff. We had a lot of aerogel in the lab.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a little sample of it here. Wait, I got it right here on my desk.

• 19:34Natalie Starkey?

  It's amazing stuff. It's really, and because it's so light. The really cool thing about it is that it it decelerates the particles. So they were coming in at the speed of a speeding bullet, I think, six kilometers per second or something. So you need to be able to decelerate those particles without destroying them. Because obviously, if you decelerate something very quickly, it's going to heat up. And therefore, you've got all this really exciting carbon material in these comet particles. And, you know, bits and bobs of whatever's in there. You don't want to destroy that by heating it all up and volatilizing everything. So that aerogel was amazing at kind of slowing things down and collecting and keeping those particles. It's quite then hard to get the particles out of the aerogel. So that was part of the sample analysis. It took a long time to process the collector.

• 20:18Natalie Starkey?

  But, yeah, so I got to work on those samples.

• 20:20Chuck Nice?

  You could have used cotton candy, just letting you guys know.

• 20:22Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Natalie Starkey?

  It might have worked, you never know. Just a bit of sticky.

• 20:26Chuck Nice?

  And then all you would have had to do was wet it and you would have had everything. Everything would have been right there.

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so before we go to questions, I just, let me just give a shout out to my people here who will launch a mission from Earth, a moving platform.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do a touch and go on an asteroid, itself a moving platform, return to Earth, and have it land in the Utah desert.

• 20:56Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and know this. And you have people walking in my mouth saying, I don't trust science. I don't.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me? Do you see what we're accomplishing here?

• 21:09Natalie Starkey?

  And it's not finished. That that mission's continuing now, actually. It's going to go. So it's dropped off the sample capsule. So it comes back to Earth. And now the spacecraft continues on to another asteroid. So it's going to cost a bit more money. But because it's still working and all the instruments are working, it's going to go to Apophis, I think it's called.

• 21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apophis.

• 21:30Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's another Earth.

• 21:31Natalie Starkey?

  Another asteroid.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Natalie Starkey?

  And yeah, and so we're going to study that and get some more. We're not going to get any samples because that's done now. But we can study it with all the other scientific instrumentation and see what it looks like.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 21:42Natalie Starkey?

  So yeah, that's really exciting.

• 21:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, do you expect to find organics at all?

• 21:47Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, definitely. So Benue is, it's a C-type asteroid, which so it's carbonaceous. It's got lots of carbon in. It's actually a B-type. So within that, it's it's got even more carbon within it. So it's thought to be what we call a very primitive asteroid, which means that we think it's it's leftover from the very birth of the solar system. It's got the very first materials that were formed around the sun.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And these are the kind of objects where we found amino acids, right?

• 22:13Natalie Starkey?

  Precisely. Yeah, yeah. So we fully expect to find amino acids in there. They should be there. They've been found in in all the other sample return missions we've done from comets and asteroids so far.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Building blocks of protein and the.

• 22:26Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, and I mean, the High Ibiza two mission, which did a similar thing and came back just a couple of years ago. The analysis have been have been ongoing for that. They've even found one of the nuclear bases of RNA. So we've got so much exciting information in there. I think it's Urisil. Is that how it's pronounced? I'm not a biologist.

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it a battery? I'm sorry.

• 22:50Natalie Starkey?

  But it's in there. So you've got, yeah, you've got all the building blocks for life within these objects.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, what we really want-

• 22:56Natalie Starkey?

  And that's part of the reason we want to look at them.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we really want is something to crawl out of it when we open it up.

• 23:01Natalie Starkey?

  That would be very- You're kidding. It would be just, it's trapped in a capsule, so we never know.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Natalie, I'm older than you. I remember in real time, I read the book. Rare for me to read a book before I see the movie, but I did that for The Andromeda Strain. Michael Crichton, before he was famous with Jurassic Park and whatever his doctor show was on TV. The Andromeda Strain was a sample returned from space. And it was a bug that got out of the capsule and, and I, it didn't bode well for the town where the capsule landed. So-

• 23:37Natalie Starkey?

  Well, watch out for Texas then, because that's where the sample's going.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Texas, not Utah?

• 23:43Natalie Starkey?

  It's landing in Utah, and then it's gonna go to Johnson Space Center.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, give me some questions for this, for this geochemist here.

• 24:05Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's, uh, let's jump to it. Well, we might as well start with Paul Sinema, and thank you, Paul, for the phonetic spelling of your name. It says, "Hey Natalie, Neil, Chuck, Paul here from the Netherlands. Each time the Apollo astronauts were turned for the moon, they had to go into isolation because of the fear of bringing back something bad for the moon." Ah, look at that, Neil. "When we bring pieces of asteroid back to Earth, do we not run the same risk and is there any protocol?"

• 24:35Natalie Starkey?

  Yes. Um, there's protocols both ways, because when we send, uh, you know, Earth materials into space, we want to make sure they're not contaminated with anything from Earth that's gonna then put it into, you know, onto Mars, onto the moon, or onto an object in space. Because we want to check that we're not, you know, taking some bugs there and then saying, oh, no, we found these bugs on this object. Look how cool this is. So that's one thing. So that's called planetary.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want anybody sneezing on the spacecraft before it goes to, you know, we found rhinoviruses on Mars. Oh, my gosh. Okay.

• 25:08Natalie Starkey?

  And this is one of those problems when you get meteorites landing. So meteorites come from these space objects and land on on our planet. But they've come through our atmosphere. They've sat on the ground for a while. So there's, you know, there's every expectation that they could have been contaminated with Earth things. But when you go to an asteroid and collect stuff directly and put it in a clean capsule and bring it back, and then you take it back to a lab to open it, you know that anything you find within there in that clean lab environment, and I've worked in these labs in the Johnson Space Center, they are incredibly clean. They're very hard to get into because you've got to go through this whole procedure and you've got to wear masks and a full hood and suit and everything. So you want to make sure that you're protecting the sample from you so that you're, you know, and it's gone even more extreme when people have been building space missions. They, you

• 25:52Natalie Starkey?

  know, I remember one guy had a beard. He had to shave his beard off because they just said, we can't deal with your beard. It's too dirty. We have to get rid of your beard. Otherwise, you can't go in the clean lab. So this is, you know, it's this level of friendliness. Yeah. However much washing, it's got to be gone. So, yeah.

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds nasty.

• 26:12Chuck Nice?

  I guess there is that. You're a slob. Okay, that's all there is to it. You're disgusting and there's food in your beard. Okay. So you're gonna have to shave that puppy.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 26:24Natalie Starkey?

  But, yeah, when we bring stuff back, sure, potentially, you know, we could have things crawling out of that. It's very unlikely. But we have dedicated labs for the return missions. So there's nothing else in those labs. We're only dealing with those samples.

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what they said about Andromeda strain.

• 26:41Natalie Starkey?

  Well, you know.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, each level below ground was a higher level of sterilization for you as you went down. And you only worked on it at the lowest level there. And they even burned off your outer skin layer, which has all these microbes. You walk through some UV thing and then they wipe the skin off. So, no, it's a fascinating. Michael Crichton wrote it. The boy has an M D. So he knew what he was doing. It was a fun, terrifying story, the Andromeda strain.

• 27:09Chuck Nice?

  That's cool.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm gonna watch that. I'm gonna watch that while your people open this capsule.

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, how does it land?

• 27:19Natalie Starkey?

  Oh, it's got basically is a capsule and it comes down with parachutes.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. It's like an escape capsule.

• 27:25Natalie Starkey?

  And then it plonks itself into the desert somewhere.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 27:28Natalie Starkey?

  Um, hopefully in a predictable location. But yeah, I mean, there are issues sometimes that, you know, the parachutes don't open. That has happened before with a, um, a capsule that came back from collecting samples of the sun, believe it or not, um, and it actually crashed and the capsule got a bit broken. But they did manage to sort of actually collect samples still. That, that wasn't pieces of rock that were.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, Chuck, I remember the pictures of it. That, that was not so much a capsule. It, it looked like a flying saucer. It was like saucer shaped and like it was an angle into the ground. It looked just like a crashed.

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  Like a, like a, like a alien ship.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly.

• 28:04Chuck Nice?

  I, I gotta tell you, whoever was in charge of parachutes had to get fired. Okay. I mean, serious, it's like billion dollars we spent and we skipped, we skimped on the parachutes? Seriously?

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 28:19Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right, so, yeah, so, so Natalie, correct me if I'm wrong. NASA, it's the department, I don't know, there's a department, the Division of Planetary Protection? That's what it's called, right? Which protects both ways. Forward contamination and back contamination. Okay.

• 28:35Natalie Starkey?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 28:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it. Okay.

• 28:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 28:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, what more you got?

• 28:39Chuck Nice?

  Hey, this is Andy C. from Vancouver, British Columbia. He says, what are some of the unique challenges working on asteroids to their minimal or negligible gravity? I assume it's pretty close to just working in microgravity of space for most of them. Or, or am I, am I wrong?

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:57Natalie Starkey?

  No, completely right. I mean, uh, Bennu is the smallest object or the smallest asteroid to, um, have been investigated in detail. Um, and as I said, it's 500 meters, uh, which doesn't sound very small, but it is really, really small. So, you know.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much would you weigh on Bennu? See, that's what we were, we're really on it.

• 29:14Natalie Starkey?

  You wouldn't, you wouldn't stick to the surface at all. You'd be flying off. So, you know, if, if you wanted to land an object on Bennu, you would need to, or if you wanted to stand there, you'd need to be tethered down. Um, because you would, if you just jumped, you'd fly away. Um, which was an issue with the Rosetta mission when it, it did land on, uh, the comet. Uh, and it bounced initially because, you know, it didn't quite go to plan. There were a few things went wrong. There was something broken on the spacecraft and they knew it was broken. There was nothing they could do at that point. Attempted landing, but they then had these tethers that came out and kind of attached it to the surface and that was the plan. But in terms of a Cyrus Rex, when you go into orbit around these objects, we call it orbit, but it's not really because there's not enough

• 29:55Natalie Starkey?

  gravity to be pulling that spacecraft towards it. So it's really powered flight around these objects. It's not as easy as going to Mars and just orbiting around.

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  You're orbiting, but it's not an orbit that is caused by the object itself.

• 30:09Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, it's powered flight and it's a lot more complicated for the mathematicians. They've got to figure out all that whilst, you know, not hitting the surface and not getting too far away.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else are they gonna do? Give them a pencil and a pad.

• 30:25Chuck Nice?

  Give them a pencil and a napkin. Tell them, go work this out.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay, so what you're saying is on Earth, escape velocity is like seven miles per second, eleven meters per second. No, no, eleven kilometers per second, right? So you're saying that on these smaller asteroids, just your, if you just trotted, you would be lifting yourself up with enough speed to possibly escape the asteroid.

• 30:55Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 30:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's how low the escape velocity is, yeah.

• 30:58Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so when you see like, what is it? It's Armageddon, isn't it? Where Bruce and Bruce and what's his face go up to the asteroid and start mining it and stuff. Is that the movie?

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, yeah. But they don't mine it. He's a miner.

• 31:12Natalie Starkey?

  He's a miner and they're trying to drill into it.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he drills in. But they do have these grappling hooks. They did give some sensitivity to the lower gravity.

• 31:22Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, that was where, you know, there was a lot of inaccuracies in that movie, but there we go. They were on the asteroid. The first? Well, then the first maybe two minutes, but anyway. But yeah, so it's something you would have to think about. If you wanted to go and mine these objects, you've got to tether yourself on there. But with a Cyrus Rex, it didn't land. It did this touch and go. So it wasn't really a problem.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, famously noted in Armageddon, the asteroid that Bruce Willis had to destroy was the size of Texas. So that would certainly have a noticeable gravity.

• 31:55Natalie Starkey?

  Ah, okay. Yeah, that's quite a, that would be a large one, yeah.

• 31:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a line delivered in the film. I know every line in the film. And that's how that where that happened. By the way, Armageddon violates more laws of physics.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Per minute than any other film I had ever seen until I saw Moonfall.

• 32:14Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god. Oh, poor Halle Berry's, you know.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Halle Berry, yeah, the moon is like, it is discovered to be hollow.

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's like a moon creature inside made of rock.

• 32:25Natalie Starkey?

  I have not seen this.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, just, just get ready, strap yourself in for that one.

• 32:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Halle Berry bought a, bought, bought a summer house and was like, damn it, I gotta do a movie.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so keep going, Chuck.

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Uh, this, uh, next question, greetings to the Royal Court of Cosmology. So Osiris Rex took a bite out of an asteroid and I wonder what it tastes like. Seriously, though. Is it at all cost effective to mine an asteroid and how would it be processed? Should it be sliced like deli meat, ground like burgers? What would the wheat be separated from the chaff? Dave in Montague, New Jersey wants to know. Dave, very poetic, Dave.

• 33:12Natalie Starkey?

  I just love that.

• 33:13Chuck Nice?

  Dave's being very poetic. When we separate the wheat from the chaff, what exactly shall we find on the floor?

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like cosmological trio, yes.

• 33:22Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 33:24Natalie Starkey?

  Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, that question's got me. Okay, um, yes, okay, so mining asteroids, sure. It, it would be profitable if we wanted to do it. Um, but there's just loads of economic implications of doing it. So the asteroids contain tons of precious metals, brilliant. We need tons of precious metals for all the technology we need on earth, particularly, you know, car batteries now need tons of precious metals.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, the carbon ones don't, just the metallic asteroids, right?

• 33:50Natalie Starkey?

  Yes, but they, they still contain quite a bit of silicious material, so they will have other bits and bobs. But yeah, you go to the right asteroids. Silicious, like silicate.

• 34:01Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, are you talking about sexy asteroids now? Oh, that asteroid's very salacious, I tell you.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:10Natalie Starkey?

  But yeah, you'd go to the right ones, and there's plenty of them up there. And so when you've got a metal-rich asteroid, it's going to be pretty solid. It's going to be harder to mine than like a rubble pile, but there are ways to do it. We have, really have the technology to do it. The big question is, you've invested all that money, you could then potentially bring all of those metals back to Earth, and you would literally flood the market. So if you would have a lot of money, but then we would basically wouldn't need any more ever again, potentially.

• 34:39Chuck Nice?

  However, that's not such a bad thing, because mining is extremely deleterious to the ecology and to, you know, the structure of our ecological balances. And so to be able to go someplace and bring it back.

• 34:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space mining.

• 34:56Chuck Nice?

  Space mining, I mean, you're really doing a great deal of good, even though you would have cornered the market and kind of collapsed that sector of the economy.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other than that, everything's fine.

• 35:10Natalie Starkey?

  But there's also technologies that we could develop if we had enough supply of certain metals. So some things are constrained at the moment because we just don't have the supply. So we couldn't say, oh, let's go make this amazing thing because we just don't have that.

• 35:20Chuck Nice?

  So what you're saying is we would create industry, even though you're destroying one sector of the economy, you're creating a whole brand new area.

• 35:29Natalie Starkey?

  Potentially, yeah. So the initial investment is huge. The risks could be huge as well. So what if something goes wrong? What if when one of these companies goes up and starts mining, something goes wrong, they redirect something by accident, ends up colliding with Earth, you know, or Mars or something else? We don't want that to happen. So there's a lot of regulation that would be required, but there, you know, there's companies working on this. There's a lot of investment happening, and I think it will happen one day.

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But to your point, Natalie, the asteroids of interest would be the nearest ones, which are the Earth crossers, right?

• 36:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, as a category of asteroid, those are the easiest ones to get to. So the thought that a mistake could. Directed towards Earth.

• 36:11Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is very real. But if they're up there messing with asteroids, I might say, if I'm the president, I'll say, we discovered an asteroid headed our way. Could you go to that one and deflect it?

• 36:22Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, out of, out of harm's way. And so they have the power to get to asteroids and mess with them. They might be our biggest defense system.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  Right. They could, they, they have a dual purpose. So let me ask you one. When you identify these asteroids, are there any that have many metals in them? So like, instead of just one precious, like, or, you know, rare earth element, uh, or rare space element, would there be several?

• 36:47Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Chuck Nice?

  Is that possible?

• 36:48Natalie Starkey?

  In fact, yeah, the ones that contain metal contain a lot of different metals. So they'll tend to be, the really metallic ones will be iron and nickel, on the most part, which is the same as sort of the core of our planet, which is what we think is down there. And that's the reason we think we know what's down there, because we've looked at these very metallic asteroids, and we think that's the center of, of a big object.

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, I want to interject. Iron and nickel are the major byproducts of supernova explosions.

• 37:15Natalie Starkey?

  Okay.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a variety of supernova where iron and nickel, it, it comes right out. And so

• 37:20Natalie Starkey?

  We've got tons of that.

• 37:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no shortage of iron and nickel in the universe for that reason. And it falls to the middle of things when, you know, when they're, they're molten and they form. So, so we get the iron nickel for free from exploding stars and, and the other elements as well. But the abundance of iron and nickel is huge.

• 37:38Natalie Starkey?

  It's huge. So that is the majority of it. But there's tons of it, as Neil said. And within that as well, there's all these other, like platinum and all these other palladium, whatever the metals are, that all the heavy metals that fall into the center of a planet or the center of an asteroid when it, um, when it's a molten blob of, of lava essentially. And then, um, it, it segregates into, as it cools down into heavy stuff in the middle and the lighter elements on the outside. So the, so there's loads of stuff in there. And even if there's only like one weight percent of platinum, it's a huge object.

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:09Natalie Starkey?

  And that's still tons and tons and tons of platinum. So it's plenty.

• 38:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So nature.

• 38:13Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, you've got everything in there.

• 38:14Chuck Nice?

  Nature. Yeah, I was gonna say, the he, the hard work is done.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 38:20Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I tried to even get a couple more in. We only have a couple more minutes here.

• 38:24Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Hi, Dr. Starkey, Dr. Tyson, Mr. Nice, Malcolm from Trinidad and Tobago. Who holds the rights to the resources of Benue and any other celestial bodies? The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the Space Act of 2015 fall short in providing a clear answer to this question. So does anybody get to go up and just, you know, is it the Wild West up there? You just get up there and this is my, plant a flag.

• 38:52Natalie Starkey?

  Some, somewhat, there's, there's literally space lawyers now, which I thought was just the coolest thing ever. I was like, okay, so they're working on these problems and there's many of them. You know, you've got private companies getting involved in space exploration. You've got private companies taking tourists up into space. You've got, when they get there, who owns what they get and exactly who can bring it back to Earth? What happens if something goes wrong? All of this and how do, you know, space agencies collaborate with private companies? There is so much in space law to be figured out and a lot of it isn't figured out at the moment. The 1967 treaty basically was saying that you can't use space as a kind of a weapon. You can't, it's got to be anything, any work that goes on in space has to be peaceful.

• 39:35Natalie Starkey?

  And we've moved past that. We're beyond that now. And space is a busy place. We're launching satellites all the time. You've got lots of different people launching satellites. It's a busy place above our planet now. And we've, we've not kept up. So space law is always, it's running and it's trying to catch up with what's going on. At the moment, I believe, I believe the law from a couple of years ago was that, I think Obama maybe signed this through, that American citizens can own the bits of space they find. And I think Luxembourg has a similar rule. I'm not sure all the other countries have caught up yet, but there's, it's slowly kind of.

• 40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like a homesteading kind of rule, right?

• 40:11Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you, if you, if you get there first and you develop it, then you get to, but if you do something with it, that's, I think in the homesteading, you had to make, it had to be economically viable. But the idea is that promoted, um, ex, not exploitation, it promoted settlements, right? If, so otherwise what's your motivation to go there if you didn't have a return on that effort? And the return on that effort is you get the free land.

• 40:37Chuck Nice?

  You get to forget the right.

• 40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that was a.

• 40:40Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, it's a big, it's a big area at the moment and constantly changing field. I can't say I'm up to date completely with it, but.

• 40:48Chuck Nice?

  I'm just looking forward to the space wars because you know, once, once we figure it, once we figure out who's got what, you know, that means somebody else got to come along and be like, you know, I'm Vladimir Putin, I'm taking that.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so one of my more interesting elements of space law that I read about was if you meet an alien who's more intelligent than you and you kill it, is it murder?

• 41:17Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 41:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because murder applies to humans. It's not, it's.

• 41:21Chuck Nice?

  It's beyond murder. It's double murder. It's worse than murder. You actually killed something better than you. That's ridiculous. That's like a fly. That's like a fly pulling out an AK-47 and blowing the, blowing us away. A bunch of flies pulled the trigger on a gun.

• 41:40Chuck Nice?

  It's ridiculous. That's terrible.

• 41:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Chuck wants to be a lawyer of the future. Okay, all right. Keep going. Two more. We've got five minutes left. Two more.

• 41:49Chuck Nice?

  All right, all right, here we go. All right, let's get, uh, let's get back to basics on this one. This is Matt from Perth, Australia. Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Starkey, Lord Nice. How do you think asteroids are formed, given you need mass to convert gas to solids like asteroids? How could they form independently and not part of a planet or a star? Can they do that?

• 42:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me, let me add to that by saying, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Natalie, if you add up all the asteroids in the asteroid belt and it, it's like 5% the mass of the moon.

• 42:27Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, it is.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that they don't actually have a planet's mass worth of content.

• 42:33Natalie Starkey?

  No, they're tiny.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What the hell happened there?

• 42:36Chuck Nice?

  Whoa, yeah.

• 42:37Natalie Starkey?

  They're just the kind of the leftover bits from when the solar system formed. And so you had a star that exploded and, and, and you've got all this, this gas field around it in a cloud and it condenses down and then you start to form materially around it. Now, it's a process that actually we don't really understand in a huge amount of detail because we've never seen it happen. We can now look at other star systems where planets are forming around them, but we're looking at these, you know, light years away and we can just.

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think Jupiter messed with the area so that it couldn't make its own planet? Because it's between Mars and Jupiter, and Jupiter is badass.

• 43:12Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so Jupiter took a lot of the mass. It's very large because it's made of mostly gases. So it became very large and the rocky planets became smaller because they've got all the denser material. But you had all this other material left over, which was the comets and asteroids. They they actually just didn't get incorporated into a planet, but that was quite good. It's useful for us because they're these sort of time capsules of that very early process. Those very early times in our solar system, the first few million years, which sounds like a long time, I understand. But we're talking about 4.5 billion years of history. And they preserve those materials from that very early stage of star and planet formation. So that's why we want to analyze them partly because they can tell us a bit about how the planets formed,

• 43:54Natalie Starkey?

  how life got started, where life came from and water. So that's part of the reason we want to look at them. But yeah, they've got a lot to tell us about those really early stages.

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so another dimension of this is, of course, you know, when the the KT impact happened 65 million years ago, we think of that as an impact. But Natalie, do you think of that as just, oh, Earth is just gathering more mass from the bits and pieces?

• 44:17Natalie Starkey?

  I mean, I also see it as like that. That's something that completely changed the direction of life on Earth. You know, we probably wouldn't be here had that not happened.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 44:27Natalie Starkey?

  Life in as we know it today might not have ever developed. It wiped out a lot of stuff, but some stuff survived and it created a new, you know, route for life to evolve. So it is just part of the process. It's part of the process of being a planet in space. For sure, we're going to be hit by an asteroid in the future. Hopefully, we're going to know it's going to happen and we can do something about it. But chances are we're gonna miss one. They're arriving all the time as meteors, but small pieces.

• 44:53Chuck Nice?

  And that's our show, people. Thank you. Chances are we're gonna miss one. Sleep well.

• 45:01Natalie Starkey?

  I'm sorry.

• 45:02Chuck Nice?

  And you know what?

• 45:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chances are we're gonna miss one.

• 45:04Chuck Nice?

  What's killing me is that we're hearing this from an expert. I like, you know what I mean? You know, let me just tell you something. I'm glad you're Dr. Natalie Starkey, cosmochemist, instead of Dr. Natalie Starkey, heart surgeon. Listen, your heart is crap. You're going to die. Okay?

• 45:23Natalie Starkey?

  That's it. That's it. It's all over.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's not that you said it. It's just you said it so casually.

• 45:27Chuck Nice?

  It's so casually.

• 45:28Natalie Starkey?

  I, I kind of just see Earth as like, we're, we're on this planet for maybe a hundred years at best. And, you know, it's been here so long and all these things have happened to this planet. And we're just this planet in space. There's all these other planets. And, you know, I do get a bit of an existential crisis because I'm like, we're really not that important here. You know, we think we are, but actually we're not really, are we? It's, it's been here for ages. I, I don't, I don't think that means we shouldn't protect our planet. And we shouldn't do things about climate change because there's still generations to come. But we are going to have to deal with these things in the future and hope.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not ending on that note.

• 46:02Natalie Starkey?

  Okay.

• 46:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me another question.

• 46:03Natalie Starkey?

  More positive note.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, give me last question.

• 46:07Chuck Nice?

  Last question.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Natalie, you're gonna answer this in a positive.

• 46:11Natalie Starkey?

  Got it.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go, Chuck.

• 46:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. Here we go.

• 46:15Chuck Nice?

  Hello, Dr. Starkey. Can you please tell me, are we all going to die seriously? Is that the? No, I'm joking.

• 46:25Chuck Nice?

  We're all gonna die.

• 46:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay, uh, this is, uh, Kevin. He says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, Dr. Starkey. Kevin from Browning, White Deer, Texas here. What can the sample from an asteroid reveal to us about the information of the solar system itself? Can it tell us anything about the origins of our life here on Earth?

• 46:50Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so that's one of the major things.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Natalie, just because it has amino acids, why would that have to mean? If that can make amino acids, then so could Earth, right? So, so they say life might have come from asteroids, but maybe life could just happen anywhere. And it's just a, it's a curiosity, but it's not, it's not the stork that brought the, the molecules.

• 47:12Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so it's, it's, we think and we know that asteroids have the building blocks for life, or many of them, but it's about then having the environment for life to form. So it's not just about having those building blocks. Life is pretty unlikely to form on an asteroid itself because we probably need water. We need some kind of liquid solvent that all these chemicals to move around in and form life. That's what we think is probably quite important. So the combination of water-

• 47:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, what you're implying there, and I just want to make it more graphic, is an atom or a molecule can't just get up and walk and find another molecule to bind with.

• 47:50Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay?

• 47:52Natalie Starkey?

  It needs some medium-

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It needs a medium that can carry it so that it has these encounters and possibly explore the chemistry that could result from it. Is that a fair characterization?

• 48:01Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, exactly. So early Earth was very inhospitable to life. It was very hot, it was molten. As it cooled down, it then condensed water on its surface, and we still were being impacted by asteroids from space. Now, these asteroids were containing these amino acids, these nuclear bases that we see, and all this carbon-rich material. So it might be that that is how life got to Earth, and then, you know, the building blocks for life. And then they had this lovely watery-rich environment where stuff could start forming. We got these very basic life forms. So that's one potential that it did come.

• 48:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or it's a water planet.

• 48:32Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, we probably need water. And that's why when you look around the solar system, there isn't a huge amount of liquid water sitting around, and we don't, we haven't yet found life anywhere else. So that's why we sort of make that inference that we need, we need water, we think, for making-

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, there you go. All right. Well, that's a good note to end on. I like that. I feel encouraged somehow. Yeah. No, no, it's an important thing because I love that you can bring ingredients, but now you need- Yeah, exactly. You need the right environment, and Earth might have been just that. I love that. Well, Natalie, it's been a delight. We don't, we need to call you more often than we do.

• 49:10Natalie Starkey?

  Oh, thank you.

• 49:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have, you have a unique sort of parameters of expertise that feed our mission here, and so thank you. And let me remind people that Natalie was the author of one of our space shows here in New York at the Hayden Planetarium. So we have a long relationship with this brilliant-

• 49:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmochemist over there in the UK.

• 49:34Natalie Starkey?

  I'll come back anytime.

• 49:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there it is, Natalie. We love you from over here across the pond. Thanks for helping us out to understand this mission. Yeah. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always. Always a pleasure. All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, signing off for Startalk Cosmic Querries. As always, keep looking up.