I want to start by having you imagine
something for me okay imagine that you
are standing on a beach in the Bahamas
it’s a nice sunny day it’s a nice beach
that’s a good image right
it’s 1492 and from the east three
rickety wooden boats sort of lurch their
way across the horizon and out of it
comes Christopher Columbus and he comes
up to the shoreline and you being from
this audience walk up to him and say sir
you today are starting a chain of events
that in 500 years for good and more than
often ill will lead to a billion people
living on two continents you haven’t
seen and won’t see in some of the most
prosperous powerful nations on earth
well his initial reaction I’m pretty
sure would be to be confused because he
thought he was in Indonesia but after
that he would probably think that you’re
wrong he would say what are you talking
about a billion people that’s more than
there are on the entire planet
and in any case it was a huge effort for
me to get here I had to get the crown to
give me three ships I had to find a crew
that didn’t want to worry about falling
off the edge of the earth just to get
them out here it was a massive
enterprise how are people going to come
here why are they going to come here
well he would have been wrong if he took
that position of course because there
are a billion people in the Americas and
there are powerful nations there and
they came for a variety of reasons they
came for wealth they came for political
and religious freedom and they came for
a personal glory just sort of the
reasons why people do anything anyway
and what made it possible was an ongoing
exploration of the Americas fueled by
steady improvements in technology that
made it possible but
that voyage was the thing that really
got it taking off so my goal here is to
suggest that maybe we are at a similar
inflection point a moment where we might
be opening up a new world that will
change the lives of our descendants in a
way that is comparable to the way the
lives of the descendants of Columbus
have been changed now that sounds pretty
grandiose I know so you’re probably
wondering where this new world is and
what this new world is and I bet you
have visions in your mind so it’s
probably just good if I just show you
all right it’s not much but there’s a
lot of promise there let me let me
explain why so this is an example of
something called a small body or a
planetesimal and by small I do mean
small I mean objects like the one in
this particular image that would easily
fit on this stage up to things that
might be as much as a hundred kilometers
across not very big not planets
oh but they’re old they are the
primordial remnants of the formation of
our solar system as a scientist I am
fascinated by these objects because they
are the building blocks of the planets
and they tell us about that time before
there were planets so from a scientists
perspective these are amazing things but
also as it turns out the new world so
for a little bit of context here you
know planetesimals by different names
there are two broad classes of them one
the asteroids other comets and really
the differences between them are based
on the amount of different compounds
inside them for instance asteroids have
more minerals and metals than organic
material in water whereas comets have
lots of water and organic material and
progressively less minerals and metals
as building blocks the asteroids are
what we make terrestrial planets out of
like earth and comets are what we made
the cores of the giant planets out of
Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune now
you might be surprised to find this out
but we have only known about these
objects for about 200 years and almost
everything that we do know about them we
have learned in the last few decades now
I would like to tell you that we learned
all of this because of some high-minded
desire to learn about our origins and
because my scientific arguments were so
compelling that everybody invested their
resources and studying these objects but
the real answer is fear we learned about
these objects because we’re afraid of
them in the 1970s Walter Louise
Elbe Alvarez made the now famous
discovery that the non-avian dinosaurs
appeared to go extinct almost coincident
with a large asteroid impact 65 million
years ago now there are a few things
that focus the mind quite like the
prospect of sudden fiery death from
above
and so we instituted a global effort to
find every object in our solar system
that was more than a hundred metres
across and figure out whether or not it
was going to hit the earth in the future
this was a huge enterprise it required
dozens of telescopes many countries
working together and it’s been ignore
misil in two ways the first is that we
have found a huge number of these
objects at current count we have
identified something on the order of
half a million planetesimals at orbits
ranging all the way out to the region
beyond Pluto now I’m going to focus my
talk the rest of this talk on a
particular subgroup of that half million
a group of objects that I well we call
near-earth objects or Neos now Neos have
a common characteristic that common
characteristic is is that at some point
in their journey around the Sun they
will approach or cross Earth’s orbit now
from the perspective of threat that
makes them sound like the ones we care
most about which is true
so we dedicate a lot of our effort to
looking at Neos trying to identify which
one of them might be potentially
hazardous to us and just like with
everything else we’ve been very
successful at studying the neo since
2000 we’ve discovered almost 15,000 of
these objects and I sort of put in
perspective here the movie Armageddon
was released just as it expanded up
so maybe the movie industry also helped
fuel this investigation or not but
15,000 objects that have an orbit that
approach or cross ours now
that’s potentially scary except that we
have mapped all of these orbits for
every one of these objects and not one
of them is likely to hit us
best failure ever we are not going to be
threatened by any of these objects now
the caution in this and also the good
news is that we’ve only just started
this process we estimate that there may
be as many as a hundred thousand to a
million more objects in these orbits
with diameters below a hundred meters
that we have yet to see so maybe one of
those might threaten us in the future
but right now the numbers look good in
our favor now the side effect of this is
the Neos are on our cosmic porch their
orbits come close to Earth they don’t
tend to go too far from the Sun they are
rich in water minerals metals other
things and their primordial so we can
learn more about our origins by looking
at them we can see them more easily and
more importantly if we need to we can
get to them so they are very important
scientifically and potentially
economically but there is a problem and
that problem is even with our biggest
telescopes they still look like that
little dot they’re small they’re too
small to be resolved so all we can see
is a point of light and we can learn
some things from that point of light we
can look at the light that’s reflected
off of it and that tells us something
about the nature of these objects but to
turn them into real-world that we can’t
do nevertheless it’s what we’ve got and
I like to call this kind of exploration
spherical cow exploration it’s all cow
it’s missing a few details like legs but
it’s an average by looking at the
average characteristics of an object we
can learn something about it how its
brightness changes with time tells us a
little bit about its rotation its total
brightness tells us a little bit about
this size breaking it out into colours
tells us a little bit about its
composition and even from that limited
perspective when we started looking at
these objects we began to realize that
an asteroid is not an asteroid it’s not
an asteroid and comet is not a comet
it’s not a comet in fact within these
groups there’s phenomenal diversity I’ll
show you a little bit about what I mean
apologize for the complexity of this but
there are three broad groups to
asteroids we have our stony asteroids
which are mineral-rich our metal
asteroids metal-rich and we have what’s
called chondrites
which are water and organic material
rich and within each of these broad
groups we have these subgroups were
they’re different mixtures of minerals
metals and chondrites
and each of these groups subdivide
further and then we have a whole group
of other potential types that we’ve
identified that they’ll fit in any of
those groups and the more objects we
observe the more asteroid classes we
seem to get and the same is true for
comets now comets are traditionally
divided based on their orbits
long period short period and
intermediate or Halle type orbits those
orbits tell us about where they come
from it tell us about how much evolve
evolution they’ve undergone but even
within those groups we have little
compositional subgroups and those
compositional subgroups are based on the
amount of water relative to the amount
of organics relative the amount of
certain volatile like ammonia and
cyanide and those groups are distributed
somewhat differently in the different
classes but we’re still trying to
understand exactly how they’re organized
overall so we can learn something from
just a point however what we don’t learn
from that are the rich details that make
them worlds we can’t tell you from a
point source what its shape is we can’t
really tell you its size we don’t know
the axis on which it rotates we don’t
know its density we don’t know if it’s
uniform and its interior we don’t know
if it’s uniform on its surface we don’t
know what its surface is like if we’re
just going to go there based on a point
source we have to make a lot of guesses
about the environment that we’re going
to get into and that brings me to the
next part of this exploration which I
call the one-off part of exploration and
this is the traditional NASA model since
the mid 1980s we have been launching
robotic spacecraft to small bodies we’ve
been to about 20 of them now so less
than 1% of all the objects we know of
that are near-earth objects these
spacecraft are really Marvel’s they are
highly capable they have enormous
complexity and they’re highly customized
to the environment that they’re going to
they’re launched uniquely for one target
that we identified as being in
particularly important to this
scientific community and that’s it and a
very risk intolerant they need to work
they’re expensive some of these are a
billion dollars so they’ve made great
strides they have learned an enormous
amount about small bodies here’s an
example of one this is comet 67p
churyumov-gerasimenko it was the target
of the Rosetta mission this is the
smallest body we’ve orbited with a
spacecraft by the way and it’s a comet
an example of a short-period comet and
it’s one of several that we have sent
missions to now this comet looks almost
nothing like any of the other comets
that we’ve been to it’s a unique world
and most of the theories that we had
before we got there
about how the environment would be they
turned out to be wrong we have found gas
compounds that we didn’t believe could
be present the surface turned out to be
a lot tougher than we thought it would
be we don’t really understand a lot of
the features on the surface or how
they’re formed and a lot of open
questions have been raised about exactly
how comets are assembled in the first
place so our visit to this comet and the
other few comets that we’ve looked at
have ended up being a case of raising
more questions a new answer which is
really not what you want to do when
you’re trying to look at these objects
as the new world you want to find common
characteristics things that will tell
you what to do but if you can’t then
that means that every place you want to
go you need to visit beforehand and
that’s something that we can’t do with
our current model in terms of the
exploration in the Americas where we are
right now is kind of like the Jamestown
era we know a lot about a few places
that we spent a lot of money and effort
to get to and we know where North
America is generally and we kind of know
how big it is but we don’t know where
the rivers are we don’t know where the
mountains are we don’t know where you
can grow food we don’t know where it
rains where it doesn’t where the
tornadoes happen where the Bears are we
don’t know the details and based on this
map we don’t even know where the Pacific
Northwest is so if we’re going to
explore Neos same way that we explore
North America we need to go at it the
same way what made it possible for us to
go from the Jamestown era to the modern
era was a combination of motivation and
technology and that’s where we are right
now
so I’ve already explained do we have
scientific motivation that’s my thing
but we also have economic motivation in
two areas first is launch so it costs
between 5,000 and 10,000 euros to take
one kilogram of material from the
surface of earth and put it in space
that’s an enormous incentive to build
things in space as opposed to launching
them in space that’s a lot of money if
we have material there to do it it’s
worth exploiting that and we do and
that’s the second part of this
motivation there is tremendous wealth in
near-earth objects and asteroids in
general they are loaded with metals like
gold platinum iron rare earths water
other organic materials phosphorus we
know of one asteroid psyche that may
contain enough iron to meet our current
needs for steel for more than a million
years there are now economists doing
forecasts that suggest that the total
value of mining this population of
material could be the equivalent of a
hundred billion euros per person on
earth an enormous amount of wealth so we
have massive economic and scientific
reasons for doing this the technology
needs to come along and the good news is
it has over the last two decades or so
there has been an explosion of micro
satellite technology cube SATs small
SATs these are smaller more compact
easier to fly less expensive missions
that can go do things that we wouldn’t
risk a billion-dollar spacecraft to do
and as these become more capable we
become more able to do what I call a
high-throughput investigation which
means that we can look at a lot of these
objects to assess their scientific and
economic value to us and I’m not alone
in thinking about this there are whole
corporations that have been formed
around the idea of utilizing resources
in space companies like Planetary
Resources and deep space initiatives in
Europe the government of Luxembourg has
made a several hundred million euro bet
that they can become the nation of space
mining and there are educational
institutions like my home institution of
the University of Arizona where we are
developing educational programs to
address the ethical technical and
scientific issues that are going to be
coming when we begin to exploit these
resources for our own use now to me the
key to getting there is that bottom part
of the of the Venn diagram I showed you
which is high-throughput investigation
with small satellites and in my group at
the University of Arizona we have been
working to develop a concept for this
that we call Wayfarer and a Wayfarer is
a very small spacecraft maybe about this
big by this big weighs maybe 20 to 25
kilograms it has one or two scientific
instruments that are tailored for
looking at small bodies and learning the
maximum amount from them we can build
these using a common format that common
format allows assembly line construction
assembly line construction brings down
its cost even more and so an individual
one of these spacecraft could cost less
than 1% of one of these bigger
spacecraft that we sent to one object in
addition to the cost of the spacecraft
as well the mission design is flexible
instead of launching one time with one
rocket to send in one object to one
place we shove these into the nooks and
crannies of every launch vehicle that
goes up commercial scientific military
you name it we put it in there and once
these objects get into orbit these
Wayfarers they go and transition
themselves to an orbital parking lot
beyond the moon where they sit and wait
for us to tell them where to explore and
when we do that they can do all kinds of
things we can send them to an asteroid
or a comet and have it go into orbit
like the Rosetta spacecraft did we can
study it in great detail or if we just
want to see a lot of objects we can fly
one or two of them by a number of small
bodies just to get a sense of what’s
going on we can also have multiple
spacecraft work together in an
environment about a body and we can send
them out on a mission from place to
place orbiting one orbiting another
orbiting another and then coming back to
the orbital parking lot all of those are
options for us and we could even play
exotic games where we put one in orbit
around an object and then we put another
object in a position to hit an asteroid
to look at what’s inside we can do this
because these objects are cheap easily
replicated but capable enough to deliver
the science we want now we are one of
only or one of several I should say
organizations that are looking at this
kind of technology
there were corporations governments and
businesses or in universities that are
also trying to build their own version
of Wayfarer and they have different
emphasis I don’t know which of these is
going to be the one that succeeds
I hope it’s us but I do know that
somebody is going to get this right and
we are going to go out and have an
explosive exploration of near-earth
space we’re going to find these
resources and once we do we open up the
opportunity to colonize our new world
this is a long game it won’t be us but
our grandchildren or their grandchildren
may live in buildings built with steel
from asteroids they may eat food grown
in soil that was either composed of or
fortified by material we brought back
from asteroids and comets they may drink
water that was mine from a comet that’s
also being used as fuel on the
spacecraft on which they live work and
travel and they’ll have all that wealth
that we were talking about that is our
Shore in the Bahamas we’re standing
there today
it’s a new world thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
something for me okay imagine that you
are standing on a beach in the Bahamas
it’s a nice sunny day it’s a nice beach
that’s a good image right
it’s 1492 and from the east three
rickety wooden boats sort of lurch their
way across the horizon and out of it
comes Christopher Columbus and he comes
up to the shoreline and you being from
this audience walk up to him and say sir
you today are starting a chain of events
that in 500 years for good and more than
often ill will lead to a billion people
living on two continents you haven’t
seen and won’t see in some of the most
prosperous powerful nations on earth
well his initial reaction I’m pretty
sure would be to be confused because he
thought he was in Indonesia but after
that he would probably think that you’re
wrong he would say what are you talking
about a billion people that’s more than
there are on the entire planet
and in any case it was a huge effort for
me to get here I had to get the crown to
give me three ships I had to find a crew
that didn’t want to worry about falling
off the edge of the earth just to get
them out here it was a massive
enterprise how are people going to come
here why are they going to come here
well he would have been wrong if he took
that position of course because there
are a billion people in the Americas and
there are powerful nations there and
they came for a variety of reasons they
came for wealth they came for political
and religious freedom and they came for
a personal glory just sort of the
reasons why people do anything anyway
and what made it possible was an ongoing
exploration of the Americas fueled by
steady improvements in technology that
made it possible but
that voyage was the thing that really
got it taking off so my goal here is to
suggest that maybe we are at a similar
inflection point a moment where we might
be opening up a new world that will
change the lives of our descendants in a
way that is comparable to the way the
lives of the descendants of Columbus
have been changed now that sounds pretty
grandiose I know so you’re probably
wondering where this new world is and
what this new world is and I bet you
have visions in your mind so it’s
probably just good if I just show you
all right it’s not much but there’s a
lot of promise there let me let me
explain why so this is an example of
something called a small body or a
planetesimal and by small I do mean
small I mean objects like the one in
this particular image that would easily
fit on this stage up to things that
might be as much as a hundred kilometers
across not very big not planets
oh but they’re old they are the
primordial remnants of the formation of
our solar system as a scientist I am
fascinated by these objects because they
are the building blocks of the planets
and they tell us about that time before
there were planets so from a scientists
perspective these are amazing things but
also as it turns out the new world so
for a little bit of context here you
know planetesimals by different names
there are two broad classes of them one
the asteroids other comets and really
the differences between them are based
on the amount of different compounds
inside them for instance asteroids have
more minerals and metals than organic
material in water whereas comets have
lots of water and organic material and
progressively less minerals and metals
as building blocks the asteroids are
what we make terrestrial planets out of
like earth and comets are what we made
the cores of the giant planets out of
Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune now
you might be surprised to find this out
but we have only known about these
objects for about 200 years and almost
everything that we do know about them we
have learned in the last few decades now
I would like to tell you that we learned
all of this because of some high-minded
desire to learn about our origins and
because my scientific arguments were so
compelling that everybody invested their
resources and studying these objects but
the real answer is fear we learned about
these objects because we’re afraid of
them in the 1970s Walter Louise
Elbe Alvarez made the now famous
discovery that the non-avian dinosaurs
appeared to go extinct almost coincident
with a large asteroid impact 65 million
years ago now there are a few things
that focus the mind quite like the
prospect of sudden fiery death from
above
and so we instituted a global effort to
find every object in our solar system
that was more than a hundred metres
across and figure out whether or not it
was going to hit the earth in the future
this was a huge enterprise it required
dozens of telescopes many countries
working together and it’s been ignore
misil in two ways the first is that we
have found a huge number of these
objects at current count we have
identified something on the order of
half a million planetesimals at orbits
ranging all the way out to the region
beyond Pluto now I’m going to focus my
talk the rest of this talk on a
particular subgroup of that half million
a group of objects that I well we call
near-earth objects or Neos now Neos have
a common characteristic that common
characteristic is is that at some point
in their journey around the Sun they
will approach or cross Earth’s orbit now
from the perspective of threat that
makes them sound like the ones we care
most about which is true
so we dedicate a lot of our effort to
looking at Neos trying to identify which
one of them might be potentially
hazardous to us and just like with
everything else we’ve been very
successful at studying the neo since
2000 we’ve discovered almost 15,000 of
these objects and I sort of put in
perspective here the movie Armageddon
was released just as it expanded up
so maybe the movie industry also helped
fuel this investigation or not but
15,000 objects that have an orbit that
approach or cross ours now
that’s potentially scary except that we
have mapped all of these orbits for
every one of these objects and not one
of them is likely to hit us
best failure ever we are not going to be
threatened by any of these objects now
the caution in this and also the good
news is that we’ve only just started
this process we estimate that there may
be as many as a hundred thousand to a
million more objects in these orbits
with diameters below a hundred meters
that we have yet to see so maybe one of
those might threaten us in the future
but right now the numbers look good in
our favor now the side effect of this is
the Neos are on our cosmic porch their
orbits come close to Earth they don’t
tend to go too far from the Sun they are
rich in water minerals metals other
things and their primordial so we can
learn more about our origins by looking
at them we can see them more easily and
more importantly if we need to we can
get to them so they are very important
scientifically and potentially
economically but there is a problem and
that problem is even with our biggest
telescopes they still look like that
little dot they’re small they’re too
small to be resolved so all we can see
is a point of light and we can learn
some things from that point of light we
can look at the light that’s reflected
off of it and that tells us something
about the nature of these objects but to
turn them into real-world that we can’t
do nevertheless it’s what we’ve got and
I like to call this kind of exploration
spherical cow exploration it’s all cow
it’s missing a few details like legs but
it’s an average by looking at the
average characteristics of an object we
can learn something about it how its
brightness changes with time tells us a
little bit about its rotation its total
brightness tells us a little bit about
this size breaking it out into colours
tells us a little bit about its
composition and even from that limited
perspective when we started looking at
these objects we began to realize that
an asteroid is not an asteroid it’s not
an asteroid and comet is not a comet
it’s not a comet in fact within these
groups there’s phenomenal diversity I’ll
show you a little bit about what I mean
apologize for the complexity of this but
there are three broad groups to
asteroids we have our stony asteroids
which are mineral-rich our metal
asteroids metal-rich and we have what’s
called chondrites
which are water and organic material
rich and within each of these broad
groups we have these subgroups were
they’re different mixtures of minerals
metals and chondrites
and each of these groups subdivide
further and then we have a whole group
of other potential types that we’ve
identified that they’ll fit in any of
those groups and the more objects we
observe the more asteroid classes we
seem to get and the same is true for
comets now comets are traditionally
divided based on their orbits
long period short period and
intermediate or Halle type orbits those
orbits tell us about where they come
from it tell us about how much evolve
evolution they’ve undergone but even
within those groups we have little
compositional subgroups and those
compositional subgroups are based on the
amount of water relative to the amount
of organics relative the amount of
certain volatile like ammonia and
cyanide and those groups are distributed
somewhat differently in the different
classes but we’re still trying to
understand exactly how they’re organized
overall so we can learn something from
just a point however what we don’t learn
from that are the rich details that make
them worlds we can’t tell you from a
point source what its shape is we can’t
really tell you its size we don’t know
the axis on which it rotates we don’t
know its density we don’t know if it’s
uniform and its interior we don’t know
if it’s uniform on its surface we don’t
know what its surface is like if we’re
just going to go there based on a point
source we have to make a lot of guesses
about the environment that we’re going
to get into and that brings me to the
next part of this exploration which I
call the one-off part of exploration and
this is the traditional NASA model since
the mid 1980s we have been launching
robotic spacecraft to small bodies we’ve
been to about 20 of them now so less
than 1% of all the objects we know of
that are near-earth objects these
spacecraft are really Marvel’s they are
highly capable they have enormous
complexity and they’re highly customized
to the environment that they’re going to
they’re launched uniquely for one target
that we identified as being in
particularly important to this
scientific community and that’s it and a
very risk intolerant they need to work
they’re expensive some of these are a
billion dollars so they’ve made great
strides they have learned an enormous
amount about small bodies here’s an
example of one this is comet 67p
churyumov-gerasimenko it was the target
of the Rosetta mission this is the
smallest body we’ve orbited with a
spacecraft by the way and it’s a comet
an example of a short-period comet and
it’s one of several that we have sent
missions to now this comet looks almost
nothing like any of the other comets
that we’ve been to it’s a unique world
and most of the theories that we had
before we got there
about how the environment would be they
turned out to be wrong we have found gas
compounds that we didn’t believe could
be present the surface turned out to be
a lot tougher than we thought it would
be we don’t really understand a lot of
the features on the surface or how
they’re formed and a lot of open
questions have been raised about exactly
how comets are assembled in the first
place so our visit to this comet and the
other few comets that we’ve looked at
have ended up being a case of raising
more questions a new answer which is
really not what you want to do when
you’re trying to look at these objects
as the new world you want to find common
characteristics things that will tell
you what to do but if you can’t then
that means that every place you want to
go you need to visit beforehand and
that’s something that we can’t do with
our current model in terms of the
exploration in the Americas where we are
right now is kind of like the Jamestown
era we know a lot about a few places
that we spent a lot of money and effort
to get to and we know where North
America is generally and we kind of know
how big it is but we don’t know where
the rivers are we don’t know where the
mountains are we don’t know where you
can grow food we don’t know where it
rains where it doesn’t where the
tornadoes happen where the Bears are we
don’t know the details and based on this
map we don’t even know where the Pacific
Northwest is so if we’re going to
explore Neos same way that we explore
North America we need to go at it the
same way what made it possible for us to
go from the Jamestown era to the modern
era was a combination of motivation and
technology and that’s where we are right
now
so I’ve already explained do we have
scientific motivation that’s my thing
but we also have economic motivation in
two areas first is launch so it costs
between 5,000 and 10,000 euros to take
one kilogram of material from the
surface of earth and put it in space
that’s an enormous incentive to build
things in space as opposed to launching
them in space that’s a lot of money if
we have material there to do it it’s
worth exploiting that and we do and
that’s the second part of this
motivation there is tremendous wealth in
near-earth objects and asteroids in
general they are loaded with metals like
gold platinum iron rare earths water
other organic materials phosphorus we
know of one asteroid psyche that may
contain enough iron to meet our current
needs for steel for more than a million
years there are now economists doing
forecasts that suggest that the total
value of mining this population of
material could be the equivalent of a
hundred billion euros per person on
earth an enormous amount of wealth so we
have massive economic and scientific
reasons for doing this the technology
needs to come along and the good news is
it has over the last two decades or so
there has been an explosion of micro
satellite technology cube SATs small
SATs these are smaller more compact
easier to fly less expensive missions
that can go do things that we wouldn’t
risk a billion-dollar spacecraft to do
and as these become more capable we
become more able to do what I call a
high-throughput investigation which
means that we can look at a lot of these
objects to assess their scientific and
economic value to us and I’m not alone
in thinking about this there are whole
corporations that have been formed
around the idea of utilizing resources
in space companies like Planetary
Resources and deep space initiatives in
Europe the government of Luxembourg has
made a several hundred million euro bet
that they can become the nation of space
mining and there are educational
institutions like my home institution of
the University of Arizona where we are
developing educational programs to
address the ethical technical and
scientific issues that are going to be
coming when we begin to exploit these
resources for our own use now to me the
key to getting there is that bottom part
of the of the Venn diagram I showed you
which is high-throughput investigation
with small satellites and in my group at
the University of Arizona we have been
working to develop a concept for this
that we call Wayfarer and a Wayfarer is
a very small spacecraft maybe about this
big by this big weighs maybe 20 to 25
kilograms it has one or two scientific
instruments that are tailored for
looking at small bodies and learning the
maximum amount from them we can build
these using a common format that common
format allows assembly line construction
assembly line construction brings down
its cost even more and so an individual
one of these spacecraft could cost less
than 1% of one of these bigger
spacecraft that we sent to one object in
addition to the cost of the spacecraft
as well the mission design is flexible
instead of launching one time with one
rocket to send in one object to one
place we shove these into the nooks and
crannies of every launch vehicle that
goes up commercial scientific military
you name it we put it in there and once
these objects get into orbit these
Wayfarers they go and transition
themselves to an orbital parking lot
beyond the moon where they sit and wait
for us to tell them where to explore and
when we do that they can do all kinds of
things we can send them to an asteroid
or a comet and have it go into orbit
like the Rosetta spacecraft did we can
study it in great detail or if we just
want to see a lot of objects we can fly
one or two of them by a number of small
bodies just to get a sense of what’s
going on we can also have multiple
spacecraft work together in an
environment about a body and we can send
them out on a mission from place to
place orbiting one orbiting another
orbiting another and then coming back to
the orbital parking lot all of those are
options for us and we could even play
exotic games where we put one in orbit
around an object and then we put another
object in a position to hit an asteroid
to look at what’s inside we can do this
because these objects are cheap easily
replicated but capable enough to deliver
the science we want now we are one of
only or one of several I should say
organizations that are looking at this
kind of technology
there were corporations governments and
businesses or in universities that are
also trying to build their own version
of Wayfarer and they have different
emphasis I don’t know which of these is
going to be the one that succeeds
I hope it’s us but I do know that
somebody is going to get this right and
we are going to go out and have an
explosive exploration of near-earth
space we’re going to find these
resources and once we do we open up the
opportunity to colonize our new world
this is a long game it won’t be us but
our grandchildren or their grandchildren
may live in buildings built with steel
from asteroids they may eat food grown
in soil that was either composed of or
fortified by material we brought back
from asteroids and comets they may drink
water that was mine from a comet that’s
also being used as fuel on the
spacecraft on which they live work and
travel and they’ll have all that wealth
that we were talking about that is our
Shore in the Bahamas we’re standing
there today
it’s a new world thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
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