out of this world yeah all right well
imagine that you were able to step into
a time machine and go back far far back
in time to a time and place where the
solar system was not even existing at
the time place in the galaxy near a
massive star that’s about to go
supernova imagine if this is about five
billion years ago so you see the
supernova going off from a safe distance
of course and it releases the energy
equivalent of something like
quadrillions upon quadrillions of
nuclear bombs and the shock wave that
goes out it compresses some of the
interstellar gas and dust that’s nearby
and it triggers the formation of new
stars one of these new stars is our very
own star the Sun and now imagine that
you’re looking at the swirling cloud of
gas and dust around our newborn son and
you look closely and it’s cooling down
slowly and you start to form the very
first solids the first millimeter
centimeter sized solids from this cloud
of gas and dust and these little pebbles
that are forming they collect together
they stick together they form these
little rocks and then those stick
together they form these boulders and
the boulder stick together to form
asteroids and the asteroids accumulate
together to form planets like the earth
so if you were to grab a little bit of
the earliest pebbles that were forming
in that environment squish them together
put them in a bag and bring them in that
time machine back to the present day
what might that look like this is
exactly what it would look like
and this is a meteorite so meteorites
really are the remnants from that
earliest phase of the earliest history
of our solar system they are in fact our
time machine to be able to go back in
time and look at that space and time
when our solar system was just starting
to form I’m going to step back just a
little bit and talk about what a
meteorite really is these are rocky or
metal rich objects that come from
elsewhere in our solar system most of
them have traveled billions of miles in
interplanetary space before they’ve
fallen on the earth and they’ve survived
passage to the Earth’s atmosphere and
they fall on the surface and can be
recovered
so that’s meteorites now what my goal is
in this talk is to essentially convince
you that meteorites are not just some
oddball rare phenomena they are
fundamental to our understanding of our
past and of our future my work which I’m
really passionate about basically
involves figuring out clever ways of
decoding the information that’s encoded
in the chemical chemicals that make up
these rocks and we’re doing that in my
laboratory by looking at the different
components that make up these materials
and trying to learn something about when
they formed and how they formed so what
I’m going to do today there’s so much
wealth of information that we’ve
garnered from from meteorites that it
would be impossible to cover that in the
space of 15 minutes here what I’m going
to do though is to condense that down to
five essentials five things that anybody
who cares about the future of our planet
anybody who is curious about our past
should know about meteorites so the
number one thing is that meteorites tell
us that the age of our solar system is
four point five six seven nine plus
minus point zero
0:03 billion years old how do we know
that age this is actually measured in my
laboratory using radioactive elements
that we use as clocks in these
meteorites this is almost like figuring
out the age of a middle-aged man to
within a day so you can exactly
precisely determine exactly the day the
month the year that this person was born
to within a day so this is an extremely
precise age but it matters we need to
know exactly what the context is for all
of the events that happened following
the formation of our solar system and
this is the age that gives up that gives
us that context for the timeline of
everything else that’s happened in our
solar system following the initial
formation like the formation of the
planets formation of the earth and the
moon the origin of life in our planet
number two there are materials preserved
in meteorites little tiny dust grains
that are older than our solar system so
this little vial that you see here
that’s got this cloudy material in the
bottom these have billions upon billions
of tiny diamonds that condensed in the
atmospheres of other stars before the
Sun was even born
by looking at the chemistry of these
little tiny grains we can learn
something about the evolution of the
galaxy before the Sun was even born
very cool so you think that meteorites
are rare well think again because you’re
actually standing on a planet that’s a
huge in collaboration of a ton of
meteorites or more than a ton of
meteorites really meteorites you can
think of them as the LEGO building
blocks of planets like the earth and the
moon this actually is a picture of
actually multiple images that were taken
by a NASA spacecraft called a deep space
climate Observatory on
of these images there’s some of the best
selfies of our our home planet and you
can see the moon moving in front of the
earth here and it looks very serene but
this is nothing like what our planet
looked like four and a half billion
years ago when it was just starting to
form after the formation of our solar
system it was forming by the
agglomeration of giant meteorites coming
together to form form our planet and
this process was so energetic that the
entire surface of our planet at the time
was covered with an ocean of magma and
as the earth gradually was cooling down
there was another huge impact of a
mars-sized meteorite that crashed into
the earth ejected this debris into orbit
around the earth and we think that the
moon actually formed from a coalescence
of that debris that was surrounding the
earth and so meteorites really are
essential to understanding the origin of
the earth and the moon
number four meteorites likely brought
the raw materials for life to the early
Earth so this is not just organic
compounds like the amino acids that were
brought in by some of the types of
meteorites that we have in our
collections but also bio essential
elements like phosphorus they were
brought in by meteorites and eventually
led to the type of chemistry that was
required to take us from from the
chemistry to life and so the reason why
you and I are here today it could very
well be because of the material that was
seeded to the early Earth by meteorites
and number five meteorites have changed
the course of the evolution of life on
our own planet and as you all will most
of you probably know that 65 million
years ago there was a large bolide
something like ten kilometers or six
miles in diameter that crashed into the
Yucatan basin and resulted in the
extinction of more than three-quarters
of all
species on the earth including the
dinosaurs so that particular event that
extinction event was also important
because that’s what led to the
possibility of small warm-blooded
mammals to flourish and eventually made
the way for humans to be able to exist
here and that’s the reason why you and I
are are here in this place in this time
so that’s that’s amazing right
so meteorite five ways in which really
they define our past and the course of
evolution of life origin evolution of
life on our planet what about the future
well our cosmic neighborhood is teeming
with asteroids these red yellow and
green dots that are shown here in this
visualization they’re showing all of the
known media known asteroids at the
current time and most of these are
larger than about a kilometer there are
about hundreds of thousands of other
smaller asteroids out there that we’ve
not even detected yet so these smaller
asteroids are probably not going to
cause the type of global catastrophe
that killed off the dinosaurs but
they’re probably enough to cause a lot
of death and destruction if they were to
hit a large populated area and just to
sort of make that point what many of you
probably been up to meteor crater up in
northern Arizona and that was actually
created by an object that’s about that’s
estimated to be about a hundred feet in
diameter and it created a crater that’s
about a mile wide so this is an event
that happened about 50,000 years ago now
and at the time when this happened the
energy that it deposited was the
equivalent to something like 150 atom
bombs and so that you can imagine the
type of destruction to plant life and
animal life that happened in this part
of the continent as a result of that
impact that could be devastating for any
large city if it would have happened
today now that event happened fifty
thousand years ago and the probability
we estimate for an impact
is 100 feet or so a diameter to happen
is it’s estimated to be once every fifty
to a hundred thousand years so that’s
something we’re basically do for another
one
it could happen next month or it could
happen fifty thousand years from now but
it’s not a question of if it’s a matter
of when there’s going to be a large
asteroid that’s going to be on a
collision course of the earth
and so what are we going to do about it
so all of the natural hazards that we
know about asteroid collision is the one
that could essentially wipe out our
species but it’s also the one that is
imminently preventable how are we going
to prevent it well there’s two two ways
that we actually there are two things
that we have to do it’s not one or the
other we have to be studying meteorites
we have to be studying asteroids to
understand their chemistry their
structure we have to be looking at the
how the orbits of these asteroids evolve
and all these pieces of information will
be necessary to develop the strategies
to redirect asteroids that might be
headed on collision course of the earth
and then of course we have to also
inspire the next generation of of
children of kids to be willing to invest
in the future and to be good stewards of
our home planet so we are actually doing
all of these things we’re studying
meteorites we’re studying asteroids
trying to understand what we can about
their composition about the structure
we’re also using space rocks to inspire
kids of all ages and it’s actually kind
of a wonderful thing I don’t know if
you’ve ever experienced that when you
see a ten-year-old when they when they
were totally enthralled with something
I’ve seen these kids that when you give
them the space rock to hold in their
hand they are completely on inspire just
knowing that they’re holding something
in their hand that is older than the
earth that’s the oldest rock in the
solar system it’s an amazing thing to
watch and I want to be able to use
that same inspiration to excite or spark
an interest in STEM fields basically
science technology engineering maths
they’re using space rocks as a vehicle
for for inspiring that kind of interest
how are we going to do that well we’ve
been doing that locally for many many
years but what we’d like to do is to
extend that globally and we’re doing
hoping to do that by taking kids on a
virtual field trip of the solar system
and how we’re going to do that is we’re
going to create an immersive virtual
environment and this is something that
the Center for Mirai studies is
collaborating with the center for
education through exploration here at
ASU and we are developing this immersive
environment where you’ll be able to walk
into the bulk of our meteorite
collection you’ll be able to go to any
one of the drawers and open them up and
we have the 3d color laser scans of all
of our meteorites that you can basically
pick up a meteorite from a drawer and
look at it in three dimensions to
experience it as a three dimensional
object they’ll be embedded videos that
will provide information about the
samples and what we’re learning from
these types of materials and so we’d
like to be able to make this really
exciting for kids to be able to explore
places in the solar system where they
may some someday hope to go perhaps and
maybe they will never be able to go but
they will be able to my care as we go
there through looking at these rocks
they’ll actually get to be geologists
studying rocks on other worlds they’ll
be able to go to places like this
primitive asteroid like this asteroid
either kaabah and look by looking at
rocks like this one which we think come
from asteroids like this they’ll be able
to visit the asteroid Vesta this is the
second largest asteroid in the asteroid
belt and we think that this is actually
a small planet which underwent complete
melting early in the history of the
solar system such that the all of the
iron nickel metal sank to the core and
you have a dense mantle on earth
lighter crusts just like the structure
of the earth and in fact we have
meteorites in our collections that come
from the crust of this very asteroid
there’s a large impact Basin in the
southern part of this asteroid which was
studied quite well actually by a nasa
spacecraft called dawn and we now know
that these types of meteorites that we
have in our collections come from this
very asteroid and so we’ll be able to
explore the geology of this one asteroid
by looking at these things and then of
course there are meteorites that we know
come from the moon and so we’ll be able
to explore the kids we’ll be able to
explore the geology of the moon by
looking at rocks like this one which we
believe comes from the Highland part
Harlan Highlands of the moon and then
finally there’s not been a sample return
or spacecraft that’s gone to Mars and
brought back samples but we’ve got these
free samples from Mars these are
meteorites that come from Mars and this
is an example of one that comes from an
area on Mars that had volcanism
happening on it about 200 million years
ago so this is a relatively young rock
that’s coming from the surface of Mars
you’ll be able to do geology by looking
at these these samples and trying to
understand the history of that planet
through these rocks and so the goal
really for us is to try to make it
really exciting for kids to study the
space rocks to basically learn something
about places where these rocks come from
to explore the solar system through them
to be inspired by by looking at these by
trying to understand the environments
where they form and we want to inspire
them to be curious about not just the
planet that they live on but the solar
system and the universe that they
inhabit and to recognize that for the
first time in the history of this planet
there’s a species that inhabits our
planet of us human beings that have the
capacity to actually do something about
an asteroid that might be on a collision
course of the earth so I believe that we
can use space rocks as a means of
inspiring kids to recognize that the
future is what we can what we choose to
make it thank you [Applause]