For those who were not yet subscribed to True Stories. I just wanted to
release this kind of cross pollinate my first and second podcast, plaus. It's
a great story and it's really really sciency, so enjoy. It runs just
over seven minutes. You can subscribe to hear more than two hundred stories like
this True Stories with Seth Andrews. Anyway, this one's called a piece of
Asteroid. I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is a true
story. Once an amazing time we live in. Our ancient ancestors used to
look up at the night sky and they didn't see stars per se. I
mean, they saw lights, but they couldn't begin to understand suns and planets.
They couldn't imagine the cosmos that we view today through our telescopes. Light
and darkness were often seen through the lenses of superstitions of good and evil.
Early New Zealand tribes thought that every star was the soul of a hero who
had been slain in battle. The brighter the star, the braver the hero.
In three point fifty bcees and Oftenes taught that gods would light the stars
every evening and then blow them out the following morning, the early Spanish Iberians
said that the stars were flickering nail heads, nails which held up the ceiling
of the universe. I could go on and on. Imagine if we could
get in a time machine and go back and attempt an explanation of what is
really out there? How would we even start. This is a solar system,
this is a galaxy. Is the universe? Here's a sun which is
also a star, and those are moons and planets. And what if we
tried to teach the people of our past about asteroids? And we talk about
an amazing endeavor, a fantastic mission involving teams of thousands and thousands of engineers
and researchers and scientists, including an astrophysicist named Brian the man who was a
small and yet also not so small part of this NASA team working to land
a probe on the surface of an asteroid, take samples from the surface,
and then rocket those samples back to our laboratories here on Earth. This would
be the very first sample of its kind in history, and the elements within
those samples could help us to understand our universe. It is interesting that even
though we hear about them today, Many people don't know exactly what an asteroid
is. Well, they are small, rocky objects that orbit the Sun like
planets and our Solar system. Most exist in the main asteroid belt between Mars
and Jupiter. They are leftovers from the formation of our Solar system about four
point six billion years ago. Asteroids come in all shapes all sizes. Some
are hundreds of miles in diameter and others are only a few feet across.
Even smaller than the asteroids are the meteoroids. These are the things that hit
the atmosphere and burn up on descent and make those brilliant meteors of falling light
from the sky. About eighteen hundred meteorites have been found in North America since
the year nineteen hundred, and some can be very valuable. Sure, you
might find some nickel and iron in there, but meteorite platinum, well that
could mean some serious money. Back in twenty fifteen, there was an asteroid
called twenty eleven UW one fifty eighth. This asteroid did a fly by of
planet Earth and scientists believe it to have a one hundred ton platinum core that
is worth a potential five point four trillion dollars. Of course, that's the
entire asteroid. But you get my point. Yet, I remain convinced,
and I know that many of you do as well, that the real value
of asteroids is the knowledge that they bring us. Which brings me back to
that mission. Brian the astrophysicist joining the thousands who carried out that incredible landing
on the asteroid. The Osiris REX spacecraft, launching September eighth, twenty sixteen,
headed toward the asteroid Benu. The journey took two years. NASA studied
the surface for over five hundred days to find a suitable site to take the
sample. The Osiris then dipped down, it almost landed and collected a surface
sample with its robotic arm. There's a video of this moment on the internet.
It is very cool. More than sixty grams of material were returned and
landed by parachute on the twenty fourth of September twenty twenty three, and scientists
are now studying these puzzled pieces of our universe, captured on an asteroid millions
of miles away at speeds of over sixty thousand miles an hour. How in
the world would we ever describe all of this to the ASA astronomers and the
astrologers of our ancient past. For me, if I got to choose the
person who got into that time machine, someone to go back and educate our
ancestors, I would probably choose Brian, the man who was a small part
of this very ambitious plan to harvest the universe from that asteroid venue. Brian
might be able to tell the story pretty well, and he might welcome the
opportunity for a greater role, since sadly Brian was not able to attend in
person when NASA first retrieved that historic sample from another world. Now Brian was
busy preparing to travel with another team, a team of musicians. You see,
Brian the scientist, the man who studied physics and mathematics set him Serial
College, London, specializing in the study of reflected lights from interplanetary dust and
the velocity of that dust and the plane of the Solar system. Brian the
astrophysicist, well, we know him best as Brian the guitarist, lead guitarist
for one of the most iconic rock bands in history. Queen. Of course,
we're talking about Brian May and that's a true story. True Stories podcast dot Com