Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: I want you to picture something for a second. Close
Speaker 2: your eyes if you can, and just imagine the ocean
Speaker 2: at night. Okay, but we are not talking about a calm,
Speaker 2: peaceful ocean reflecting the moonlight. Picture a vast, absolutely pitch
Speaker 2: black expanse. It's terrifyingly deep and completely chillingly silent. You
Speaker 2: were suspended in this water and moving through this dark
Speaker 2: expanse without a single sound. Are massive ancient rocks just
Speaker 2: drifting exactly, Some of the size of cars, some are
Speaker 2: the size of city blocks, and you know a few
Speaker 2: are the size of entire mountain ranges.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is a terrifying thought.
Speaker 2: Right. They are just hurtling through the darkness, completely unbothered
Speaker 2: by anything around them, just driven by momentum that was
Speaker 2: set in motion billions of years ago during the violent
Speaker 2: birth of our solar system.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just ancient kinetic energy.
Speaker 2: Now Here is the truly unsettling part of this thought experiment.
Speaker 2: You are sitting in a tiny, incredibly fragile glass boat
Speaker 2: right in the middle of this ocean.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, Okay, you have.
Speaker 2: A flashlight, but you know the beam is weak. It
Speaker 2: only penetrates a few feet into the murk. Most of
Speaker 2: the time, the massive rocks pass safely in the distance.
Speaker 2: You don't even know that you are there, You have
Speaker 2: no idea. But occasionally one of those colossal, silent shapes
Speaker 2: crosses right through your path. It slips out of the dark,
Speaker 2: skims just past the fragile hull of your glass boat,
Speaker 2: and disappears back into the void before you even have
Speaker 2: a chance to draw breath, let alone, like brace for
Speaker 2: an impact.
Speaker 3: That is, I mean, that's a profoundly visceral way to
Speaker 3: describe the reality of our orbital neighborhood. It really strips
Speaker 3: away the abstract math.
Speaker 2: It puts you right there, right it does.
Speaker 3: It puts the listener right into the physical vulnerability of
Speaker 3: our situation. Because we tend to think of space as empty,
Speaker 3: but we are floating in a dynamic, incredibly active shooting gallery.
Speaker 2: The shooting gallery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, our planet sits in a chaotic web of orbital trajectories,
Speaker 3: and for a very long time, humanity strategy regarding near
Speaker 3: Earth objects has basically been well to point our flashlights
Speaker 3: into the dark, cross our fingers and hope the bean
Speaker 3: catches the big ones.
Speaker 2: While there's still far enough away to do something about
Speaker 2: them exactly, And that terrifying reality is the core mission
Speaker 2: of our discussion today. We are looking critically at our
Speaker 2: current and frankly alarming limitations in understanding what these asteroids
Speaker 2: actually are.
Speaker 3: Because just knowing a rock is out there in the
Speaker 3: darkness isn't enough.
Speaker 2: Not even close. We have to know what it is
Speaker 2: made of, how it is held together, and where its
Speaker 2: momentum is taking it. Right, So we are going to
Speaker 2: explore a brilliantly unorthodox space mission architecture. It's proposed by
Speaker 2: researchers in the UK, and it's.
Speaker 3: Called Remorra R EMO R.
Speaker 2: Step standing for Rendezvous Mission for Orbital Reconstruction of Asteroids,
Speaker 2: and it is designed to completely rewrite the rule book
Speaker 2: on how we interact with these ancient celestial bodies.
Speaker 3: And we really need to set the stakes right at
Speaker 3: the top here because analyzing romorra isn't just an academic
Speaker 3: exercise in geology.
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
Speaker 3: We aren't figuring out ways to catalog different types of
Speaker 3: space rocks just to fill out a textbook on the
Speaker 3: early Solar System. This architecture is fundamentally driven by the
Speaker 3: urgent need for planetary defense.
Speaker 2: It's about survival.
Speaker 3: It is we are approaching a very real, very tangible deadline.
Speaker 3: In the year twenty twenty nine, humanity is going to
Speaker 3: experience an incredibly close encounter with a massive asteroid named
Speaker 3: Apofus Apofice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are definitely going to get into that.
Speaker 3: And beyond Apofus. We have this glaring, terrifying vulnerability in
Speaker 3: our observational network known as the sunword blind.
Speaker 2: Spot, blind spot.
Speaker 3: Right there are entire vast regions of the sky where
Speaker 3: our most powerful ground based and orbal telescopes are rendered
Speaker 3: completely blind by the overwhelming glare of our own sun.
Speaker 2: Like staring into a spotlight exactly.
Speaker 3: Like that, Earth is entirely unprotected from any trajectory approaching
Speaker 3: from that specific vector. If a kinetic threat comes at
Speaker 3: us out of the Sun, we will not see it
Speaker 3: until it is literally entering our upper atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this, because before we can fully grasp
Speaker 2: the elegance of how the remot architecture fixes the problem,
Speaker 2: we have to establish the baseline.
Speaker 3: The baseline of how we currently try to study these things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how we currently try and often fail to study
Speaker 2: these near earth objects right now. Our primary tools are
Speaker 2: remote sensing.
Speaker 3: Right, optical telescopes, radar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we use ground based optical telescopes. We use planetary
Speaker 2: radar like the Goldstone Solar System radar out in California.
Speaker 2: We use infrared orbital observatories.
Speaker 3: All looking from a distance.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and all of these tools suffer from a fundamental limitation.
Speaker 2: I call it the skyscraper facade dilemma.
Speaker 3: The skyscraper facade dilemma. Okay, explain that well.
Speaker 2: Imagine you are an engineer tasked with determining if a
Speaker 2: massive skyscraper is going to collapse in an earthquake. Okay,
Speaker 2: but you are not allowed to go inside. You have
Speaker 2: to stand across.
Speaker 3: The street just looking at the outside.
Speaker 2: Right, you can look at the tint of the exterior glass.
Speaker 2: You can bounce a laser off the steel window frames.
Speaker 2: You can take thermal images to see which side of
Speaker 2: the building is getting hit by the sun.
Speaker 3: But you're stuck on the street.
Speaker 2: You are stuck on the outside. To truly know the
Speaker 2: structural integrity of that building, to know if the internal
Speaker 2: load bearing columns are solid reinforced concrete or if they
Speaker 2: are structurally compromised and hollowing out, you have to walk
Speaker 2: through the front door.
Speaker 3: You have to get inside.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you cannot determine the internal macroporosity of a structure
Speaker 2: just by analyzing how photons scatter off its outermost layer.
Speaker 3: That captures the physics of the problem perfectly. When we
Speaker 3: use pictronoscopy through an optical telescope, we are really just
Speaker 3: analyzing the reflectant spectra of the asteroid.
Speaker 2: The surface light exactly.
Speaker 3: We measure which specific wavelengths of sunlight are absorbed and
Speaker 3: which are reflected by the minerals on the surface.
Speaker 2: So that tells us what the dust on the outside
Speaker 2: is made of.
Speaker 3: Basically, it tells us if the outer crust is rich
Speaker 3: in silicates or carbonaceous material or metallic iron.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: And when we use synthetic aperture radar, we are bouncing
Speaker 3: microwave pulses off the object. That gives us a radar
Speaker 3: cross section, which can reveal the asteroid's general shape, its
Speaker 3: rotation period, and surface roughness.
Speaker 2: So we get the ship and the spin right.
Speaker 3: But both optical light and radar waves are superficial in
Speaker 3: this context. They scatter off the boundary layer. They cannot
Speaker 3: penetrate hundreds of meters of rock to reveal the interior
Speaker 3: mass distribution. Just bounce off. Yeah. And from a planetary
Speaker 3: defense perspective, that blind spot is a catastrophic lack of
Speaker 3: actionable intelligence.
Speaker 2: Because if we spot one of these things on a
Speaker 2: collision course and we have to physically move it, the
Speaker 2: internal structure dictates everything about how we apply force.
Speaker 3: Right, it dictates the entire physics profile of a deflection mission.
Speaker 3: Take the concept of a kinetic impactor. Okay, this is
Speaker 3: the strategy where we launch a heavy spacecraft and intentionally
Speaker 3: ram it into the asteroid at extremely high.
Speaker 2: Velocities, playing cosmic billiards.
Speaker 3: Basically yeah, to alter its orbital momentum. We recently prove
Speaker 3: this concept works with NASA's DART.
Speaker 2: Mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Tests right.
Speaker 3: Which successfully altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphous. But
Speaker 3: the success of a kinetic impactor is heavily dependent on
Speaker 3: something called the beta factor or the momentum enhancement factor.
Speaker 2: Which is essentially how much extra push you get from
Speaker 2: all the debris sprang back out in a space after
Speaker 2: the crash.
Speaker 3: Right. Correct. If you smash an impactor into a monolithic,
Speaker 3: incredibly dense, solid iron asteroid, the energy transfer is relatively straightforward.
Speaker 2: Like hitting a bowling ball.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the ejected, the debried, blown backward words might
Speaker 3: be minimal. However, many asteroids are what we call rubble piles.
Speaker 2: Rubble piles, so they aren't solid.
Speaker 3: No, they aren't single solid rocks. They are loose amalgamations
Speaker 3: of boulders, gravel, and.
Speaker 2: Dust, just held together by gravity.
Speaker 3: Their own incredibly weak collective microgravity.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So if you slam an impactor into a highly porous
Speaker 3: rubble pile, the impactor might just burrow deeply into the
Speaker 3: loose material.
Speaker 2: Like shooting a bullet into a sand bag.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It compresses the empty void space inside the asteroid.
Speaker 3: The rubble pile absorbs the kinetic energy like a giant
Speaker 3: celestial sponge.
Speaker 2: Oh man, so it doesn't move.
Speaker 3: The beta factor changes completely. The asteroid might barely alter
Speaker 3: its trajectory. At all or worse. What's worse, if you
Speaker 3: hit it with too much energy, you might exceed its
Speaker 3: weak escape velocity and shatter it into a shotgun blast
Speaker 3: of fragments.
Speaker 2: Oh god, so instead of one row hitting Earth, it's one.
Speaker 3: Hundred a shotgun blast of highly destructive fragments that stay
Speaker 3: on the same collision course with Earth. You absolutely cannot
Speaker 3: design an optimal deflection mechanism without a high fidelity model
Speaker 3: of the internal structural integrity.
Speaker 2: And you just cannot get a high fidelity internal model
Speaker 2: from a telescope on a mountain in Hawaii. No, you
Speaker 2: have to get up close and personal with the rock.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to a really interesting geopolitical and economic
Speaker 2: paradox currently playing out in the United Kingdom regarding space science.
Speaker 3: Right the UK paradox.
Speaker 2: Because the UK possesses a staggering amount of intellectual capital
Speaker 2: in planetary science and astrodynamics.
Speaker 3: Huge amount.
Speaker 2: Yeah, researchers from institutions like Imperial College London or the
Speaker 2: University of Liverpool, where the core Remorra concept is being spearheaded,
Speaker 2: they are globally recognized heavyweights. Absolutely, they don't just sit
Speaker 2: on the sidelines. They are deeply integrated into the most
Speaker 2: complex headline grabbing international missions of our era.
Speaker 3: Like the Dart mission Right.
Speaker 2: UK teams were essential in analyzing the impact data from
Speaker 2: the Dart mission we just talked about. They played vital
Speaker 2: roles in the Osiris REX mission, which executed an incredibly
Speaker 2: complex touch and go maneuver.
Speaker 3: To snatch a physical sample of the asteroid venue.
Speaker 2: Right and bring it back to Earth. The UK scientific
Speaker 2: footprint is everywhere.
Speaker 3: They are consistently producing the algorithms, the data processing techniques
Speaker 3: and the scientific analysis that make these billion dollar flagship
Speaker 3: mission successful.
Speaker 2: But you know, I look at that reality and I
Speaker 2: have to ask the obvious administrative question. Sure, if I
Speaker 2: am sitting on a parliamentary budgetary committee looking at the
Speaker 2: national checkbook, I'm thinking, our scientists are already getting access
Speaker 2: to the best data in the Solar System by collaborating
Speaker 2: with NASA and the European Space Agency.
Speaker 3: Why do we need our own stuff?
Speaker 2: Exactly? Why do we need to aggressively fund our own
Speaker 2: UK specific domestic mission architecture. It seems infinitely cheaper to
Speaker 2: just keep paying a small membership fee to the ESA.
Speaker 3: Let the Americans and Europeans build the big rockets.
Speaker 2: Right, Let them build the billion dollar rockets and probes,
Speaker 2: and let our scientists analyze the data when it gets
Speaker 2: beamed back. Why try to build a sovereign deep space pipeline.
Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is the stark difference between holding a
Speaker 3: seat in the passenger cabin versus holding the steering wheel.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 3: When a nation operates solely as a contributor to international
Speaker 3: flagship missions, no matter how value their scientific input is,
Speaker 3: they are ultimately subjected to the strategic priorities of the lead.
Speaker 2: Agency, the agency paying the bills.
Speaker 3: Right. If you are writing shotgun on a NASA mission,
Speaker 3: NASA's dicatal survey dictates the target asteroid. NASA engineers designed
Speaker 3: the primary bus architecture. NASA sets the launch window.
Speaker 2: So the UK is just along for the ride.
Speaker 3: The UK scientists might be granted a principal investigator role
Speaker 3: on one specific onboard spectrometer, or they might get priority
Speaker 3: access to the telemetry data, but they do not control
Speaker 3: the mission parameters.
Speaker 2: So they are brilliant analysts, but they are entirely reactive.
Speaker 2: They have to wait for someone else to decide it
Speaker 2: is time to go look at a rock.
Speaker 3: When you are dealing with planetary defense or looking toward
Speaker 3: the massive economic potential of future asteroid mining, reactive posture
Speaker 3: is a strategic vulnerability.
Speaker 2: You can't just wait around.
Speaker 3: You do not want to be entirely dependent on the
Speaker 3: fluctuating budgets of the US Congress, where the complex multinational
Speaker 3: negotiations of the ESA to determine if or when a
Speaker 3: specific near Earth object gets.
Speaker 2: Investigated, because what if they say no?
Speaker 3: Exactly? Developing a domestic pipeline allows a space sector to
Speaker 3: rapidly prototype its own sovereign engineering concepts, validate its own
Speaker 3: hardware in the void, and respond to threats or economic
Speaker 3: opportunities on its own timeline. It builds an industrial base
Speaker 3: at home.
Speaker 2: But the reality is sovereign capability is breathtakingly expensive. If
Speaker 2: the UK wants to pick its own targets and steer
Speaker 2: its own ships, it cannot do it by mimicking NASA's playbook.
Speaker 2: A country dealing with standard domestic economic pressures cannot just
Speaker 2: casually authorize a one billion dollar flagship mission to go
Speaker 2: map an asteroid.
Speaker 3: It's just not going to happen.
Speaker 2: No, to solve this paradox, to achieve independent exploration without
Speaker 2: bankrupting the Science Directorate. You have to get ruthlessly, almost
Speaker 2: uncomfortably creative, you really do. You have to abandon the
Speaker 2: idea of the massive gold plated spacecraft. And that severe
Speaker 2: budgetary constraint is exactly the evolutionary pressure that birthed the
Speaker 2: Remora architecture.
Speaker 3: We have to define budgetary constraint in this context because
Speaker 3: the numbers associate with the Remora proposal are almost hard
Speaker 3: to believe for anyone familiar with aerospace procurement.
Speaker 2: They're shockingly low.
Speaker 3: Right, the white papers classify this as a minif class
Speaker 3: mission and they are targeting a total mission cost in
Speaker 3: the neighborhood of fifty million euros.
Speaker 2: We really need to pause on that number because fifty
Speaker 2: million euros sounds like an astronomical sum in everyday life.
Speaker 3: Oh sure, you could.
Speaker 2: Fund a mid sized hospital for years, you could build infrastructure,
Speaker 2: but in the realm of deep space exploration, it's nothing.
Speaker 2: Fifty million euros is essentially a rounding error. It is
Speaker 2: the aerospace equivalent of trying to build a Formula one
Speaker 2: car using the spare change you found under the surfer cushions.
Speaker 3: It demands a total paradigm shift in engineering. For comparison,
Speaker 3: the Osiris REX mission you mentioned earlier had a life
Speaker 3: cycle cost pushing well toward one billion dollars. Wow. The
Speaker 3: Dart impactor, which was relatively straightforward because its entire job
Speaker 3: was to crash and die, just hit a rock, it's
Speaker 3: still cost over three hundred million dollars. Even the most
Speaker 3: stripped down aggressive Discovery class interplanetary missions at NASA rarely
Speaker 3: drop below the two hundred million dollar threshold.
Speaker 4: So fifty million is just It's insane to propose intercepting
Speaker 4: a fast moving chaotic body in deep space, characterizing its
Speaker 4: mass distribution, and operating a scientific payload for fifty million
Speaker 4: euros means you cannot use standard deep space hardware.
Speaker 2: You have to rethink everything.
Speaker 3: You cannot afford the massive radiation hardened command processors, you
Speaker 3: can afford the huge high gain parabolic antennas. Every single
Speaker 3: subsystem has to be miniaturized, stripped of excess mass, and
Speaker 3: fundamentally reimagined.
Speaker 2: Which leads the researchers to abandon the concept of the
Speaker 2: monolithic probe entirely. Remora doesn't send one big, expensive box
Speaker 2: into space, no, it does it. It relies on a
Speaker 2: swarm The proposal calls for a fleet of six autonomous
Speaker 2: cube SATs, and the biological inspiration for this approach is
Speaker 2: bicked right into the acronym. They are looking at the
Speaker 2: Remora fish.
Speaker 3: Right, the little fish that stick to sharks.
Speaker 2: Exactly. If you watch footage of a great white shark
Speaker 2: or a massive manta ray gliding through the ocean, you
Speaker 2: almost always see these tiny slender fish section onto their
Speaker 2: sides or swimming in absolute synchronicity just inches away. The
Speaker 2: Remora fish don't waste their own energy swimming across the
Speaker 2: entire ocean. They let the apex predator do the heavy lifting,
Speaker 2: hitching a ride on the massive momentum of the host,
Speaker 2: operating in a tight symbiotic envelope. The Remorse space architecture
Speaker 2: treats near Earth asteroids like the sharks of the Solar System.
Speaker 3: It is a profound shift from the traditional orbit and
Speaker 3: observe model. These six cube SATs, each utilizing standard form factors,
Speaker 3: likely no larger than a shoe box or perhaps a
Speaker 3: small microevoven.
Speaker 2: Wait, they are that small, yeah, very small.
Speaker 3: And they're not designed to fly across the Solar System
Speaker 3: under their own power. They will hitch a ride on
Speaker 3: a larger launch vehicle into deep space.
Speaker 2: Okay, so they get dropped off.
Speaker 3: Once they are deployed in the vicinity of a targeted
Speaker 3: near Earth asteroid, the swarm approaches the body, they don't
Speaker 3: just fly by, They rendezvous.
Speaker 2: They match speed.
Speaker 3: Yes, depending on the specific mission profile, they might attempt
Speaker 3: to physically dock with the asteroid's surface using microanchors, or
Speaker 3: more likely, they will establish an incredibly tight synchronized orbital
Speaker 3: formation just meters above the tumbling surface.
Speaker 2: A swarm of space hitchhikers. I love that. But beyond
Speaker 2: just being cheap to build, there is a massive scientific
Speaker 2: advantage to breaking your sensors up into six tiny boxes
Speaker 2: instead of one big one.
Speaker 3: There is a huge advantage.
Speaker 2: Because if you have a single billion dollar probe orbiting
Speaker 2: a rock, you are fundamentally limited to a single point
Speaker 2: of observation. At any given millisecond. You have one pair
Speaker 2: of eyes. You are taking a local measurement of the
Speaker 2: magnetic field or the gravity at one specific coordinate in.
Speaker 3: Space, and that single point measurement creates ambiguity when you
Speaker 3: are trying to map a complex, irregular body. But when
Speaker 3: you deploy a distributed swarm of six cube SATs. You
Speaker 3: instantly create a multi static, multi dimensional sensor network.
Speaker 2: You're seeing it from all sides at once.
Speaker 3: You are no longer observing the asteroid, you are enveloping it.
Speaker 2: So how does enveloping it actually tell us what is
Speaker 2: inside the rock? How do six shoe boxes give us
Speaker 2: that internal structural map that the billion dollar telescopes couldn't through.
Speaker 3: The extreme precision of gravitational multipole expansion.
Speaker 2: Okay, you're gonna have to translate that for me.
Speaker 3: You'll break that down. Because the asteroid is an irregular
Speaker 3: rubble pile, its gravity is not uniform.
Speaker 2: It's lumpy.
Speaker 3: It's lumpy. If there is a massive, dense chunk of
Speaker 3: iron buried fifty meters beneath the surface on the northern hemisphere,
Speaker 3: the gravitational pull will be microscopically stronger in that specific
Speaker 3: localized area compared to the dusty, porous southern hemisphere.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the gravity pulls harder near the iron.
Speaker 3: Yes. As the six CubeSats fly in formation around the asteroid,
Speaker 3: their orbital paths will be slightly perturbed by these gravitational anomalies.
Speaker 2: The dense iron chunk pulls one of the CubeSats slightly out.
Speaker 3: Of line exactly, and the CubeSats are constantly communicating with
Speaker 3: each other, measuring the distance between themselves down to the
Speaker 3: millimeter using optical intersatellite links or precise radio ranging.
Speaker 2: So they know exactly where they all are relative to
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 3: By mathematically analyzing exactly how the swarm's formation deforms over
Speaker 3: time as they fly through the gravity field, you can
Speaker 3: solve for the specific mass distribution inside the asteroid. Oh wow,
Speaker 3: you are essentially using the microscopic wobbles of the CubeSats
Speaker 3: to perform a localized gravimetric MRI.
Speaker 2: Of the rock an MRI. That's incredible.
Speaker 3: You map the internal density the voids and the monolithic
Speaker 3: boulders without ever having to drill a single core sample.
Speaker 2: That is mathematically beautiful. You use the chaotic nature of
Speaker 2: the asteroids gravity as the scanning mechanism itself. But here
Speaker 2: is the massive operational hurdle that I immediately run into.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the logistics. We are talking about six
Speaker 2: independent spacecraft.
Speaker 3: It's tinyins.
Speaker 2: They are flying in tight formation. They are mirror meters
Speaker 2: away from a tumbling, irregularly shaped asteroid that has a chaotic,
Speaker 2: lumpy gravity field right, and they are doing all of
Speaker 2: this millions of miles away from Earth. If I think
Speaker 2: about a standard mission control center for a single lunar lander,
Speaker 2: I picture dozens of flight dynamics officers sweating over consoles,
Speaker 2: calculating orbital insertion burns, sending telemetry commands, the.
Speaker 3: Whole NASA control room scene exactly.
Speaker 2: Managing six distinct spacecraft in a highly perturbed deep space
Speaker 2: environment simultaneously. Wouldn't you need an absolute army of human
Speaker 2: operators constantly adjusting their flight paths just to make sure
Speaker 2: they don't crash into a boulder or slam into each other.
Speaker 3: The human operational cost is usually the silent killer of
Speaker 3: deep space budgets. If you attempted to fly the Remora
Speaker 3: swarm using traditional human in the LOOT mission control protocols,
Speaker 3: that fifty million euro budget would evaporated in a matter of.
Speaker 2: Months just paying salaries.
Speaker 3: You would be paying the salaries of dedicated navigation teams
Speaker 3: working around the clock shifts. But the financial cost isn't
Speaker 3: even the primary barrier. It's not. The laws of physics
Speaker 3: outright prohibit manual control in this scenario because of the
Speaker 3: speed of light precisely deep space telemetry is constrained by
Speaker 3: the speed of light. If the asteroid is fifteen million
Speaker 3: miles away, a radio signal traveling at light speed takes
Speaker 3: over a minute to get there, and the confirmation signal
Speaker 3: takes over a minute to get back.
Speaker 2: So there's a lag.
Speaker 3: You're operating with hard unchangeable round trip latency of several minutes.
Speaker 3: You cannot fly a spacecraft with a joystick. When the
Speaker 3: lag is measured in minutes.
Speaker 2: It's like playing a video game with terrible ping.
Speaker 3: Worse, imagine one of the CubeSats detects that the asteroids
Speaker 3: irregular shape has caused a sudden, unexpected gravitational shear, and
Speaker 3: it is drifting toward a collision. Okay, By the time
Speaker 3: the onboard sensors register the danger package, the telemetry beam
Speaker 3: it back to the deep space network antennas on Earth.
Speaker 3: The human operator sees the red light flashing on their monitor,
Speaker 3: calculates an evasion burn, and transmits the command back to
Speaker 3: the cube set.
Speaker 2: It's already crashed.
Speaker 3: The spacecraft has already been obliterated against the surface.
Speaker 2: The human reaction time, combined with the speed of light,
Speaker 2: makes remote control a death sentence. So to keep the
Speaker 2: budget at fifty million, and to actually survive the environment,
Speaker 2: you have to completely sever the cord to mission control.
Speaker 3: You have to push the intelligence to the edge. The
Speaker 3: swarm has to be fully autonomous.
Speaker 2: Here's where it gets really interesting because the solution to
Speaker 2: this isn't just basic autopilot. Autopilot on a commercial jet
Speaker 2: just holds a heading in a predictable atmosphere.
Speaker 3: It's relatively simple.
Speaker 2: What the UK researchers are developing is an artificial intelligence
Speaker 2: survival mechanism. It is a software architecture known as NEAR
Speaker 2: NEAR standing for Near Earth Asteroid Regions Software NEAR, and
Speaker 2: the most critical function of the NEAR software is calculating
Speaker 2: fuel minimal reserves on the fly in a highly paotic environment.
Speaker 2: This is life or death for a CubeSat.
Speaker 3: Because they have almost no fuel exactly.
Speaker 2: A massive flagship probe has large hydrozene tanks. If it
Speaker 2: makes an inefficient orbital correction, it just burns a little extra.
Speaker 3: Fuel, no problem, plenty to spare.
Speaker 2: A cube sat might only be equipped with a heavily
Speaker 2: miniaturized cold gas thruster system or an electrospray thruster. The
Speaker 2: total delta vie the total amount of thrust it can
Speaker 2: generate over its entire lifespan is infinitesimally small. Every single
Speaker 2: microburst of propellant must be mathematically optimized.
Speaker 3: The near art architecture allows the spacecraft to dynamically assess
Speaker 3: its localized environment, determine its required trajectory to maintain the
Speaker 3: sensor network formation, and execute the mathematically absolute minimum energy
Speaker 3: path to get there, all on its own, entirely independent
Speaker 3: of Earth. This requires an incredibly sophisticated on board processing capability,
Speaker 3: which the researchers have divided into two distinct coupled algorithmic engines.
Speaker 3: It's called Dinear and gonear.
Speaker 2: Okay, Deneur and gonear, the dynamic modeling engine and the
Speaker 2: pathfinding engine. Let's dig into dinear first, because modeling gravity
Speaker 2: around an asteroid sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 3: It is extremely difficult.
Speaker 2: When we launch a satellite into Earth orbit, the math
Speaker 2: is relatively stable. Earth is a massive, slightly oblate spheroid,
Speaker 2: The gravity field is dominant and well mapped. Couplerian orbital
Speaker 2: mechanics work beautifully.
Speaker 3: It's a solve problem, right, But.
Speaker 2: An asteroid is a totally different beast. Some look like
Speaker 2: tumbling dog bones, some look like rubber ducks. Some are
Speaker 2: just jagged, spinning shards of rock.
Speaker 3: You are describing a non coplarian dynamic environment around a tumbling,
Speaker 3: irregular body. The gravitational potential field is wildly asymmetric.
Speaker 2: Because the mass is all over the place.
Speaker 3: And it's constantly changing relative to a fixed point in
Speaker 3: space as the object rotates. To survive, the CubeSat must
Speaker 3: constantly calculate the gravitational pull not from a single point mass,
Speaker 3: but from a complex polyhedral shape model.
Speaker 2: It has to calculate gravity from every lump and bump.
Speaker 3: Dineir is the algorithmic engine that handles this. It takes
Speaker 3: the real time optical and ranging data from the sensors,
Speaker 3: builds a continuous three D mathematical model of the asteroid shape,
Speaker 3: and computes the highly chaotic gravitational potential field that the
Speaker 3: spacecraft is currently swimming through. It maps the invisible shifting
Speaker 3: currents of gravity.
Speaker 2: It is the real time cartographer of the void. It
Speaker 2: builds the topographical map of gravity, and once Dinair builds
Speaker 2: that map, it feeds the data directly into ganire.
Speaker 3: Right is the executive decision maker. It is the pathfinding brain.
Speaker 2: So it looks at the map.
Speaker 3: It utilizes advanced control theories, likely forms of model predictive
Speaker 3: control or convex optimization, to look at the map provided
Speaker 3: by dinair, look at its own critically low propelling gage,
Speaker 3: and look at the desired orbital coordinate it needs to
Speaker 3: reach to maintain the swarm formation.
Speaker 2: And then it plots a course.
Speaker 3: It boughts a trajectory that exploits the chaotic environment. Rather
Speaker 3: than just pointing at the destination and firing a thruster
Speaker 3: against the gravitational currents, gone Ear calculates how to surf
Speaker 3: the gravitational waves serve them. It might wait for the
Speaker 3: tumbling asteroid to rotate just enough so that a local
Speaker 3: gravity anomaly actually pulls the cubes at in the right direction,
Speaker 3: requiring only a tiny microsecond burst at the thruster to
Speaker 3: complete the maneuver.
Speaker 2: It's like a master kayaker navigating Class B ratids.
Speaker 3: That's a great analogy.
Speaker 2: A novice kayaker just paddles furiously in a straight line,
Speaker 2: fighting the current and exhausts themselves immediately. But the master
Speaker 2: kayaker reads the wall.
Speaker 3: They let the water do the work.
Speaker 2: They see the eddies, the sheer lines, the rocks, They
Speaker 2: angle the nose of the boat just right, and they
Speaker 2: let the immense chaotic energy of the river itself do
Speaker 2: the work, swallowing through the danger with almost zero physical effort.
Speaker 2: Gonier is reading the gravitational rapids.
Speaker 3: That is an exceptional analogy for the underlying mathematics of
Speaker 3: the optimization algorithms. And if we connect this to the
Speaker 3: bigger picture, the successful development of the Dineer and Gounier
Speaker 3: software suite is arguably far more valuable than the physical
Speaker 3: fifty million euro hardware of the remortse form itself.
Speaker 2: Really, the software is worth more than the.
Speaker 3: Ships because if you can definitively prove that this software
Speaker 3: can navigate non couplearian gravity and manage highly constrained resources
Speaker 3: without human intervention, you have just laid the foundational operating
Speaker 3: system for the entire future space economy.
Speaker 2: You were talking about the infrastructure for asteroid mining.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, if commercial entities are ever going to profitably extract water, ice,
Speaker 3: or platinum group metals from near Earth objects, they will
Speaker 3: not be doing it with human astronauts, and they will
Speaker 3: not be doing it with remote controlled rovers suffering from
Speaker 3: a ten minute toelemetry.
Speaker 2: Lag, too expensive and too slow.
Speaker 3: They will use massive autonomous industrial swarms, and those swarms
Speaker 3: will require the exact autonomous path finding and resource management
Speaker 3: logic being pioneered by the near architecture. This software is
Speaker 3: the key to unlocking scalable deep space industrial operations.
Speaker 2: But developing software that brilliant presents a massive engineering paradox
Speaker 2: on its own. You can write thousands of lines of
Speaker 2: incredibly elegant code, you can run millions of Monty Carlo
Speaker 2: simulations on supercomputers, sure in theory, but you cannot just
Speaker 2: load that code onto a fifty million euro physical swarm,
Speaker 2: strap it to the top of a rocket, blast it
Speaker 2: into the vacuum of space, and cross your fingers that
Speaker 2: you didn't miss a decimal point in the convex optimization loop.
Speaker 3: Definitely not.
Speaker 2: The vacuum is entirely unforgiving a single line of bad
Speaker 2: code and gone ear a thrust or misfires for half
Speaker 2: a second too long, and your cube sat shatters against
Speaker 2: a boulder. You have to physically test the hardware and
Speaker 2: the software working together.
Speaker 3: It has to be validated.
Speaker 2: But how do you test software designed to navigate the frictionless,
Speaker 2: tumbling microgravity environment of an asteroid when your laboratory is
Speaker 2: bolted to the surface of the Earth under the crushing,
Speaker 2: omnipresent pull of one G.
Speaker 3: You have to build a terrestrial environment that explicitly tricks
Speaker 3: the physical hardware into believing it is floating in deep space.
Speaker 2: Trick the hardware.
Speaker 3: And this brings us to another distinct advantage the UK possesses.
Speaker 3: At the University of Liverpool, where the lead authors of
Speaker 3: the Remora proposal are based, they have constructed a highly
Speaker 3: specialized facility known as the zero G Astrolab.
Speaker 2: The Zero g Astrolab. I am fascinated by facilities like
Speaker 2: this because they sound like pure science fiction, but they
Speaker 2: are triumphs of material science and metrology. They really are
Speaker 2: the absolute core of this laboratory. It's defining feature is
Speaker 2: what they claim to be the flattest flow in the UK.
Speaker 2: And the best way to conceptualize how a floor helps
Speaker 2: test spacecraft is to imagine the ultimate obsessive compulsive air
Speaker 2: hockey table.
Speaker 3: An air hockey table.
Speaker 2: Well on a standard arcade air hockey table, a motor
Speaker 2: blows air up through hundreds of tiny holes, creating a
Speaker 2: cushion that a plastic puck floats on, eliminating most of
Speaker 2: the friction. The zero G Astrolab inverses this concept with
Speaker 2: terrifying precision. The floor itself is an epoxy resin, poured
Speaker 2: and cured to a self leveling precision that approaches optical flatness.
Speaker 2: It is obsessively smooth, so it's like a mirror basically,
Speaker 2: instead of the floor blowing air, you take a physical
Speaker 2: heavy prototype of the cube SAT and you mount it
Speaker 2: on a specialized rig equipped with air bearings. This rig
Speaker 2: acts like a reverse hummercraft oh icy. It forces a
Speaker 2: microscopically thin film of compressed gas down onto the epoxy floor.
Speaker 3: This setup effectively nullifies kinetic friction. The prototype, dozens of kilograms,
Speaker 3: is physically floating a fraction of a millimeter above the
Speaker 3: resin surface.
Speaker 2: It's actually floating.
Speaker 3: If you walk up to it and push it with
Speaker 3: the absolute lightest touch of your pinky finger, it will
Speaker 3: glide silently across the room at a constant velocity until
Speaker 3: it impacts the far wall wow, exactly as it would
Speaker 3: if you applied that same force in the vacuum of space.
Speaker 3: The mass remains, but the friction is gone.
Speaker 2: So the engineers take the actual physical subsystems, the optical
Speaker 2: navigation cameras, the gyroscopes, the miniature cold gas thruster valves.
Speaker 2: They mount them on this floating rig, and they load
Speaker 2: the near software onto the onboard processor.
Speaker 3: Everything working together.
Speaker 2: This is the holy grail of aerospace validation. Hardware in
Speaker 2: the loop testing.
Speaker 3: The necessity of hardware in the loop testing cannot be
Speaker 3: overstated when dealing with autonomous systems. It is one thing
Speaker 3: for Dyneir to plot a perfect trajectory in a purely mathematical.
Speaker 2: Simulation, because computers are perfect.
Speaker 3: In a computer, sensors do not have dermal noise. Thruster
Speaker 3: valves open and close, instance stantaneously with zero mechanical latency.
Speaker 3: The minimum impulse bit is always perfectly calculated. But physical
Speaker 3: reality is chaotic and messy. Things break hardware degrades, a
Speaker 3: star tracker camera might catch a stray reflection, a solenoid
Speaker 3: valve might stick for three milliseconds.
Speaker 2: And that's all it takes to crash hardware.
Speaker 3: And the loop testing forces the pristine software algorithms to
Speaker 3: interact with the messy, noisy realities of the physical world.
Speaker 3: As the prototype glides across the epoxy floor, the optical
Speaker 3: sensors must process actual photons from the room.
Speaker 2: Begoni your software has to actually think, yes.
Speaker 3: It must calculate a trajectory, and it must command actual
Speaker 3: physical gas to expand through a nozzle to alter the
Speaker 3: prototype's momentum. It proved that the digital brain can successfully
Speaker 3: command the analog body.
Speaker 2: I see the value in that absolutely, But I have
Speaker 2: to play Devil's advocate here because there's a glaring limitation
Speaker 2: to an air hockey table, no matter how flat the
Speaker 2: epoxy is. Of course, space is a six dimensional environment.
Speaker 2: A space moves with six degrees of freedom. It translates forward, backward, left, right,
Speaker 2: up and down, and it rotates by pitching, yawing, and
Speaker 2: rolling the sixty f environment right. When you bolt a
Speaker 2: prototype to a flat floor, you are trapping it in
Speaker 2: two dimensions. It can slide along the X and Y axes,
Speaker 2: and it can spin like a top around the Z axis.
Speaker 2: That is only three degrees of freedom. It can't go up,
Speaker 2: It cannot pitch forward, it cannot fly upward. How can
Speaker 2: engineers possibly trust software to navigate the complex three D
Speaker 2: tumbling of an asteroid when its physical body has only
Speaker 2: ever been tested on a flat plane.
Speaker 3: That is the fundamental critique of air bearing testing, and
Speaker 3: it is a challenge aerospace engineers have wrestled with since
Speaker 3: the Apollo program. A planer floor cannot perfectly replicate volumetric space.
Speaker 2: So how do they fix it?
Speaker 3: However, we bridge the gap between three degrees of freedom
Speaker 3: and six degrees of freedom using highly advanced coupled mathematical models,
Speaker 3: specifically utilizing Euler's equations of rigid body dynamic. Here's how
Speaker 3: the methodology works. You are isolating the variables. You use
Speaker 3: the flat floor to absolutely rigorously validate the planar dynamics.
Speaker 3: You prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the
Speaker 3: sensor fusion, the processing latency, and the thruster impulse bits
Speaker 3: work flawlessly in the x, y and yaw dimensions.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you know the flat parts work perfectly.
Speaker 3: Once you have mathematically validated the physical hardware's performance in
Speaker 3: that constrained two D plane, you extract that precise performance data.
Speaker 3: You then feed that validated real world hardware data back
Speaker 3: into a massive six degree of freedom supercomputer simulation.
Speaker 2: So you prove the machine works horizontally in the real world,
Speaker 2: and you let the math prove it works vertically in
Speaker 2: the simulation.
Speaker 3: Exactly because the physics of a thrust firing or a
Speaker 3: sensor reading don't fundamentally change just because the object pitches forward.
Speaker 1: That makes sense.
Speaker 3: If you can eliminate the uncertainties of the hardware latency
Speaker 3: and the software execution loops on the floor, the mathematical
Speaker 3: extrapolation to six dof becomes highly reliable. It is the
Speaker 3: absolute best terrestrial proving ground available short of actually launching
Speaker 3: the prototype into orbit.
Speaker 2: Which, returning to our initial constraint, would blow the fifty
Speaker 2: million euro budget immediately immediately. Yes, the constraints dictate the innovation. Okay,
Speaker 2: so let's synthesize where the architecture stands. The UK possesses
Speaker 2: the theoretical models. They have the dinar and Gone Near
Speaker 2: software actively learning to serf chaotic gravity. They have the
Speaker 2: zero g astrolab in Liverpool physically validating the hardware in
Speaker 2: the loop on the smoothest epoxy available. They have the
Speaker 2: Remora swarm concept finalized, but is still just a brilliant
Speaker 2: concept trapped in a laboratory.
Speaker 3: Still on the ground.
Speaker 2: How do you actually get a fifty million euro fleet
Speaker 2: of tiny metal boxes out of Earth's gravity? Well, you
Speaker 2: cannot afford to buy a dedicated heavy lift rocket. You
Speaker 2: need a ride, and.
Speaker 3: This requirement activates another vital node in the UK's domestic
Speaker 3: space ecosystem, the Small Satellite Industrial Cluster, located in Surrey,
Speaker 3: ah SIR. For decades, the region surrounding the University of
Speaker 3: Surrey spearheaded by companies like Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd or SSTL,
Speaker 3: has been a global pioneer in miniaturized, low cost space hardware.
Speaker 2: They wrote the book on Doing Space Cheaply and Reliably.
Speaker 3: They did long before CubeSats were a standard university project.
Speaker 3: Surrey was proving that you could use commercial off the
Speaker 3: shelf components to build robust satellites, and the Remorra white
Speaker 3: papers brilliantly leverage this existing domestic infrastructure. How so, they
Speaker 3: propose what is known as a Phase ROW pilot study.
Speaker 3: Because the Remorra CubeSats are built to standard form factors,
Speaker 3: they do not require custom launch integration. They utilize standard
Speaker 3: deployer boxes.
Speaker 2: So they can just plug into any rocket.
Speaker 3: The strategy is to integrate these autonomous romeras as secondary
Speaker 3: payloads hitchhikers on future larger SSTL missions. When a primary
Speaker 3: commercial or government satellite is launched, there is almost always
Speaker 3: excess mass and volume capacity inside the rocket's payload.
Speaker 2: Fairing empty space in the trunk.
Speaker 3: Often standardized mounting rings like the ESPA ring are used
Speaker 3: to bolt secondary payloads around the primary one.
Speaker 2: It is the orbital equivalent of carpooling. You don't buy
Speaker 2: the bus, you just buy a ticket for the empty
Speaker 2: seat in the back, and structurally this mitigates an enormous
Speaker 2: amount of financial risk. If the launch vehicle suffers an
Speaker 2: anomaly and explodes on the pad, or if the Remorsewarm
Speaker 2: fails to boot up once deployed in the vacuum, you
Speaker 2: haven't lost a flagship sovereign mission.
Speaker 3: You've lost a fifty million secondary experiment.
Speaker 2: Right the primary mission of the rocket still succeeds. It
Speaker 2: allows the UK to incrementally validate this radical autonomous technology
Speaker 2: without betting the entire science director It's budget on a
Speaker 2: single launch.
Speaker 3: It is an incredibly pragmatic, low risk pathway to orbit.
Speaker 3: But while the engineering validation must be careful, methodical and incremental,
Speaker 3: the geopolitical and planetary realities driving this mission are anything
Speaker 3: but patient.
Speaker 2: No running out of time.
Speaker 3: There is a very real, very pressing urgency to get
Speaker 3: the near architecture and the sworn telemetry functional and this
Speaker 3: shifts our analysis from the theoretical mechanics of CubeSats to
Speaker 3: the immediate ticking clock of planetary dynamic.
Speaker 2: A ticking clock. We alluded to this in the introduction,
Speaker 2: but we need to stare directly at what is hurtling
Speaker 2: toward us in the year twenty twenty nine.
Speaker 3: Yes, we do.
Speaker 2: This is not some arbitrary date selected by bureaucrats for
Speaker 2: a funding cycle. The United Nations has officially designated twenty
Speaker 2: twenty nine as the International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary.
Speaker 3: Defense, a very specific title.
Speaker 2: And they did not make that declaration lightly. They get
Speaker 2: it because in twenty twenty nine, humanity is going to
Speaker 2: receive a visceral, undeniable wake up call regarding our fragility
Speaker 2: and the cosmos.
Speaker 3: We are preparing for the close approach of the asteroid.
Speaker 2: Apothice Apophas the name alone carries a certain mythological weight.
Speaker 2: Apofice was the ancient Egyptian deity of chaos and darkness,
Speaker 2: and for a brief period after its discovery in two
Speaker 2: thousand and four, the asteroid absolutely lived up to that name.
Speaker 2: Early orbital calculations indicated a terrifyingly high probability, reaching up
Speaker 2: to almost three percent at one point that Apoffice would
Speaker 2: actually impact Earth in twenty twenty nine.
Speaker 3: Which is terrifying, But subsequent highly precise radar observations eventually
Speaker 3: ruled out a direct impact for the twenty twenty nine encounter,
Speaker 3: thank goodness, and later observations ruled out impacts for the
Speaker 3: subsequent passes later in the century. However, the relief of
Speaker 3: avoiding an impact does not diminish the sheer, staggering reality
Speaker 3: of the orbital geometry we are about to witness.
Speaker 2: It's still coming close, very close.
Speaker 3: Apofus is not a small chunk of gravel. It is
Speaker 3: an S type asteroid with an estimated diameter of roughly
Speaker 3: three hundred and fifty meters that is over eleven one
Speaker 3: and fifty feet across.
Speaker 2: I try to visualize that mass, you have to picture
Speaker 2: the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building ripped from
Speaker 2: its foundations, composed of tens of millions of tons of
Speaker 2: silicate rock and nickel iron, tumbling through the vacuum at
Speaker 2: ten tens of thousands of miles an hour.
Speaker 3: It's a flying mountain.
Speaker 2: And the trajectory of this mountain during the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: nine pass is what makes it a generational event.
Speaker 3: To contextualize how close it will come, we have to
Speaker 3: look at humanity's own orbital infrastructure. When you look at
Speaker 3: satellite television or check global weather patterns, you are relying
Speaker 3: on satellites placed in geostationary orbit. This is a specific
Speaker 3: orbital regime located roughly thirty six thousand kilometers or about
Speaker 3: twenty two thousand miles above the Earth's equator. At the
Speaker 3: precise altitude, the satellite's orbital velocity matches the rotational speed
Speaker 3: of the Earth, allowing it to stay parked permanently over
Speaker 3: one specific geographic location, the geostationary belt. We have an
Speaker 3: entire ring of multi billion dollar hardware occupying that belt.
Speaker 3: During the twenty twenty nine encounter, the trajectory of apofice
Speaker 3: will bring it inside that geostationary belt.
Speaker 2: Wait inside, it is going to thread the needle. Yes,
Speaker 2: it will pass less than twenty thousand miles from the
Speaker 2: surface of our planet. That is closer to us than
Speaker 2: the saddle lights beaming the weather report. A one thousand
Speaker 2: foot mountain is going to skim just over the top
Speaker 2: of our atmosphere, plunging through the very space we consider
Speaker 2: our domestic orbital territory.
Speaker 3: The gravitational interaction alone will be intense. Earth's immense gravity
Speaker 3: will physically grab a p office, radically altering the asteroid's
Speaker 3: orbit and likely triggering localized seismic events. Asteroid quakes across
Speaker 3: its surface, potentially rearranging its surface, boulders, and structure in
Speaker 3: real time as it flies past.
Speaker 2: And the most profound aspect of this encounter won't be
Speaker 2: recorded on a seismograph. It will be recorded by human
Speaker 2: eyes exactly because Apofice is so massive and passing so close,
Speaker 2: it will cross the threshold of naked eye visibility across
Speaker 2: massive swaths of the globe, including parts of Europe, the UK,
Speaker 2: and Africa. Millions of people will be able to walk
Speaker 2: out of their homes, stand in their backyards, look up
Speaker 2: at the night sky and clearly see a point of
Speaker 2: light moving rapidly across the backdrop of stars.
Speaker 3: No telescopes need.
Speaker 2: No telescopes, no binocular is just standing on the grass
Speaker 2: watching a civilization ending amount of kinetic energy silently glide
Speaker 2: past the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: The psychological and cultural impact of that visual will be unparalleled. Intellectually,
Speaker 3: the global public understands that asteroids exist. We've all seen
Speaker 3: the CGI representations in movies.
Speaker 2: Sure, Armageddon deep impact, but.
Speaker 3: There's a massive cognitive dissonance between knowing a thread exists
Speaker 3: theoretically and physically. Standing in your garden watching a three
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty meters rock fly between Earth and our
Speaker 3: own communications satellites. It will crystallize the absolute necessity of
Speaker 3: planetary defense architecture in the public consciousness. Overnight.
Speaker 2: We won't be able to ignore it anymore.
Speaker 3: It will be the ultimate validation that space is not
Speaker 3: empty and that we are incredibly vulnerable.
Speaker 2: It is going to be a shared global moment of
Speaker 2: held breath, but as terrifying as watching a paufice will be.
Speaker 2: The asteroid experts and planetary defense researchers I talk to
Speaker 2: are not the ones losing sleep over twenty twenty nine.
Speaker 3: No, they aren't.
Speaker 2: Because apofice is a known variable. We have mapped its trajectory,
Speaker 2: We know the mass, we know the hour and minute
Speaker 2: of its closest approach. The true existential dread, the nightmare
Speaker 2: scenario of planetary defense, does not originate from the mountains.
Speaker 2: We can see the nightmare comes from the rocks we
Speaker 2: are entirely blind.
Speaker 3: To, which forces us to confront the most dangerous vulnerability
Speaker 3: in our entire global observation network. We have spent decades
Speaker 3: building an incredibly robust, highly sensitive system of ground based
Speaker 3: optical telescopes and sky surveys.
Speaker 2: We have eyes everywhere.
Speaker 3: They relentlessly scan the night sky, peering deep into the
Speaker 3: outer Solar System, cataloging millions of near Earth objects. But
Speaker 3: there is a fundamental geometric limitation to this system. All
Speaker 3: of those ground based optical telescopes operate on the night
Speaker 3: side of the Earth, looking outward, away from the inner
Speaker 3: Solar System.
Speaker 2: Because if you take a highly sensitive, multi million dollar
Speaker 2: optical sensor designed to detect the faint reflection of a
Speaker 2: rock millions of miles away, and you point it toward
Speaker 2: the inner Solar System during the day, you are pointing
Speaker 2: it directly at the Sun.
Speaker 3: It would be disastrous.
Speaker 2: It would be like staring through a high powered sniper
Speaker 2: scope directly into a stadium spotlight while trying to spot
Speaker 2: a dust mte fluttering an inch from the bulb. The
Speaker 2: sensor would be overwhelmed instantly. The optical glare is blinding.
Speaker 3: This creates what astronomers refer to as the sunward blind spot.
Speaker 3: It is a massive volumetric cone of space extending from
Speaker 3: Earth toward the Sun, encompassing the solar elongation angles, where
Speaker 3: the Sun's radiation and scattered light in our atmosphere completely
Speaker 3: obliterate any possibility of optical detection.
Speaker 2: So anything coming from that direction is just invisible.
Speaker 3: Any celestial body occupying an orbit that brings it toward
Speaker 3: Earth from within that sunward cone is effectively cloaked. We
Speaker 3: cannot see it. And this is not a theoretical vulnerability
Speaker 3: debated in academic papers. This blind spot has already been
Speaker 3: violently exploited. It already happened, resulting in a direct impact
Speaker 3: on a populated city with absolutely zero warning.
Speaker 2: We have to talk about Chellibinsk. February fifteenth, twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: a typical freezing winter morning in the industrial city of Chellibinsk, Russia.
Speaker 2: The sun is just rising over the horizon, casting long shadows.
Speaker 3: A normal morning commute.
Speaker 2: People are scraping ice off their windshields driving to work,
Speaker 2: and then the sky absolutely detonates. A streak of light,
Speaker 2: momentarily burning brighter than the sun itself, tears across the
Speaker 2: upper atmosphere for a few terrifying seconds, the intense light
Speaker 2: casts moving shadows in the wrong direction across the city,
Speaker 2: and then silence. Because light travels infinitely faster than sound,
Speaker 2: there is an agonizing three minute delay where the trail
Speaker 2: of superheated plasma fades into a thick, twisting column of smoke,
Speaker 2: and then the acoustic shockwave hits the ground.
Speaker 3: To understand the violence of that shockwave, we have to
Speaker 3: look at the physics of the object. This was an
Speaker 3: ordinary chondrite meteor, roughly twenty meters we're about sixty five
Speaker 3: feet in diameter.
Speaker 2: It's it relatively small.
Speaker 3: Yes. It entered the Earth's atmosphere at a shallow angle,
Speaker 3: traveling at an estimated forty one thousand miles per hour.
Speaker 3: As it plowed into the thickening layers of the atmosphere,
Speaker 3: the air in front of the rock could not move
Speaker 3: out of the way fast enough.
Speaker 2: It just slammed into the air.
Speaker 3: It compressed violently, creating immense ram pressure and superheating the
Speaker 3: air into a plasma envelope. The aerodynamic stress acting on
Speaker 3: the front of the media rapidly exceeded the internal tensile
Speaker 3: strength of the rock. Itself at an altitude of roughly
Speaker 3: eighteen miles above the surface. The structural integrity failed completely
Speaker 3: rock broke. The meteor did not just crack apart, It
Speaker 3: violently pancaked and detonated in what we call an air burst.
Speaker 3: The sudden release of kinetic energy was staggering, estimated at
Speaker 3: nearly five hundred kilotons of TNT equivalent, that.
Speaker 2: Is more than thirty times the destructive energy released by
Speaker 2: the atomic bomb detonated.
Speaker 3: Over Hiroshima thirty times.
Speaker 2: And that energy propagated downward as a physical wall of overpressure.
Speaker 2: When the shockwave reached Chellibinsk, it blew in the windows
Speaker 2: of thousands of apartment building, schools, and commercial structures across
Speaker 2: hundreds of square miles.
Speaker 3: Instruction was massive.
Speaker 2: The roof of a massive zinc factory collapsed entirely. Over
Speaker 2: fourteen hundred people required medical attention, the vast majority of
Speaker 2: them suffering lacerations because they had seen the initial blinding
Speaker 2: flash of light, walk to their windows to look outside,
Speaker 2: and were standing directly behind the glass when the pressure
Speaker 2: wave arrived and shattered it inward.
Speaker 3: Just a horrific sequence of events.
Speaker 2: It was an incredibly destructive, highly documented kinetic event caught
Speaker 2: on hundreds of Russian dashboard cameras. But the most terrifying
Speaker 2: aspect of the Shelleybinsk event isn't the damage itself. It
Speaker 2: is the intelligence failure leading up to it. With all
Speaker 2: of our sky surveys, with all of our orbital mechanics models,
Speaker 2: no one, not NASA, not the ESSA, not the Russian
Speaker 2: military radar network SAT coming it was a complete surprise.
Speaker 3: This raises an important question. How does a sixty five
Speaker 3: foot rock traveling at forty thousand miles per hour slip
Speaker 3: entirely undetected through the most technologically advanced sensor network in
Speaker 3: human history and detonate with the force of a thermonuclear
Speaker 3: weapon over a city of over a million people.
Speaker 2: Because of its trajectory, it came from the Sun precisely
Speaker 2: its specific orbital path.
Speaker 3: Its radiant approached Earth from the daylight side. It spent
Speaker 3: its final approach entirely hidden within the sunward.
Speaker 2: Blind spot, hiding in the blare.
Speaker 3: The telescopes on the night side of the Earth were
Speaker 3: looking the wrong way, and no optical telescope on the
Speaker 3: day side could penetrate the solar glare to track it.
Speaker 3: We were completely structurally blind to that vector of attack.
Speaker 2: So what does this all mean. We have established the
Speaker 2: catastrophic danger of the sunwar blind spot, we have the
Speaker 2: looming psychological wake up call of Apofice in twenty twenty nine,
Speaker 2: and we have this incredibly elegant fifty million euro proposal
Speaker 2: out of the UK for a swarm of autonomous, artificially
Speaker 2: intelligent cube SATs designed to operate independently in deep space.
Speaker 3: Right, the pieces are all there.
Speaker 2: When you overlay those three realities, the ultimate strategic purpose
Speaker 2: of the REMOT architecture suddenly snaps into crystal clear focus.
Speaker 2: Remore is not just a signientific mission to map the
Speaker 2: gravity of a random asteroid. It is the blueprint for
Speaker 2: a planetary sentinel system.
Speaker 3: The genius of the fifty million euroswarm architecture is its
Speaker 3: scalability and its autonomy. Because these cube SATs are incredibly
Speaker 3: cheap to manufacture, and because the near software eliminates the
Speaker 3: need for massive human mission control teams, you are not
Speaker 3: limited as sending them on bespoke scientific excursions to known
Speaker 3: targets like Apophae.
Speaker 2: You can just pump them out.
Speaker 3: You can mass produce these swarms and deploy them strategically
Speaker 3: to plug the gaps in our planetary defense network.
Speaker 2: You could launch a fleet of Remora CubeSats and maneuver
Speaker 2: them into a trailing orbit behind Venus, or park them
Speaker 2: at the l one lagrange point between the Earth.
Speaker 3: And the Sun, put them right in the danger zone.
Speaker 2: You position them entirely outside the optical glare of the
Speaker 2: Sun from Earth's.
Speaker 3: Perspective, and you turn them around. You have them look
Speaker 3: outward away from the Sun, scanning the exact volume of
Speaker 3: space that Earth based telescopes cannot see. They become a
Speaker 3: synthetic aperture, optical barrier.
Speaker 2: A tripwire.
Speaker 3: If a Chelli Binsk sized rock or something much larger
Speaker 3: is hurtling toward Earth from the day side, the wave
Speaker 3: of fleet detects the thermal signature or the optical reflection
Speaker 3: against the blackness of space. The Gaunier software independently calculates
Speaker 3: the trajectory, recognizes the threat vector, and beams an encrypted
Speaker 3: early warning telemetry packet back to Earth.
Speaker 2: Days or even weeks before the object enters the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: They serve as the eyes we currently lack.
Speaker 2: They are the early warning radar for the sunward blind spot.
Speaker 2: But to bring this entire massive concept back down to Earth.
Speaker 2: We have to inject a heavy dose of fiscal reality
Speaker 2: into the conversation. Yeah, the budget part A mathematically brilliant
Speaker 2: architecture capable of revolutionizing planetary defense and autonomous resource mapping
Speaker 2: is ultimately still just ink on a white paper until
Speaker 2: someone writes the check to bend the metal. And given
Speaker 2: the intense budgetary constraints and shifting political priorities currently facing
Speaker 2: the UK space sector, finding even this seemingly minuscule amount
Speaker 2: of fifty million euros to fund a new dedicated sovereign
Speaker 2: mission architecture from scratch is an uphill battle.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly difficult right now.
Speaker 2: It requires immense political will to prioritize planetary defense over
Speaker 2: more immediate terrestrial concerns. It is highly uncertain if the
Speaker 2: UK Space Agency will be able to natively fund the
Speaker 2: REMRA emission through its entire life cycle in the near term.
Speaker 2: Navigating the labyrinth of government funding pipelines often proves far
Speaker 2: more treacherous and chaotic than navigating the non caplearan gravity
Speaker 2: field of a tumbling asteroid.
Speaker 3: That is the harsh reality of aerospace procurement. However, the
Speaker 3: intellectual heavy lifting has already been accomplished.
Speaker 2: The math is done.
Speaker 3: The teams at institutions like the University of Liverpool are
Speaker 3: not developing the near software suite or validating the hardware
Speaker 3: and the loop protocols in a vacuum. Even if domestic
Speaker 3: funding falls short. The Remorra architecture, the algorithm's bridging three
Speaker 3: dof testing to six D zero simulation, the autonomous fuel
Speaker 3: optimization loops, the multi static gravity mapping techniques is fully designed.
Speaker 2: The blueprint exists, and if.
Speaker 3: The UK cannot launch it independently, there is a strong
Speaker 3: probability that other entities will recognize the immense value of
Speaker 3: this work. International space agencies looking for low cost auxiliary
Speaker 3: fleets to accompany their flagship missions, or private aerospace consortiums
Speaker 3: aiming to deploy the first autonomous asteroid mining swarms could
Speaker 3: adopt and integrate this brilliantly optimized architecture. The foundational technology
Speaker 3: is primed and waiting for the right backer to recognize
Speaker 3: its potential.
Speaker 2: We have covered a truly immense amount of conceptual territory today.
Speaker 2: We started by looking through the tinted skyscraper glass of
Speaker 2: our current remote sensing limitations, understanding why we cannot just
Speaker 2: look at the outside of a rock to know how
Speaker 2: to deflect it.
Speaker 3: We get to get inside.
Speaker 2: We explored the elegant UK solution to the funding paradox,
Speaker 2: mimicking the symbiotic remorra fish to deploy a fifty million
Speaker 2: euro multi static sensor network of CubeSats. We dived into
Speaker 2: the deep mathematics of the near soft where watching artificial
Speaker 2: intelligence learn to serve chaotic gravity, and we slid across
Speaker 2: the microscopic perfection of the zero g Astrolabs epoxy floor.
Speaker 2: We confronted the ticking clock of a pofice threading the
Speaker 2: needle of our geostationary belt in twenty twenty nine, and
Speaker 2: the violent, terrifying reality of the sunward blind spot that
Speaker 2: Chileabinsk exposed. It is a journey from the absolute limits
Speaker 2: of human vision to the bleeding edge of autonomous survival
Speaker 2: in the void.
Speaker 3: It serves as a remarkable testament to the ingenuity forced
Speaker 3: by constraint, but the implications of this technology force a
Speaker 3: profound shift in how we must conceptualize our future interactions
Speaker 3: with deep space. I want to leave you with a
Speaker 3: thought that extends far beyond the engineering schematics and the
Speaker 3: budget proposals.
Speaker 2: Okay, lay it on us.
Speaker 3: If autonomous architecture is like the remorous form, become the
Speaker 3: standard operational model for deep space. If we successfully populate
Speaker 3: the Solar System with tiny, self contained silicon brains that
Speaker 3: make their own independent fuel, minimal survival choices, mapping chaotic
Speaker 3: gravity wells, and calculating complex orbital trajectories, millions of miles
Speaker 3: away from any human oversight, surviving entirely on their own
Speaker 3: in the dark for years at a time. At what
Speaker 3: specific point do we stop classifying them merely as human tools?
Speaker 3: At what point does the complexity of their autonomous behavior
Speaker 3: force us to view them as a new, independent, artificial ecosystem,
Speaker 3: living semiotically alongside the ancient rocks of our Solar system.
Speaker 2: Are they just programmed machines, or are they the vanguard
Speaker 2: of the first artificial species we are seeding into the wild,
Speaker 2: chaotic ocean of space. It is a fascinating and slightly
Speaker 2: haunting philosophical threshold, and it brings us right back to
Speaker 2: the image we started with. The Next time you step
Speaker 2: outside on a clear night and look up into the dark,
Speaker 2: remember that you are not looking at an empty static void.
Speaker 2: You are looking into a deep, silent ocean filled with
Speaker 2: massive momentum, where ancient mountains hurtle through the pitch black.
Speaker 2: But hopefully, in the very near future, the fragile glass
Speaker 2: boat of our planet won't be relying solely on a
Speaker 2: weak flashlight pointing in the wrong direction. Hopefully we will
Speaker 2: have our own fleet of highly intelligent mechanical fish swimming
Speaker 2: out in the dark, watching the currents and ensuring that
Speaker 2: nothing ever slips out of the sun to take us
Speaker 2: by surprise. Again, thank you so much for joining us
Speaker 2: on this exploration of the universe. Keep looking up, stay curious,
Speaker 2: and we will catch you next time.