Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomi 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: Okay, okay, stop me if you've heard this one before.
Speaker 2: A mysterious object from a totally a different star system
Speaker 2: just waltzes into our solar system. It's weird, it's moving
Speaker 2: impossibly fast, and it's basically carrying secrets from some alien world.
Speaker 3: And then just as we figure.
Speaker 4: Out what it is, poof, it's gone.
Speaker 3: It's gone. It's already on its way out.
Speaker 4: It really does feel like a recurring theme, doesn't it.
Speaker 4: It's the cosmic equivalent of meeting someone fascinating in an airport,
Speaker 4: having a great conversation, and then their flight gets called.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate at cosmic Teas we're sitting here, it
Speaker 2: is February sixteenth, twenty twenty six, and the entire astronomy
Speaker 2: world is buzzing about this thing.
Speaker 3: Three I at Lass.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the third one.
Speaker 2: This is it the third interstellar object humanity has ever detected.
Speaker 2: First we had Umumua back in what twenty seventeen, that
Speaker 2: weird tumbling cigar.
Speaker 4: Shaped thing caused so much debate.
Speaker 2: Then Boresov came along a couple of years later, and
Speaker 2: it looked a little more familiar, bit more like a
Speaker 2: normal commet a bit. Yeah, and now at LUs but
Speaker 2: the headline feels exactly the same.
Speaker 3: Hello, goodbye, nice knowing you.
Speaker 4: It's just so frustrating. I mean, the geometry of these
Speaker 4: encounters is it's just unforgiving. By the time our telescopes
Speaker 4: are powerful enough to spot them, they are usually already
Speaker 4: screaming past the sun and heading for the exit door. Right,
Speaker 4: the universe is like throwing these incredible gifts at us,
Speaker 4: but it's throwing them really, really hard, exactly.
Speaker 2: And the mood today, you can feel it online. It
Speaker 2: feels a bit somber, right, like we missed the bus again.
Speaker 2: I was just looking at the trajectory maps this morning,
Speaker 2: arning you know, tracking it on the NASA dashboard, and
Speaker 2: three Iadolass is moving at something like sixty kilometers per second.
Speaker 2: Sixty yeah, that's not just fast, that is I mean
Speaker 2: that is, don't even bother trying to chase me fast.
Speaker 4: Well, under normal circumstances. Yes, yes, that's exactly what the
Speaker 4: physics would tell you. Sixty kilometers per second is it's
Speaker 4: blisteringly fast.
Speaker 3: Put that in perspective for us.
Speaker 4: Okay, So a high velocity rifle bullet travels at about
Speaker 4: one kilometer per second, give or take. So this rock
Speaker 4: is moving sixty times faster than a speeding bullet. It's
Speaker 4: completely unbound from the Sun's gravity, which means it isn't
Speaker 4: coming back. It's a one time visitor, a true interstellar tourist,
Speaker 4: a cosmic drive by precisely, and usually when something is
Speaker 4: moving that fast and is already on its way out,
Speaker 4: we just we wave, We take our telescope pictures, we
Speaker 4: analyze the light spectrum from afar, and we write our
Speaker 4: papers about the one that got away.
Speaker 3: But I hear a butt in your voice.
Speaker 4: But and this is why today is actually a very
Speaker 4: very exciting day. The entire narrative has just shifted in
Speaker 4: the last few hours, shifted.
Speaker 3: How the thing is leaving. It's got to be halfway
Speaker 3: to Jupiter's orbit by now, isn't it.
Speaker 4: It is leaving and you're right. We absolutely can't catch
Speaker 4: it with a normal chase, A direct shot is impossible.
Speaker 4: But a new proposal just dropped today that suggests we
Speaker 4: actually can catch it.
Speaker 3: Your kid is.
Speaker 4: It's just that the method is well, it's completely unhinged.
Speaker 2: Unhinged. I like unhinged. Unhinged usually means interesting.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's audacious, it's beautiful. The proposal comes from a
Speaker 4: team including Adam Hibberd who's with the Initiative for Interstellar Studies.
Speaker 4: They've crunched the numbers and they are saying, we can
Speaker 4: run this object down, but we don't do it by
Speaker 4: flying towards it.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm listening. Where do we fly them?
Speaker 4: We catch it by flying directly into the sun.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, what come again?
Speaker 4: Yep?
Speaker 2: We want to catch a freezing cold rock that's heading
Speaker 2: out into the blackness of deep space. And step one
Speaker 2: of the plan is fly into the giant ball of fire.
Speaker 4: Step one is fly into the fire. It's a technique
Speaker 4: called a solar O birth maneuver. And if this paper
Speaker 4: is that's right, it is the only way humanity is
Speaker 4: going to get a close up look at an alien
Speaker 4: object in our lifetimes.
Speaker 2: Okay, we have to unpack this immediately, because that sounds
Speaker 2: like suicide, not science. But hold on, before we even
Speaker 2: get to the whole flying into the Sun part, we
Speaker 2: need to set the stage properly. What exactly is three
Speaker 2: eye out lists? Why are we so desperate to catch
Speaker 2: this thing that we're seriously considering roasting a multi billion
Speaker 2: dollar spacecraft.
Speaker 4: Well, you have to think about what these objects really represent.
Speaker 4: Three eyelis isn't just a rock or you know, a
Speaker 4: dirty snowball. It's debris. It's leftover building material from the
Speaker 4: formation of a completely different solar system.
Speaker 3: It's literally a message in a bottle.
Speaker 4: Precisely, it's a physical package containing the chemical history of
Speaker 4: an exoplanet system. We spend billions and billions of dollars
Speaker 4: building these incredible telescopes like web to just stare at
Speaker 4: the atmospheres of planets light years away, trying to guess
Speaker 4: what they're made of from these tiny squiggles in a
Speaker 4: light spectrum.
Speaker 3: Right, it's all remote analysis.
Speaker 4: The universe has literally mailed a piece of one to
Speaker 4: our front door. If we can actually sample it, touch it,
Speaker 4: put it in a mass spectrometer and analyze its isotopes. Yeah,
Speaker 4: my god, it would be the scientific gold mine of
Speaker 4: the century.
Speaker 2: It would tell us if our own Solar system is
Speaker 2: unique or if we're just common?
Speaker 4: Are we common or are we a fluke. That's one
Speaker 4: of the biggest questions there is, right, It's.
Speaker 2: The difference between looking at a picture of a cake
Speaker 2: and actually getting to eat a slice.
Speaker 3: But here's the.
Speaker 2: Problem, and this is what everyone is lamenting today. We
Speaker 2: can't eat the slice because the slice is moving at
Speaker 2: sixty kilometers per second away from us.
Speaker 4: And that speed is the whole key to the problem.
Speaker 4: To put that sixty number in perspective again, the fastest
Speaker 4: spacecraft we've ever launched out of the Solar System is
Speaker 4: Voyager one, and it's.
Speaker 3: Been going for what almost fifty years now.
Speaker 4: Almost fifty years, and it's moving it about seventeen kilometers
Speaker 4: per second seventeen and that took decades of gravity assists
Speaker 4: to build up. Three ied lass is moving more than
Speaker 4: three almost four times faster than our fastest dever probe.
Speaker 4: We just can't catch it conventionally.
Speaker 2: So why can't we just I mean, this is the
Speaker 2: obvious question, right, why can't we just launch a bigger rocket?
Speaker 2: We have these huge new rockets, the sls. We've got starship.
Speaker 2: Can't we just strap a probe to one of those
Speaker 2: and just floor it.
Speaker 4: That's the direct mission approach. Yeah, it's a totally logical
Speaker 4: question and the first thing every mission designer looks at.
Speaker 4: But the math it just falls apart almost immediately. The
Speaker 4: issue isn't just the sheer speed, it's the timing. It's
Speaker 4: a combination problem. Three i Atlis was detected far too
Speaker 4: late in the game. It had already crossed inside Jupiter's
Speaker 4: orbit and swung around the Sun before we even knew
Speaker 4: it was there.
Speaker 3: It totally snuck up on us, it really did.
Speaker 4: And because it was detected so late, the optimal launch window,
Speaker 4: you know, that perfect time when Earth was in just
Speaker 4: the right spot in its orbit to simply shoot a
Speaker 4: rocket to intercept it, that window had already slammed shut.
Speaker 4: It was gone before we even knew it existed.
Speaker 2: It's like trying to merge onto a highway. If you
Speaker 2: see a car coming from way down on the on ramp,
Speaker 2: you can time it, you speed up, you merge in.
Speaker 3: Smoothly, perfect analogy, But if that car.
Speaker 2: Is already blown past you while you're at a dead stop,
Speaker 2: you can't just accelerate from zero to one hundred miles
Speaker 2: an hour instantly to catch up.
Speaker 3: The physics doesn't work.
Speaker 4: You're standing on the train platform and the bullet train
Speaker 4: has already screamed past the station. That's the situation we're in.
Speaker 2: Okay, But what if we were already in space. I
Speaker 2: know the European Space Agency has this mission planned, the
Speaker 2: Comet Interceptor. The idea is to have a probe just
Speaker 2: kind of waiting.
Speaker 4: Right, loitering. Yeah. The concept is to park a spacecraft
Speaker 4: at a stable point in space the suner till two
Speaker 4: point and just wait for a suitable long period commet
Speaker 4: or ideally an interstellar object to show up.
Speaker 3: So even if we had one of those waiting right now,
Speaker 3: it wouldn't work.
Speaker 4: It would matter. The angle is all wrong and the
Speaker 4: speed is just too high. The sheer change in velocity
Speaker 4: required we call delta V and orbital mechanics is just
Speaker 4: monumentally beyond the capability of any chemical rockets we have
Speaker 4: sitting on a or even waiting in space.
Speaker 3: So delta V is basically a measure of how much
Speaker 3: oomph you need.
Speaker 4: It's the currency of space travel. Every maneuver costs a
Speaker 4: certain amount of delta V. Getting from Earth orbit to
Speaker 4: the Moon causes a certain amount. Getting to Mars costs more.
Speaker 4: Trying to catch three i ellas from a standing start
Speaker 4: costs an astronomical amount. If you tried to pack enough
Speaker 4: fuel to do it, you'd need a rocket the size
Speaker 4: of a skyscraper just to get a tiny coffee cup
Speaker 4: sized pro moving fast enough. And we can't build that.
Speaker 2: So the direct approach is dead on arrival. Conventional wisdom
Speaker 2: says we wave goodbye, write some sad poetry, and wait
Speaker 2: for the next one in what another couple of years.
Speaker 4: That was the conventional wisdom until this morning.
Speaker 2: Okay, so enter the visionaries. Who are these people proposing
Speaker 2: the dive into the Sun plan? This sounds like a
Speaker 2: pretty Maverick idea, it is.
Speaker 4: But they're not Mavericks in a a reckless sense. It's
Speaker 4: a fascinating team. You have Adam Hibberd, who is a
Speaker 4: just a brilliant orbital mechanic from the Initiative for Interstellar
Speaker 4: Studies or ifour okay, then you have t Mar Marshal
Speaker 4: U Banks from Space Initiatives, Inc. And Andreas Hine at
Speaker 4: the University of Luxembourg. These aren't just random enthusiasts. These
Speaker 4: are the folks who specialize in impossible navigation. They live
Speaker 4: for these kinds of problems.
Speaker 3: They like the hard problem.
Speaker 4: They love them. And Hibberd in particular is the main
Speaker 4: architect behind a really unique piece of software called os.
Speaker 3: OITS what's that It stands.
Speaker 4: For Optimum Interplanetary Trajectory Software. It sounds dry, I know,
Speaker 4: but you should think of it as a kind of
Speaker 4: GPS for the impossible hasso. Most mission planning software is
Speaker 4: designed to look for the most efficient direct routes, you know,
Speaker 4: a home and transfer from Earth to Mars. It's about
Speaker 4: saving fuel on established paths. Always. Hays is different. It's
Speaker 4: designed to look for cosmic bank shots. It looks for
Speaker 4: gravitational pinball.
Speaker 2: So it's not looking for the straightest line. It's looking
Speaker 2: for loopholes.
Speaker 4: It's looking for leverage points in the Solar System. And
Speaker 4: this isn't its first rodeo. It was the same software
Speaker 4: used to design Project Lyra, which was the big theoretic
Speaker 4: mission concept to go back and chase down umua oh.
Speaker 3: I remember that that also seemed impossible at the time.
Speaker 4: It did, and a direct mission was but always found
Speaker 4: these wild looping trajectories using Venus and Jupiter and Earth
Speaker 4: to eventually build up enough speed. So this software has
Speaker 4: a pedigree in solving these exact kinds of impossible navigation redeals.
Speaker 2: Okay, so these guys fed all the data on three
Speaker 2: I clus its speed, its direction into this super smart
Speaker 2: software and just ask it a simple question, a very
Speaker 2: simple question.
Speaker 4: Is there any way, anyway at all using any combination
Speaker 4: of planets and burns to catch this thing with current technology?
Speaker 3: And the computer didn't just crash.
Speaker 4: The computer came back with a resounding yes. But the
Speaker 4: path it plotted it's just wild. It's elegant and terrifying
Speaker 4: all at.
Speaker 3: Once, which brings us back to the Solar.
Speaker 4: O birth maneuver, the solar obirth.
Speaker 2: Okay, lay it on me. I think I understand a
Speaker 2: basic gravity assist. That's where you fly by a planet
Speaker 2: like Jupiter and you kind of steal a little bit
Speaker 2: of its orbital momentum to speed yourself up. Right, Voyager
Speaker 2: did that a bunch of.
Speaker 4: Times, exactly right. A standard gravity assist is like you're
Speaker 4: on a skateboard and you grab onto the back of
Speaker 4: a moving bus for a second. The bus barely notices,
Speaker 4: but you get a huge boost. But the overt effect
Speaker 4: is different. It's more profound. It relies on a quirk
Speaker 4: of orbiter mechanics. That feels it almost feels like a
Speaker 4: cheat code for the.
Speaker 3: Universe, a cheat code. I'm listening. I like cheat codes.
Speaker 4: The basic principle is this. A rocket engine is more efficient.
Speaker 4: It gives you a bigger booth than kinetic energy when
Speaker 4: the rocket is already moving very fast.
Speaker 2: Wait, hang on, why that seems backwards. A rocket provides
Speaker 2: a certain amount of for ust a certain push. Why
Speaker 2: doesn't matter how fast I'm already going when I fire it?
Speaker 4: It's all about kinetic energy. The formula for kinetic energy
Speaker 4: is one half mass times velosoity squared. The key is
Speaker 4: that squared part. Okay, So because of that squared relationship,
Speaker 4: if you add a fixed amount of velocity, Let's say
Speaker 4: you fire your engine and add one kilometer per second
Speaker 4: to your speed, the amount of energy you gain from
Speaker 4: that burn is massively larger if you're already going, say
Speaker 4: fifty kilometers per second, than if you're only going five.
Speaker 4: You get more bang for your buck from the exact
Speaker 4: same puffet gas.
Speaker 3: Okay, I think I'm starting to get it.
Speaker 2: So you want to save your biggest engine burn for
Speaker 2: the moment you are moving at your absolute maximum speed.
Speaker 4: Precisely that is the key to the whole thing. So
Speaker 4: this question is obvious. Where in our Solar system does
Speaker 4: an object move the fastest when.
Speaker 3: It's falling towards something really really heavy?
Speaker 4: The Sun? The Sun is the biggest deepest gravity while
Speaker 4: we have by a long long shot. If you just
Speaker 4: drop a space graft and let it fall towards the Sun,
Speaker 4: gravity pulls it in, accelerating it faster and faster.
Speaker 3: And faster, like rolling down the universe's biggest hill.
Speaker 4: Exactly by the time it gets really close to the surface,
Speaker 4: or well, the photosphere, it is just screaming. It's moving
Speaker 4: faster than any man made object has ever moved in history.
Speaker 2: So you let the Sun do all the hard work
Speaker 2: of acceleration for you.
Speaker 4: You let gravity do the heavy lifting. You die. You
Speaker 4: fall all the way down into the deepest part of
Speaker 4: the well, and right at the very bottom of that dive,
Speaker 4: the point called perihelium, at closest point to the Sun,
Speaker 4: you are moving at these incredible mind bending speeds, and
Speaker 4: that that is when you fire your engine.
Speaker 2: You hit the gas at the very bottom of the hill.
Speaker 4: That's it. It's like being on a swing set. If
Speaker 4: you try to pump your legs at the very top
Speaker 4: of the arc, when you're almost motionless, it doesn't do
Speaker 4: much right.
Speaker 3: You just kind of wiggle.
Speaker 4: But if you give a huge kick right at the
Speaker 4: very bottom of the swing, when you're moving fastest, you
Speaker 4: go flying so much higher on the other side. This
Speaker 4: is the ultimate cosmic swing set. You dive at the
Speaker 4: Sun and at that single precise moment of closest approach,
Speaker 4: you burn everything. You have. The combination of the Sun's
Speaker 4: intense gravity and that perfectly timed rocket burn flings you
Speaker 4: out of the Solar System like a stone from a
Speaker 4: god's slingshot.
Speaker 2: That is terrifyingly brilliant. So we're not really chasing three
Speaker 2: iolase at all. We're using the Sun to catapult ourselves
Speaker 2: onto a trajectory that will evente intercept it way out
Speaker 2: in deep space.
Speaker 4: Yes, we're setting in ambush. The math in this new
Speaker 4: paper suggests that this maneuver can generate the kinds of
Speaker 4: exit speeds we need well over sixty, maybe seventy even
Speaker 4: eighty kilometers per second to actually run down an interstellar
Speaker 4: object that had a massive headstart.
Speaker 2: But there's a catch, right, there's always a catch. This
Speaker 2: sounds too perfect. You can't just launch this mission tomorrow.
Speaker 4: No, absolutely not. And this is where the beautiful, frustrating
Speaker 4: reality of celestial mechanics comes back in. It's a game
Speaker 4: of alignment. You need the planets to be in exactly
Speaker 4: the right places literally, for this to work. We need Earth, Jupiter,
Speaker 4: and the Sun to be in very specific positions relative
Speaker 4: to three iiizes escape path.
Speaker 3: Okay, wait, why Jupiter? You lost me there? I thought
Speaker 3: this was all about the Sun.
Speaker 4: It is, but we can't just fly from Earth to
Speaker 4: the Sun directly. It's actually, and this sounds crazy, it's
Speaker 4: really hard to hit the Sun.
Speaker 3: It's the biggest thing around. How can it be hard
Speaker 3: to hit.
Speaker 4: Because the Earth isn't stationary, We're moving sideways at about
Speaker 4: thirty kilometers per second in our orbit. To fall into
Speaker 4: the Sun, you first have to get rid of all
Speaker 4: that sideways momentum. It takes a huge amount of breaking fuel.
Speaker 4: So the clever plan is this launch from Earth and
Speaker 4: first fly out to Jupiter.
Speaker 3: So you go outwards to go inwards. That makes no sense.
Speaker 4: It's the bank shot. We use Jupiter's massive gravity not
Speaker 4: to speed up, but to slam on the brakes. We
Speaker 4: do a gravity assistant reverse. It kills our orbital speed,
Speaker 4: turns the spacecraft around and drops it into a dead
Speaker 4: dive straight at the Sun.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: So the full itinerary is launch from Earth, fly out
Speaker 2: to Jupiter for a few years, use Jupiter to U
Speaker 2: turn and dive into the Sun, do the crazy O
Speaker 2: birth run, and then shoot out into the void to
Speaker 2: chase Atla's a bank.
Speaker 4: Shot off the King of Planets into the heart of
Speaker 4: the star to catch a ghost.
Speaker 2: So according to Hibberd and his team, when does this
Speaker 2: magical cosmic window open? When are all the pieces in.
Speaker 3: The right place?
Speaker 4: Twenty thirty five?
Speaker 2: Twenty thirty five, Okay, so that's nine years.
Speaker 4: From now, nine years, which in the world of designing
Speaker 4: and building major flagship space missions is It's actually a
Speaker 4: very comfortable timeline. It's not a frantic scramble. It's doable.
Speaker 4: We could do this.
Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about the tech for a minute, because
Speaker 2: usually when I hear people talk about chasing interstellar objects,
Speaker 2: they immediately start talking about, you know, laser arrays and
Speaker 2: light sales and antimatter engines, stuff that belongs in star trek.
Speaker 3: Is that what this requires?
Speaker 4: No, and that is probably the most important and exciting
Speaker 4: part of this new proposal. They are not asking for
Speaker 4: science fiction. They're not asking for directed energy propulsion or
Speaker 4: giant laser arrays on the dark side of the.
Speaker 3: Moon, which is cool, but decades away.
Speaker 4: Decades away at best. Yeah, this proposal is based on
Speaker 4: using solid rocket motors, chemical propulsion, the same fundamental stuff
Speaker 4: we've been using to launch satellite since the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: You're kidding me, Just standard rockets. How can that possibly
Speaker 2: be powerful enough?
Speaker 4: Well specialized? Of course, you need a kickstage that can
Speaker 4: survive the heat. But the physics of the solar overirth
Speaker 4: maneuver are so powerful that they compensate for the relative
Speaker 4: weakness of our chemical fuel. We don't need a sci
Speaker 4: fi engine because we are using the Sun itself as
Speaker 4: our primary engine. The physics gives us the leverage our
Speaker 4: chemistry lacks.
Speaker 2: That makes it feel incredibly real. This isn't some maybe
Speaker 2: in one hundred years academic paper. This is a we
Speaker 2: could start bending metal for this tomorrow kind of paper.
Speaker 4: It is the technological readiness level or TRL for all
Speaker 4: the key components is very high. We know how to
Speaker 4: build heat shields. We did it with the Parker solar probe,
Speaker 4: which is practically touching the Sun's atmosphere right now, and surviving.
Speaker 3: Parker is a huge success.
Speaker 4: We absolutely know how to do Jupiter flybys, who've been
Speaker 4: doing them since the pioneer missions in the seventies. And
Speaker 4: we definitely know how to make reliable solid rocket motors.
Speaker 4: The pieces are all on the board, we just need
Speaker 4: to assemble them in this new audacious way.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we have the target three IAD lists, we
Speaker 2: have the mind bending method, the solar o birth, we
Speaker 2: have the technology. It's basically off the shelf. But now
Speaker 2: we have to talk about the elephant in the room,
Speaker 2: or maybe the tortoise in the room.
Speaker 4: The duration.
Speaker 2: The duration, because I saw the number in the abstract
Speaker 2: of the paper and I had to read it twice
Speaker 2: to make sure it wasn't a typo.
Speaker 4: How long does it actually take for this probe after
Speaker 4: its twenty thirty five launch in Solar Dive to catch
Speaker 4: up to three A.
Speaker 2: It lists the baseline simulation suggests a flight time of
Speaker 2: approximately fifty.
Speaker 4: Years five zero fifty.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's essential, So.
Speaker 4: Let me get this straight. We launch in twenty thirty five,
Speaker 4: the probe performs its dive, gets flung out into space,
Speaker 4: and it finally catches the object in twenty eighty five.
Speaker 3: That's the timeline.
Speaker 4: Yes, I mean most of the people working on the mission,
Speaker 4: the engineers, the scientists who build it, they won't be
Speaker 4: alive when it arrives. That is very likely true.
Speaker 2: Yes, wow, that is a hard sell, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Hey, Congress, can you give us a few billion dollars
Speaker 3: for a mission.
Speaker 2: That will give us some really cool photos for our
Speaker 2: grandkids in the year twenty eighty five.
Speaker 4: It's a hard sell if you look at it through
Speaker 4: the lens of you know, typical four year election cycles
Speaker 4: or quarterly corporate reports. But this is where we have
Speaker 4: to fundamentally shift our thinking. This isn't a normal mission.
Speaker 4: We have to move to the realm of what some
Speaker 4: people call cathedral projects.
Speaker 3: Cathedral projects explain that.
Speaker 4: Think about the architects and the stonemasons who laid the
Speaker 4: cornerstones of the great cathedrals in medieval Europe. They knew
Speaker 4: with absolute one hundred percent certainty that they would not
Speaker 4: live to see the spire completed. Their children might not
Speaker 4: their grandchildren might not even see it finished, but they
Speaker 4: started anyway.
Speaker 2: They were building it for the future, for something bigger
Speaker 2: than themselves.
Speaker 4: They were building it for the future. This mission is
Speaker 4: a scientific cathedral. It's a legacy project.
Speaker 2: That is a beautiful way to put it. But practically speaking,
Speaker 2: can we even maintain a mission for fifty years? I
Speaker 2: mean equipment, brakes, radioactive power sources, decay, signals degrade over
Speaker 2: those insane distances.
Speaker 4: We have precedent, and it's an amazing one. Voyager one
Speaker 4: and Voyager two launched in nineteen seventy seven. They're still
Speaker 4: talking to us today nearly fifty years later.
Speaker 3: That's incredible.
Speaker 4: And that was with nineteen seventies technology. We're talking eight
Speaker 4: track tape recorders for data storage and less computing power
Speaker 4: than your watch. Imagine what a probe built with robust
Speaker 4: twenty thirties technology could do. It could be designed from
Speaker 4: the ground up for longevity. It could hiernate for decades,
Speaker 4: wake itself up periodically for check ins, and use advanced
Speaker 4: AI for self repair. It's an engineering challenge, but it's
Speaker 4: not an unsolvable one.
Speaker 3: So it's a time capsule.
Speaker 2: We launched the absolute best technology of twenty thirty five
Speaker 2: put it to sleep, and it arrives in the twenty
Speaker 2: eighties as this sort of retrofuturistic marvel.
Speaker 4: And just think about the arrival in twenty eighty five,
Speaker 4: the scientists receiving that first signal, that first grainy, black
Speaker 4: and white image of an alien rock. They might be
Speaker 4: the grandchildren of the scientists who wave goodbye to it
Speaker 4: at the launch pad. There's a human continuity there that
Speaker 4: is just quite beautiful to think about.
Speaker 2: It totally changes the definition of success for a project.
Speaker 2: Success isn't I got the data. Success is I made
Speaker 2: sure the data will exist for someone else to get.
Speaker 4: Exactly, And you have to consider the alternative. If we
Speaker 4: say fifty years is too long, what's our other optioning nothing,
Speaker 4: we get zero data. Three IAT disappears into the dark
Speaker 4: forever and we never ever know what it was made of.
Speaker 4: The secrets it carries are lost.
Speaker 2: So the choice isn't really wait fifty years or get
Speaker 2: the data now. The choice is wait fifty years or
Speaker 2: wait forever.
Speaker 4: That's the choice. And let's just quickly compare to the
Speaker 4: other big dream actually flying to another star like Alpha Centauri, right,
Speaker 4: the Holy Grail, even with the wildest, most optimistic propulsion concepts,
Speaker 4: fusion rockets, laser sales, you name it. A trip to
Speaker 4: Alpha Centauri is going to take decades, maybe a century.
Speaker 4: And that's for technology we don't even have a blueprint
Speaker 4: for yet. Sure, this mission gives us the prize. We
Speaker 4: want actual physical matter from another star system without having
Speaker 4: to travel the four light years to get there. We
Speaker 4: are catching the delivery truck instead of driving all the
Speaker 4: way to the factory. In that context, fifty years is
Speaker 4: a blink of an eye. It is strange as it sounds.
Speaker 4: The fastest way to touch the stars.
Speaker 2: That is a really really powerful way to frame it.
Speaker 2: It's a shortcut, even if it takes a lifetime.
Speaker 4: It is. And the scientific payoff, I mean, we really
Speaker 4: can't overstate it.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's dig into that payoff. Let's say we do it.
Speaker 2: The world space agencies get together, they fund this thing.
Speaker 2: It launches in twenty thirty five. Fast forward, it's twenty
Speaker 2: eighty five. Probe wakes up. It's closing in on three
Speaker 2: I at lis. What are we looking for? What is
Speaker 2: the aha moment that makes the whole fifty year weight
Speaker 2: worth it?
Speaker 4: We are looking for ground truth, right, now, our entire
Speaker 4: understanding of how planets form, how solar systems evolve, is
Speaker 4: based on a sample size of one us, our solar system.
Speaker 4: That's it. We assume that other systems formed in more
Speaker 4: or less the same way with the same ingredients, but
Speaker 4: we honestly don't know. It's a huge assumption.
Speaker 3: We're just guessing based on what we see around us.
Speaker 4: We're making very educated guesses, but there's still guesses. But
Speaker 4: what if the isotopic ratios of elements like oxygen or
Speaker 4: carbon are completely alien compared to what we find in
Speaker 4: our own commets. That would be revolutionary.
Speaker 3: What would that tell us?
Speaker 4: It would mean the cloud of gas and dust it
Speaker 4: formed from was different from our own about the star
Speaker 4: it came from. Maybe it was a different type of
Speaker 4: star or a different part of the galaxy. What if
Speaker 4: we find complex organic molecules, you know, the building blocks
Speaker 4: of life, that are different from the amino acids we
Speaker 4: find on meteorites here.
Speaker 2: It could tell us if the basic ingredients for life
Speaker 2: are common throughout the galaxy.
Speaker 4: Exactly, or it could tell us the opposite. It could
Speaker 4: tell us that our solar system is weirdly special, that
Speaker 4: we have a unique chemical cocktail that made life here possible.
Speaker 4: Either answer fundamentally changes our understanding of our place in
Speaker 4: the universe.
Speaker 3: And we can figure this out with instruments on.
Speaker 4: The pro Oh yeah, we can do this with spectrometers,
Speaker 4: with cameras, with dust analyzers. A key instrument would be
Speaker 4: a mass spectrometer, which basically weighs molecules and tells you
Speaker 4: exactly what they're made of. We could literally taste the
Speaker 4: alien dust.
Speaker 3: When you put it like.
Speaker 2: That, it really makes the fifty year weight seem almost trivial.
Speaker 2: When you're talking about answering the question are we alone
Speaker 2: or at least is our home unique? Fifty years is nothing.
Speaker 4: It's the kind of knowledge that rewrites every textbook on Earth.
Speaker 4: And there's another angle here too, one that Hibberd and
Speaker 4: his team touch on in their paper. It's the practice,
Speaker 4: practice for what practice for the future. If we as
Speaker 4: a species ever want to become truly interstellar, if we
Speaker 4: ever want to send probes to proximate centory and get
Speaker 4: data back, we need to learn how to do it.
Speaker 4: We need to learn how to build spacecraft that can
Speaker 4: reliably last for fifty seventy five one hundred years. We
Speaker 4: need to learn how to communicate over those vast distances.
Speaker 4: This mission is the perfect training ground. It's a necessary
Speaker 4: stepping stone.
Speaker 2: So even if in the worst case scenario the probe
Speaker 2: gets there and the camera breaks or something, the engineering
Speaker 2: challenge of just getting it there makes us better. We
Speaker 2: learn so much along the way.
Speaker 4: Precisely, it pushes the boundaries of deep space navigation, long
Speaker 4: duration systems, autonomous operations, everything we would need for the
Speaker 4: next great leap.
Speaker 2: I want to go back to the Solar O birth
Speaker 2: maneuver for a second, because I'm still stuck on the
Speaker 2: sheer visual of this launching. In thirty five, we go
Speaker 2: on to Jupiter. You turn, we dive at the Sun.
Speaker 2: How close to the Sun are we really talking here?
Speaker 2: Are we talking like skimming the surface?
Speaker 4: It gets pretty close. To get the maximum O birth
Speaker 4: effect the biggest kick. You want to get as deep
Speaker 4: into that gravity well as you can possibly survive the
Speaker 4: paper models of fu turejectories, but we're talking about getting
Speaker 4: within a few solar radii a.
Speaker 2: Few times the Sun's own radius.
Speaker 3: That's hot.
Speaker 4: It is incredibly, unbelievably intense. The heat shield requirements are significant.
Speaker 4: You are essentially flying through the outer edges of a
Speaker 4: nuclear furnace. The radiation environment is brutal, but again, we've
Speaker 4: done this. The Parker Solar Probe is designed to get
Speaker 4: even closer than this mission would likely need to. We
Speaker 4: have the materials, We have these carbon carbon combas ceramic shields.
Speaker 4: We know how to survive the heat. The engineering exists.
Speaker 2: It's just so counterintuitive to go to the coldest, darkest
Speaker 2: place in the void, you first have to go to
Speaker 2: the hottest, brightest place in our solar system.
Speaker 4: Nature loves a paradox. Yeah, and the physics doesn't care
Speaker 4: about our intuition. It only cares about energy, and the
Speaker 4: most accessible gravitational energy in town is at the Sun.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating that this proposal is coming out right now
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 3: Do you think there's a new sense of.
Speaker 2: Urgency because of how many of these objects were suddenly
Speaker 2: finding Oh?
Speaker 4: I think so absolutely. When Omulua passed through in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 4: it was a complete shock. We were called totally flat footed.
Speaker 4: With Boris off. A couple of years later we were
Speaker 4: a little bit more ready, but it was still fleeting.
Speaker 4: Now with three IAT lists, the pattern is established. These
Speaker 4: things are out there and they are passing through our
Speaker 4: cosmic neighborhood all the time.
Speaker 2: We just weren't looking properly before. Our telescopes weren't good
Speaker 2: enough exactly.
Speaker 4: We are now officially in the era of ISO astronomy
Speaker 4: interstellar object astronomy, but I think there's a growing feeling
Speaker 4: that just looking isn't enough anymore. We want to touch,
Speaker 4: And the collective frustration of watching three iatlests get away
Speaker 4: is the direct motivation for this kind of innovative out
Speaker 4: of the box thinking people like hibberd Or saying I'm
Speaker 4: tired of watching them get away.
Speaker 3: It's the scientific hunter instinct. We want to catch the ghost.
Speaker 4: And oiat's the software is the bloodhound that's finding the
Speaker 4: scent trail.
Speaker 3: Let's play Devil's advocate for a moment. What goes wrong?
Speaker 2: What are the biggest risks aside from you know, waiting
Speaker 2: fifty years and then realizing we forgot to take the
Speaker 2: lens cap off.
Speaker 4: Well, the launch itself is the first hurdle, as always,
Speaker 4: we need a heavy lift vehicle to get this thing
Speaker 4: honest way to Jupiter with enough mass. But by twenty
Speaker 4: thirty five, looking at the trajectory of rockets like starship
Speaker 4: and others that shouldn't be the bottleneck.
Speaker 3: Okay, so launch is probably fine.
Speaker 4: The real risk, the nail biting part, is the series
Speaker 4: of maneuvers, the Jupiter gravity assist and especially the Solar dive.
Speaker 4: These are games of incredibly high precision. If you miss
Speaker 4: your angle at Jupiter by a tiny fraction of a degree,
Speaker 4: you miss the Sun by thousands of miles. If you
Speaker 4: miss your angle at the Sun or you're burned, timing
Speaker 4: is off by a second, you either burn up or
Speaker 4: you miss the target by millions and millions of miles
Speaker 4: fifty years down on the line.
Speaker 2: You're essentially threading a needle while riding a roller coaster
Speaker 2: in the dark.
Speaker 4: And you have to do it all autonomously. You can't
Speaker 4: joystick this from Earth. The light travel time is way
Speaker 4: too long. The computer on board has to have the
Speaker 4: perfect clock, has to execute the burn perfectly at the
Speaker 4: moment of perihelion. It has to be smart and independent.
Speaker 3: But again, this is an engineering problem.
Speaker 2: It's not magic. It's just a very very hard engineering problem.
Speaker 4: It is a solvable engineering problem.
Speaker 2: So we have this incredible proposal on the table, A
Speaker 2: twenty thirty five launch, A fifty year cruise, a dive
Speaker 2: into the Sun and a rendezvous in the deep dark
Speaker 2: with a piece of another solar system.
Speaker 3: What needs to happen now to make this real? This
Speaker 3: is just a paper right right now.
Speaker 4: It's a paper that's been accepted by the Journal of
Speaker 4: the British Interplanetary Society. It's a proof of concept. To
Speaker 4: make it real, a major space agency NASA, yes, maybe
Speaker 4: a private consortium or ideally a collaboration of all of them,
Speaker 4: needs to pick it up. They need to fund what's
Speaker 4: called a phase A study. And that is that's why
Speaker 4: they say, okay, orbital mechanics math looks good. Now let's
Speaker 4: get a team of engineers to actually design the hardware.
Speaker 4: What does the heat shield look like? What kind of
Speaker 4: rocket motor do we need? What's the power source? They
Speaker 4: put real numbers and costs to it.
Speaker 3: And do you think they will?
Speaker 2: Is there an appetite for this kind of long term thinking?
Speaker 4: That is the big question. Space agencies are by their
Speaker 4: nature quite risk averse. They like missions that have a
Speaker 4: high probability of success and finish within a decade. They like,
Speaker 4: for political reasons, to have some instant gratification. A fifty
Speaker 4: year mission is a very hard sell. But but the
Speaker 4: scientific community is allowed on this one. The desire to
Speaker 4: study in ISO up close is overwhelming. It's at the
Speaker 4: top of the wish list for a lot of planetary scientists.
Speaker 4: So I think we might see a real push for this,
Speaker 4: maybe not as a huge, standalone flagship mission at first,
Speaker 4: but maybe as part of a dedicated interceptor program.
Speaker 2: Maybe a global coalition. This feels like something the whole
Speaker 2: world should go in on. It's not really an American
Speaker 2: mission or European mission, human mission.
Speaker 4: It absolutely should be three iads. Loss doesn't care about
Speaker 4: national borders. It's a visitor to planet Earth, not to
Speaker 4: a specific country.
Speaker 2: You know, thinking about that fifty year timeline again, it
Speaker 2: reminds me of planting a tree. You don't plant an
Speaker 2: oak tree for yourself. You know you'll never sit in
Speaker 2: its full shade. You plant it for the shade it
Speaker 2: will give your kids, your grandkids. This mission is a
Speaker 2: scientific oak tree.
Speaker 4: That is the perfect analogy. And in a world that
Speaker 4: is so relentlessly focused on the now, on the next
Speaker 4: news cycle, the next tweet, the next quarterly report, there
Speaker 4: is something profoundly healthy about committing to a half century project.
Speaker 4: It forces us to think long term. It forces us
Speaker 4: to have faith that there will even be a civilization
Speaker 4: here in twenty eighty five, with scientists ready and waiting
Speaker 4: to receive the data.
Speaker 3: It's an act of profound optimism it is.
Speaker 4: Launching this probe is a statement. It's saying, we believe
Speaker 4: in the future.
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 2: So here we are February sixteenth, twenty twenty six. Three
Speaker 2: I Atlas is speeding away from us at sixty kilometers
Speaker 2: a second. It thinks it has escaped, but somewhere in
Speaker 2: a lab, Adam Hibberd and his team were looking at
Speaker 2: a computer screen, nodding and saying, not so fast.
Speaker 4: We're coming for you.
Speaker 3: We're coming for you. It's just going to take us
Speaker 3: a while to get there.
Speaker 4: Just a little while before we.
Speaker 2: Wrap this up, I want to circle back to the
Speaker 2: object itself one last time. Three I eight t Lass.
Speaker 2: Do we know anything specific about it yet? I mean,
Speaker 2: from the very brief look we've had.
Speaker 4: So far, we do. We know that it's volatile rich,
Speaker 4: which is a fancy way of saying it's acting like
Speaker 4: a comet. As it got close to the Sun, it
Speaker 4: started out gassing, forming a little coma and a tail.
Speaker 4: That's actually really good news for a chase mission. Why
Speaker 4: is that good news Because if it's actively outgassing, it's shedding,
Speaker 4: it's throwing off particles of dust and gas. That means
Speaker 4: we don't necessarily have to perform a risky landing or
Speaker 4: impact on it to sample it. We just have to
Speaker 4: fly through its tail. Hy we can use something like
Speaker 4: aerogel collectors, which is what the Stardust mission used to
Speaker 4: collect particles from a comet's tail back in the two thousands.
Speaker 4: It makes the catch part of the mission a little
Speaker 4: bit easier and safer. We don't have to dock with it.
Speaker 4: We just have to intercept its wake, just drive through
Speaker 4: the smoke exactly. But that cometary nature also adds a
Speaker 4: layer of mystery. Where did it come from? The trajectory
Speaker 4: traces back to well to nowhere specific yet there's no
Speaker 4: obvious home star. It's been wandering the Milky Way for millions,
Speaker 4: maybe billions of.
Speaker 3: Years, a true galactic drifter.
Speaker 4: Until it just happened to bump into us.
Speaker 2: It really is a ghost, and this plan, the solar
Speaker 2: O birth maneuver, it honestly feels like the kind of
Speaker 2: thing that belongs in a future history book.
Speaker 3: You know, in the year.
Speaker 2: Twenty thirty five, humanity finally decided to reach out and
Speaker 2: touch the galaxy.
Speaker 4: It would be a defining moment. It would be the
Speaker 4: moment we stopped being just passive observers of the universe
Speaker 4: through our telescopes and started becoming actor participants in the
Speaker 4: great galactic story.
Speaker 3: Well, I, for one, am rooting for it.
Speaker 2: I might be an old man when the data comes back,
Speaker 2: or I might not be here at all, but I
Speaker 2: would absolutely love to see that rocket clear the tower
Speaker 2: in twenty thirty five.
Speaker 4: I'll be right there watching with you.
Speaker 2: So to everyone listening, take a look at the night
Speaker 2: sky tonight. You won't be able to see three I
Speaker 2: at Lists with your naked eye. It's already too far
Speaker 2: and too dim now, But know that it's out there.
Speaker 2: It's racing away into the dark. But if these brilliant
Speaker 2: patient scientists have their way, we haven't seen the last
Speaker 2: of it. We're just giving it a head start, a
Speaker 2: fifty year head start challenge accepted. Absolutely, that's all the
Speaker 2: time we have for this. Look at the incredible chase
Speaker 2: for three ie at Lists. It's a story of speed
Speaker 2: fire and an almost unbelievable amount of patience. And it
Speaker 2: really asks us a pretty profound question, doesn't it. Are
Speaker 2: we as a people willing to start something we know
Speaker 2: we won't finish just for the sake of knowing what's
Speaker 2: out there?
Speaker 4: I really hope the answer is yes, me too.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening, everyone, Keep looking.
Speaker 4: Up and keep thinking big.
Speaker 5: We'll catch on the next one, said f.