It’s Asteroid Week with NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

The Planetary Society

Technology, Science

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2018

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The dinosaurs regret their lack of a space program. 200 million years later, humans are gearing up to defend themselves from a species-ending rock. The many challenges involved are addressed in a new strategic action plan created by sixteen agencies of the US government. NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer, Lindley Johnson, and his associate, Kelly Fast, take us inside the plan. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy applauds the growing worldwide attention to Near Earth Objects. By the time you read this Hayabusa2 will have reached asteroid Ryugu. Senior editor Emily Lakdawalla has a mission update. And Bruce Betts is all over Asteroid Week in a new What’s Up segment.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Watch for Falling Rocks. It's Asteroid Week on planetary radio.
0:09.0	Welcome, I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.
0:16.6	There's a brand new strategic action plan for dealing with near-Earth objects or Neos, those million or so asteroids and comets that threaten our planet,
0:27.3	NASA planetary defense officer Linley Johnson will take us through the plan with support from Kelly Fast, the agency's near-Earth
0:35.1	object observations program manager. Later Bruce Bats will carry the theme forward
0:40.7	in a special Neo edition of What's Up.
0:43.8	To introduce us to the topic, I present the CEO of the Planetary Society,
0:48.0	Bill Nye, the Science Guy.
0:49.9	Bill, who'd have thought that Asteroid Week would become a worldwide celebration, but then I guess it's a worldwide threat.
0:56.0	Yes, Matt, it's a worldwide threat.
0:59.0	It's a very low probability event that the Earth will get hit with an asteroid but it is very high consequence.
1:06.2	So as I like to say, you know when I was in Carl Sagan's class dropping a name, when I was in Carl Sagan's class in 1977, he talked a lot about the Tunguska event.
1:18.0	This is a thing in Siberia in 1908, as the calendar is now reckoned on June 30th, you know, at that time they were on the Julian calendar in some parts of the world.
1:27.0	Nobody knew really what it was for two years. People went up there and took pictures two years later. That's how remote the Tunguska, what we now call
1:35.9	Air Burst event was. They didn't really use the term Air Burst when I was in school. So this is an object that hits the Earth's atmosphere so fast, how fast is it,
1:46.1	that it explodes and creates these enormous shockwave. Shock waves akin to those you would see in rocket exhaust. And you probably remember
1:54.8	Chelyubinsk five years ago pronouncing it as best I can.
1:58.8	D. We don't want this to happen so the key everybody is early detection. We got to go out there and look.
2:05.6	So because of the June 30th Tunguska event, 1908, we now call this asteroid week.
2:12.4	Woo! now call this asteroid week.
2:12.8	Woo!
2:13.8	And so we at the planetary site worked very hard on this and all three of our pillars of effort.
	...

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