This Former Astronaut Wants to Save You From Asteroids

Ahead of Asteroid Day, former astronaut Dr. Ed Lu, head of the B612 Foundation, explains how mapping the inner solar system can help us detect and deflect an asteroid collision with Earth.

By S.C. Stuart

June 30 is Asteroid Day and 2018 marks 110 years since the Tunguska Asteroid Impact in Siberia, the largest in recorded history.

Asteroids were granted their own day in 2016 by the United Nations, and as this year’s celebration approaches, we thought it was a good opportunity to learn more about asteroid detection and how experts are ensuring we don’t go the way of the dinosaurs, who were done in by a 6-mile-wide asteroid 66 million years ago.

Enter the B612 Foundation. Formed in 2002 by former NASA astronauts Dr. Edward Lu and Russell (Rusty) Schweickart, its goal is to protect the planet from asteroid impacts. PCMag spoke with Dr. Lu, who serves as executive director of the foundation’s newly formed Asteroid Institute, by phone from his office in Silicon Valley. After earning a PhD from Stanford, Dr. Lu flew three missions for NASA, logged 206 days in space, worked aboard the International Space Station. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, NASA’s highest honor, before joining Google for a three-year stint in the company’s Advanced Projects division. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Over 4.5 billion years, Earth has been struck by thousands of asteroids (of varying dimensions). Your mission at B612 Foundation is to show we have the technology to fix it. How do you propose to do that?
Our mission of protecting Earth from dangerous asteroids is through enhancing detection, mapping, and deflection of asteroids. Once the inner solar system is mapped, we can see what’s coming and deploy defensive measures. Essentially, we need to know what we’re up against: know where the asteroids are, and where they’re going, so we can take action.

How do you stop an asteroid hitting Earth?
The space community has already carried out scientific experiments on asteroids which, as a side effect, showed that robotic probes, on a collision course with an asteroid, can knock it off course via kinetic impact. Then a “gravity tractor” spacecraft can fly alongside the asteroid ensuring it’s kept off a course collision with Earth by giving it a consistent gravitational tug. More than likely you’re going to use a combination of these actions, depending on where the asteroid is going, and what it’s made of.

Space is the final frontier, but how do you map it?
At the Asteroid Institute we’re doing advanced work to create a predictive dynamical map, which requires two things — multiple observations of the positions of each object over a long period of time, and the ability to calculate the future locations of those objects using the laws of orbital mechanics.

Which brings us to ADAM [Asteroid Decision Analysis and Mapping platform]. Did this come out of your time at Google working in the maps division?
Yes, in a way. But we have many partners on the ADAM project including: Caltech, Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI), Google Cloud, and the Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology Center (DIRAC) at the University of Washington.

The ADAM project will provide a cloud-based infrastructure for large-scale orbital dynamics and related computations that will enable the science, policy, and business community to better understand and make sense of opportunities and threats coming from the asteroids in the solar system.

What are the tech specs behind the project?
ADAM is running on the Google Compute Engine, which delivers virtual machines running in Google Cloud data centers around the world. Compute Engine tools and workflow enable scaling from single instances to global, load-balanced cloud computing. The two companies have become technology partners for…ADAM, which aims to provide the software infrastructure for analyzing the trajectories of near-Earth objects, identifying potential threats, and sizing up the scenarios for taking action if necessary.

What progress has been made so far?
We have made progress on the computational tools and now have the capability to mathematically propagate an asteroid orbit over many decades to within an accuracy of a few kilometers. This required us to take into account such tiny effects as the curvature of space-time due to General Relativity, the non-sphericity of the Sun, the gravitational effects of each of the planets and of the larger asteroids, as well as the non isotropic thermal re-radiation from rotation of the asteroid.

Essentially ADAM will provide an early-warning system?
Yes, one of the first questions we are investigating using ADAM is how much warning prior to an asteroid impact our current telescopes will be able to provide, and whether this is sufficient to be able to mount a deflection mission.

Is the ADAM team based at the Asteroid Institute?
Our team is spread out in multiple locations around the US: some within Google itself here in Silicon Valley; postdocs at the University of Washington, and others based in Colorado, Maryland, and Southern California.

So you’re using Google’s tools to manage a distributed team?
G Suite is what makes it possible to manage such a far-flung science and engineering project, definitely. We use shared docs, video conferencing, everything you’d expect.

As an aside, did you name your foundation after the B612 asteroid in Antoine de Saint-Exupery The Little Prince?
One of my favorite books, and authors. I particularly like the somewhat autobiographical story Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote called Wind, Sand and Stars about his time as a pilot in the 1920s, flying over North Africa in the late afternoon, when engines had a flight time of less than 10 hours, and he had to land on a flat mesa, many hundreds of feet in the air. He decided to spend the night and fly out again in the morning. Then he saw a black rock, wondered where it came from, and realized it must have been a meteorite. That started his fascination with objects from outer space which he later wrote in The Little Prince and the asteroid named B612.

Let’s cut to your career with NASA as an astronaut. When did you become fascinated by space?
Actually, originally, I wanted to be a scientist or an engineer like my dad. When I was a kid I used to build balsa wood model airplanes and saved all the money I could to get my pilot license and ended up flying a two-seater Piper PA-38 Tomahawk. My path to NASA was odd. I became a scientist and then one day a friend suggested I send in an application for astronaut training, and I got in.

Best NASA memory? I interviewed your fellow NASA astronaut Nicole Stott about her 6-hour spacewalk recently.
Interestingly enough, my best memories are all tied up with the amazing people I got to work with on the ISS.

Not many people know that Brian May, from the band Queen, returned to his studies after a 30-year music career and got his PhD in astrophysics. How did you both meet him?
[Laughs] Dr. May has the best hair of any astrophysicist I know. I believe we first met him at the Starmus conference back in 2014, in the Canary Islands. He’s an amazing guy. We’re proud to partner with him on Asteroid Day.

Do you feel that B612 and Asteroid Day were both instrumental in getting the UN Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and General Assembly to pass resolution creating International Asteroid Warning Network?
Yes, I do think we were a part of this — as was a very large number of people around the world — this field is gaining momentum fast.

How does your work intersect with the NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO)?
We work with them all the time, because we’re part of the same community. The PDCO is really NASA HQ’s funding office, but the work itself is done elsewhere — at JPL and so on.

As a non-partisan, international and non-governmental entity, what can the B612 Foundation accomplish that others cannot?
It gives us academic, scientific, and exploratory freedom, which is fantastic. But it comes with a downside that we have to raise our own money; we can’t rely on the government’s deep financial coffers. But it does mean we can move quickly, and engage in the latest scientific inquiry, which is a wonderful thing.

Finally, thanks for saving us from the dreadful fate as seen in all those disaster movies, like Deep Impact].
[Laughs] That’s what we’re here to do. Saving the planet is our mission at B612 Foundation.

Read More: “This Former NASA Engineer Trains Geeks to Become CEOs”

Originally published at www.pcmag.com.