Secrets of Asteroid Bennu with Harold Connolly Jr.

24:50the autonomous spacecraft pulls back from the surface. But what happened was, is we went in 48 centimeters, you know, banked an arm almost, down into the surface of the asteroid, which wasn't, you know, went right through it. Which we did not really expect. Some folks on the mission will say, well, we had some models that showed it could be. But yeah, okay, it could be. But that was a good thing, actually. because it taught us that gravity itself is basically what's holding the asteroid together. Tensile forces between particles is not really doing it very well. Hey, Neil, see, I learned some physics over the last 20 years.

25:32And the other thing is we're penetrating deeper into the surface. So the surface of the asteroid is being cooked a lot, depending on how much the surface is moving based on the rotation and landslides and impacts. So we're getting down to the stuff that might be fresher, quote, fresher.

25:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:So that's better for you. Correct. Absolutely correct. Wow. The problem was, and you did ask another question here when I get to that. The problem was that when we pulled back up and did the first test to see what kind of sample we got, we literally moved that three-meter arm backwards to a camera to take pictures. And I can remember about 4 o 'clock in the morning waking up and downloading from our mainframe the images and start looking at it, it had all these little spots all over the place. I'm thinking, what the heck are these spots? Long story short, as the world knows, several stones got caught keeping the flap open and that we were losing sample every time we articulated the arm.

26:29Wow. There's another PhD thesis. There's another PhD thesis. Come on, come on, come on. That's tough. Yeah, always right. That's tough. Yeah, so the PI had to make some quick decisions with the associate administrator of RASA and other people to basically stow the sample much quicker than we have expected to prevent more from loss. But of course, as you know, we got 122 grams of sample, 121.6, and we needed to get 60 grams to meet our scientific goals.

26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's a success. That's a success. Yeah. So you bring it back to Earth, and now you've got it in the lab. And so you're a geologist. I don't know. Do you guys use microscopes? or do you use stuff that dissolves the material and you do mass spectrometer? What's a geologist's dream lab when you have something from space? That's a great question. You know, we brought the sample out of the field. By the way, the sample cadastro, the SRC, sample return capsule, landed in the Utah desert basically perfectly in the end. It had rained there three days earlier, but it chose to land in a dry spot, which was perfect.

27:39And then we take it to a makeshift facility at the UTTR, Utah Test and Training Range. We get the sample canister and it's, you know, the guts of the sample return capsule out and get it under nitrogen so that the sample is constantly bathed in nitrogen. So, I mean, that took literally almost four hours to the mark to get that under the perfect timing.

28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:We have a quick chemistry question. Yeah. You speak of nitrogen as though it's neutral. In fact, there are some sort of wine air replacement canisters that send nitrogen in as the air comes out. But to me, nitrogen can make ammonia, nitrous oxide. It's not like argon, where we're taught in chemistry class is just inert because it's got no electrons available. Just nothing to do. No interaction. Nothing to do. So why does nitrogen work for you? I just never understood that chemically. In this case, we have the samples of the nitrogen, so we know what the composition of the nitrogen is, not just nitrogen, but it's isotope composition, if there's any impurities in it, which, of course, there's not.

28:47And it doesn't react with normal minerals and rocks in any way, shape, or form. Okay. I shouldn't say normal. I shouldn't say normal. There's nothing normal about it. Typical. Right sample. Typical. Typical. And then we get to the – I'll just tell you real quick. Then we get to the lab, we open up the canister, and the first thing you do as a geologist is you look at it with your eye. The most important thing is that it's a rock. Before you begin to slice it up to make polished sections, before you send it off to the folks at Goddard Space White Center to analyze organics, before they dissolve it up to get their analysis, you must know what the rock is because the context is absolutely critical.

29:25Without the context of the rock, you may not be able to interpret your results.

29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:So different labs had different objectives in the samples that they were given. Okay. Is it possible that your priors, I don't mean to get philosophical on you, but is it possible that your prior expectations for what the sample is can bias your conclusions that you draw from it? A hundred percent. Again, we had, if I may, we had an amazing aha moment when we discovered, which we should have more or less known we were going to discover, but because we find so few of these minerals in meteorites that we pick up on Earth, it didn't kind of process that the asteroid samples could be rich in evaporite minerals.

30:15What is an evaporate mineral? A mineral that forms in a water-rich solution as that water evaporates. A classic example, table salt. Right. Absolutely. Table salt is in the rocks from Bennu. It's in the rocks from Rugu.

30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:And the point is - So is the Utah salt flats, and it landed in Utah. So there - We have samples to prove it was not from there. I'm just saying, you land in Utah and you say, we found salt. Just to alert our listeners and viewers, when a geologist analyzes a sample, in most cases, the sample is destroyed when you're done. Isn't that correct? Well, yes and no, actually, because I'm the kind of geologist that's called a petrologist. And my job is to tell the stories that the rock contain. and that means looking at them with my eye looking at them with a microscope as neil said and then actually cutting them and polishing them and looking out at them with a special microscope either one that's optical that sees through to the thin thin thick thin coatings of the rock on a basically a glass slide or put them in an electron microscope or a scanning electron microscope where then you begin to analyze in detail their composition of the minerals and how the rocks, the minerals arrange themselves and why they're the way they are.

31:39All these little details, it's like being a detective. The tiniest little clue may actually open up a whole world of being able to understand geology. Now, other folks, other scientists do dissolve samples. But if you dissolve the sample without knowing what you dissolved, other than it came from this mountain, I mean, you know, how many different layers of rock are in the mountain? And you say it came from that mountain. Well, I don't know where it came from. That doesn't help you recreate the geology and then put it into context of a special question, such as looking at the potential origins of what we know is life.

32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:So I don't mean to diss your entire profession, but most people, when we look out into space rocks, we're kind of interested in the organics, not in the minerals. And I know geologists love them some minerals, but at the end of the day, the headline is not what kind of new rock you found. It's what kind of organics might be there. So how close were you to that analysis or was that a whole other group? so uh that's a very good point you raise and uh the problem with the organic chemistry not a problem but the challenge is that you have to know what the rock is that you're analyzing what has what processes geologic processes have has it been through in order to know the geologic processes that rock has been to in this case an apparent body that was probably the size of of series the asteroid series for example um uh that fluid moved through that asteroid four and a half billion years ago because the asteroid became active when the asteroid created rock in the in the earliest time period it created ices not just water ice but ammonia carbon dioxide carbon monoxide etc and then the asteroid internally began to heat up and you have fluid moving through now why is that any any relevance whatsoever to prebiotic compound because prebiotic compounds may very well have formed in that aqueous or water-rich environment.

33:38The evaporite minerals that we talked about are the late-stage product of the fluid that moved through, that formed other minerals first, and they're the very last stage. Now, if you're an organic chemist and you want to get organics to come out of a solution, one of the time classic methods of doing that in a laboratory is you salt the solution, and the organics go with the evaporate minerals or the salt when you evaporate the fluid.

34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:I've got to correct you on something. You called Ceres an asteroid, but it got promoted to dwarf planet. Dwarf planet. You're right. I'm sorry. You're right. It's a dwarf planet. I'm sorry. I'm behind 30 years. Just to remind people, it's the only asteroid that's large enough for its gravity to have shaped it into a sphere. And that's a sufficient qualifications to be a dwarf planet just like pluto yeah by the way pluto uh sends its regards and says

34:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:thank you chuck for that for that telegram so so what do we know uh because i i think i seem to remember a research paper uh or it might have just been a a review in the new york times that talked about, was it amino acids that were found in the rock? We've found a lot in the rock and we're finding more. And they also found a lot of organic compounds, because we're talking about organic compounds and the minerals associated with them in the Rugu sample. The difference is that in Hayabusa 2, which was a Jackson mission to asteroid Rugu that brought back sample, they brought back 5.2 gram. So they have a lot less.

35:16So for us, we were able to do work for organics on individual stones from Bennu and also homogenized powder of more than six grams that we homogenized up to really understand the chemistry well. And indeed, they have found that the main headlines is, you know, 14 of the 20 amino acids that are needed for life, but really it's probably 15 because a paper by Mahara et al that came out in November found the 15th one, and we have to reproduce it, But that was right near Thanksgiving, and the 15th one was tryptophan, which is the same stuff. You're getting turkeys that make you sleepy, right? That's why Ben always rotates so slowly.

36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:Thank you, Chuck, for that scientific analysis. What is the paper coming out on that?

36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:I forgot that tryptophan is an amino acid. I've forgotten that. And the famous one from Jurassic Park is, of course, what is it, lysine. Lysine. Lysine, yeah. We wanted to make sure that the dinosaurs were dependent on that, and therefore they would die had they escaped. But, of course, together now, life finds a way. So, Harold, I remember, because I'm that old, back in the 90s, when we analyzed ALH... 84... 84-001, something like that. This potato-shaped meteorite on Earth, which was deduced that it came from Mars, and I thought it was brilliant. They found a little air inclusions within it and analyzed it.

37:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:It had the exact atmospheric composition of Mars. So this rock came from Mars, And there was no dispute about that. But it also had some inclusions within it that if memory serves, it had oxidized minerals sitting right adjacent to non-oxidized minerals. And typically, in any geologic environment that you have, it's either oxygen rich or not. right and if it's oxygen rich then everything gets oxidized and if it's oxygen poor then nothing is oxidized but life does both in the same vessel right we inhale and oxidize our hemoglobin and then the oxygen gets ripped away hemoglobin goes back for more oxygen so we have oxidized and non-oxidized molecules in the very same vessel so the fact that they were together on the rock would require you to believe, if you're going to explain it abiotically, that the rock was like over here for a while and was getting oxygenated.

38:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:And then it rolled somewhere else where there was no oxygen. And then it had some other participating molecules. You have to really Rube Goldberg your way into that answer. Or it was breathing. Or it had lungs.

38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:so so with these inclusions at this new site on mars at the chiava falls site um if if if you find more than that there might be it might be really hard if not impossible to completely explain it abiotically. So do you know what else was discovered in those inclusions? Yeah, so the report talked about basically the byproducts of breaking down fatty acids, if my memory serves me right, and alkenes and some single sort of chain organic molecules. We don't want any fatty rocks on Mars. We don't want any fatty rocks. No, no, no. No, we don't want them getting too... Said Pete, have said... No fatty...

39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:No fatty... We'll take some acid, but no fatty acids. No, that's... I think that's one of the other data points that they're using to... The scientists who wrote that paper are using to argue that there's additional evidence of potential biological processes that were around at that time 80 million years ago, which is the Cretaceous period here on Earth. So here on Earth, dinosaurs would have been walking around at that same time period. And that's a lot younger than the 84, Allen Hills, 84, or a lot more than that rock is, because that's about 4.1 or 2 billion years old, that rock. So the likelihood, at least more confidence can be given that that's a nicer way to construct a hypothesis.

39:58But again, we still have so much to learn about the formation of organic compounds in the relationship to geology and the rocks. And to go off too much in one direction or the other, I think the middle path is required here. Raigou, whose mission was that one? So JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, has had two sampler term missions. Hayabusa 1, which went to an asteroid called Itokawa and brought back teeny tiny little grains because the collecting mechanism didn't quite work the way it was supposed to. But then Hayabusa 2, which went to the carbonaceous asteroid Rugu, which was actually OSIRIS-REx's backup plan in case we couldn't figure out how to get to Bendeva.

40:42And they chose Rugu and went to Rugu and came home basically earlier than we did. The analysis started in June of 2021, and I was living in Tokyo at that time period for the beginning of the analysis of their sample from asteroid Rupert. Now, think about that. It was a pandemic.

41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, of course. Of course. I was crazy. The name of a Star Wars character? I have some. It ought to be if it's not. It's a pretty cool name. Yeah. So just to sort of celebrate the scientific profession, tell me what role the researcher Rigu played in your guys' approach to Bennu. Because, you know, one mission stands on the shoulders of the previous mission. That's how science works. So were you able to answer or ask different questions of your samples because of what was learned in the previous sample returns? Yeah, it's both scientific, engineering, and cultural in the exchange. We had co-lives on each other's team, which means members of each other's teams.

41:56I was a member on both teams. And Shogo Tashibana from the University of Tokyo was a member on OSIRIS-REx as well as in charge of analysis sample for Hayabusa 2. And indeed, the early analysis of their sample, which they analyzed only 100 milligrams of, we had 15 grams to work with ours. And actually, we were good boys and girls and didn't even get to 13 and managed to get our goals achieved. and they informed us on what the chemistry we should expect, what the minerals are we should expect, and how to take a deep dive into certain areas that turned out to be very important for findings, as you just talked about moments ago.

42:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Excellent. Now, is it true that every asteroid is the fragment of some larger parent body that got shattered early in the solar system? And I ask that because Bennu, last I checked, is bigger than the Empire State Building, something like 500 meters across. And so that seems like a big enough body to be its own body in the universe. But tell me, turn the clock back on this. Was there some protoplanet that had already sort of, as you, I'll just say, differentiated its materials and then shattered to become Bennu? And if that's the case, you might be able to find other rocks that are like Bennu that are out there.

43:25Yeah, absolutely great question. First of all, the main type of meteorite we find on Earth that's like Bennu is called a CI-like meteorite. meteorite and there's only two handfuls of them in existence and it's very clear from both studying the sample from Rugu and a sample from Bennu that our sample collection is biased on earth not only is the sample collection contaminated but what actually is out in space is biased because we have a lot of carbon issues asteroid now turn the clock backward Bennu is fragments from collisions that occurred of of different bodies together one of those bodies was a parent body as we call a previous incarnation of Bennu at a much larger scale.

44:08And that was something that was indeed, you know, forming probably some of the early protoplanets that may have existed. And once the objects get to a certain size, around 10 kilometers or so in diameter, the internal mechanism begins to turn on for geologic process. That internal mechanism is heat begins to move around. It's generated from the decay of radioactivity and pressure,

44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:it becomes a cosmic body at that level it becomes a cosmic body it begins to melt the ices that were accreted with it it begins to have fluid and we call that the early stages of metamorphism in geology and the early stages of metamorphosis that fluid moves through and begins to interact with the minerals that are there and it begins to change those minerals and pick up different kinds of chemicals that is moving through the fluid it moves in different parts of the asteroid because it cracked and all kinds of things that happen and then what we think happened is that at some point, the poor parent body asteroid gets collided into with something else, and it stops the process.

45:07So you have a snapshot in geologic time of that moment that all the processes geologically were active stopped.

45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. Because it's not big enough to sustain it anymore, and it gets frozen in that state. It got knocked up, it got knocked up, and it hangs around, and, you know, that's it. Yeah, so because it's relatively recent, well, recent in my professional life, last several decades that we came to learn that star systems, like we take the solar system, for example, with its eight planets. Stop.

45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:That if you run the models, that star systems such as ours likely began with like 30 planets or something, or planetesimals. And many of those orbits are just unstable and they collide with each other. and it gets resolved. And so it takes a while for that to sort of shake out and find out who's left. You just described the coolest game of billiards ever. Yeah, yeah. Who survives? Who survives? Survivor billiards. And don't you even have, there's some asteroids where it looked like there were two pieces that are stuck together that didn't break apart? Well, yeah, there are also asteroids that have satellites that go around from collisions, most likely so.

46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, right, right. Even asteroid Bennu, although we don't have a satellite, didn't find a satellite, it was geologically active on the surface. And we had these explosions that pushed material up, which was not cometary-like, but we had looked, going back to the comet discussion, we had looked for cometary action because one of the hypotheses for Bennu before we got there was it could have been an extinct comet core. But it isn't. At least most of us will say. Right. It's not a clean boundary between asteroids and comets. right? I'm sure. No, sir. It is not. You know that better now. Yep. It is not.

47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now when we think of life, you know, I think we're carbon-based. That's, you know, everybody knows that. And we eat food and we have crops and we eat plants and animals. And I always see phosphorus showing up as some key ingredient. And not being a biologist, I've never fully come to appreciate what role that plays. So could you just tell me about phosphorus? I know it's an element on the periodic table. And did you find it in this asteroid sample? And what role does it play in sustaining life as we know it? Right. So let's go back to, again, the square root of one, and that phosphorus is, of course, one of the elements on a periodic table, as you said.

47:47And the accretion time period of the asteroid, you have all this material creating which contains all the different elements that we have on our table, you know, to some extent. Not things like hydrogen and helium and stuff. Then as time goes on, minerals start to form through the interaction of water with these rocks that we talked about. And that water is moving through with different, what I call, nutrients. In this case, it's not for biological system, but geologic system. and things like sodium, like in sodium chloride, table salt and chlorine and phosphorus are in this fluid.

48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:And then I love that reference to the geologic nutrients. That's a cool thought. To me, they were alive at one time. Okay. You know, to you, rocks are alive. That's fine. Don't worry. Give it time. Some influencers on the social media will be pushing geologic nutrients for your health at some point. Oh, yes. I was hard when I was in high school. Let me just say that. I was a geek. Anyway, yeah, so there's a whole sequence that forms of these different minerals, the calcium-rich ones, then the phosphorus-rich ones, right? And they go down through what's left in the fluid to come out of the fluid and start forming new minerals.

49:07You get things like sodium, et cetera. and phosphorus is one of those key minerals that makes things like phosphates and of course phosphorus is one of the key kind of elements uh that gets bound together uh with things like carbon and hydrogen etc to form uh prebiotic compounds that are important right and it's the whole suite of these evaporite minerals not just the phosphate the phosphorus is critical though But it's not just that. It's a whole suite in them that we, as life, have to have in different ways and different proportions. Now, I'm not a biologist, so keep that in mind.

49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. So tell me about pre-solar grains. There's a lot of research papers on this. In fact, we have some on display here at the Rose Center for Earth and Sprays. In fact, they're pre-solar diamonds, I think. and there's some, there's some, and I think it's kind of cool. I just don't know its relevance. It's cool to think of grains that might've predated the formation of the solar system, which gets you even farther back than the four and a half billion years. So I think that's kind of cool, but is it just sort of cool to know or does it have other relevance to any of this? Well, I mean, you know, you know, they're saying better than I, you know, we are stardust.

50:26We are made up of stardust, right? And stardust means dust that literally comes from stars, either evolving stars or dying stars that eject material. And in that ejection, a gas that comes out, like the fluid with minerals condensing, these new minerals condense out of the gas. And these are from stars that are not part of our, were not part of our solar system, and seeded what was there in the beginning before our solar system formed, which was a molecular they're called and there are different kinds of pre-solar grains the diamonds are one of them yeah downstairs in the museum's meteorite hall there are diamonds and a little capsule in there which is fantastic it looks like a slip you know like a grayish mixture and inside of the little vial there are silicon carbine grains but then there are what we call corundan or little teeny tiny and we're talking really so small smaller than what you know we can see certainly with the negative eye, manometer size.

51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:Isn't some of these that you're describing used as fake diamonds on Earth? Or corundum? I have some memory. That's ruby or sapphire is what that is, yeah. Okay, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then there are silicates, silicates being the most abundant minerals that we see on Earth, like quartz is a silicate mineral, for example. Alivine or peridote, the gemstone peridote is another one. So these grains predate the origin of the solar system. And they provided the nutrients, if you will, for the beginning of the formation of rocky materials and minerals in this solar system. Because everything got crunched as the gas began to collapse to form the sun.

52:07And things heated up and then they cooled down and stuff came out. But these grains survived that process. So they're actually older than our solar system, which is really, really cool. And there are people who spend their whole life studying these pre-solar grains. And it's incredible. So the solar system was basically able to form because it was on a whole grain diet, is what you're saying. I love it. A whole grain diet. Megatarian.

52:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:Maybe even vegan. I said, didn't even have seven grains there? I thought there were seven grains there. And just one more point about the pre-solar grains is that these, we find them in the mirror. That means they survived the geologic processing, such as the water moving through or heat beginning to generate. And many of them survived to different degrees, depending on where we're getting the sample from and what was the original pair. Wow.

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56:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:So let's pivot to other places where these search for ingredients of life have been in the news, such as Mars. Right. We're not quite there yet with Europa. We've got a nice clipper mission en route. We have a whole episode of StarTalk where we toured the Jet Propulsion Labs and spoke to the folks. It was right around the launch time of the Europa Clipper mission to look for life with ice-penetrating radar, to look under that icy moon with its ocean of liquid water. But if we go to Mars, where there's no water today, but such ample evidence that there was once running water, do you compare notes with your fellow Mars geologists or Marsologists, whatever the word is you might call them, to see?

56:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because I remember there's a recent news where there were some inclusions in some kind of clay or something that people felt pretty sure is a record of some kind of microbial life thriving in a distant past. And they're inclusions that only a geologist would recognize as being something interesting. And then you pair that up with the biologists and all the astronomer can do is just watch you guys have a conversation about it. Well, you can talk to us about it as you do.

57:40Yeah, that's a great – I like the way you drew that. But that's, so from lessons learned from analyzing Bennu, for example, and Rugu, and there's several more papers coming out in the near future from the OSIRIS-REx mission that are going to detail even more interesting results about prebiotic compounds. So keep to the literature for that. Look for that very soon.

58:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:And just to be clear for everyone in this modern era, it means a research paper with many collaborators that has been submitted for peer review, has been revised according to whatever the peer review might have recommended. Then it shows up in the journal, online or otherwise. And that then gets disseminated around the world for others to comment on, to stand on the shoulders of what was there. That's what's going on here. He's not making a YouTube video. Well, it's either that. Or he goes on Joe Rogan for two hours. No, no, no, no. It's either the first or Rogan's two hours, which is the setting, by the way.

58:47So, yeah, so on that area of Mars, what was it called? I forgot. Shiana Falls, is that what it was? Yeah, recently came out. the the minerals that were there and large veins of what are probably a mineral called gypsum and associated minerals are minerals that form through a fluid precipitation they're evaporated minerals they have to come out of this fluid that is there and the fluid's evaporating and other minerals that are there such as vivianite which is a phosphate mineral here we go phosphorus again one of the

59:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:key ingredients for life isn't gypsum on the mo scale i have some memory of that so i got i got that right you got that right gypsum is very soft it's like one or two or it's it's a hydrated mineral so it has water attached to it which makes a structure and then um grigite is um another mineral of that form and that's an iron sulfur rich mineral but that is an interesting mineral because it's on a pathway. The final product forming would be pyrite, which everybody knows is school scope. The mineral before that is not an all-ripe, big name, but that mineral was recently discovered in both Rugu and Bennu for the first time.

1:00:09Now, why is this mineral, Greg, important? Because it's sampling different abundances of oxygen that is around in order to produce itself. Okay.

1:00:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:Now, oxygen is not uncommon in the universe, but it's highly reactive, right? So it's going to be binding with almost everything. And so where's it getting its oxygen from? What's its source? Oh, that's a great question. We assume it's coming from a fluid interaction, a fluid that has evolved. But how that fluid's evolving, I don't know. When that fluid evolved, I don't know. And the landscape certainly is such that, you know, fluid was moving around, water. In the Chava Falls, in those deposits, I don't know. Is that the right word? Inclusions? Those. Yeah. Yeah. Are you convinced that there was a, an active biota in the, in the distant past from that evidence?

1:01:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:Or is there another way to explain that, that does not involve life because life would be extraordinary and fun, but you know, you geologists have all kinds of ways you can make stuff even without life. Oh, I know it. Yeah. So I'm not sure if life was actually part of that process, but I'm not going to eliminate it as a scientist from that process. It could be what we call abiotic or not requiring life, but it may be that life was there. There are other evidence that suggests that, and I don't know the details of the organic compounds. There's simple organic compounds that were also found there that may indicate that life was there.

1:01:44But as we know from working with Bennu, we're beginning to understand that the organic compounds that we're finding in Bennu are much greater than what we see in the meteorites. And the process which formed them most likely occurred inside of a great parent body or on surface or subsurface of Mars, for example, or Earth. And that is an important punctuation point that we have to know. meteorites are definitely contaminated so we're learning a lot about organic chemistry in the solar system in the prebiotic chemistry from the meteorites i mean from the asteroid samples that the meteorites are definitely contaminated if you look at that and you look at let's say you find these um evidences on mars and then we already know that they're in the asteroids is that, I don't want to make a big leap, would that be any indication that there is this so-called lithopam spermia that seeds planets like ours to create life?

1:02:58Or would it mean that, hey man, this is just the stuff that shows up under the right conditions, doesn't make a difference where you are? Yeah, that's a great question. The latter is certainly more or less what we've kind of been leaning towards here, in that the asteroids themselves could be seeding Mars and Earth with the prebiotic compounds that are needed for life to have evolved. But I'm old enough to know that we have meteorites from Mars on the surface of Earth. And I'm old enough to know that there was a time period when certain physicists said you couldn't get Ross off of Mars to Earth.

1:03:35And when we finally proved that these are, essentially proved to a high level confidence that these are from Mars, the calculations showed that you can. So it's certainly not impossible, but I mean, why go there where we can go with a more simple answer, at least at first to eliminate that.

1:03:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:So I found a fascinating concept. Let me just share it with you and tell me if you agree. So the biologist sees life on Earth, and we don't see life elsewhere as thriving as it is on Earth. So it's easy to just come up with the singular genesis of life on Earth by whatever cause. And we know how complex the DNA molecule is. So we can ask ourselves, could that have happened on any other surface of any other planet? And we say, look how complex it is. No, it's unlikely. However, geologic processes, I can send you to any planet and you'll be familiar. There might be some fun, interesting things that you've only read about or heard about in abundance there.

1:04:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:But geology, when you subject minerals and ingredients to the same temperatures, pressures, will get you the same results every time. so if you create a biological analog to that and say given the right temperatures and pressures and and time you'll make a dna molecule every time uh do you what do you say to that that that may be you know if if geology is universal geology why wouldn't it do it for us why wouldn't it do it for biology yeah yeah the short answer is yes

1:05:25Neil deGrasse Tyson:but i have another i have an issue with the panspermia hypothesis okay okay uh and by the that's an hypothesis surely named by men oh without a doubt 100 yeah okay yeah so so yeah life begins in one location and then spreads to other location, which, by the way, I don't think we, getting back to your ignorant physicist comment, I think no one knew how to do that until we can compute or model major impacts on planetary surfaces that can then fling rocks back into space. And you couldn't just deduce that. You had to calculate what happens to the energy of the impactor and how it gets manifested.

1:06:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:So in all fairness to the ignorant physicist, computers helped us out there. To the cocky physicist. Okay, it was my chance to have fun at you. By the way, just further in your defense, one of our greatest physicists, Lord Kelvin, of the Kelvin temperature scale, was telling geologists, geologists said, look, we need a billion years to make these ravines we need a billion years and the biologists were saying we need a billion years to evolve everything and he was saying i'm only giving you 10 million years because that's the lifetime of the sun and there's no way we can make the sun live longer than that and so that he he then he got his you know ass handed to him when we discovered that there's thermonuclear fusion in the sun.

1:07:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:And there's a whole other thing that was discovered after he made this proclamation. But he had the cockiness of a physicist knowing that physics is pretty fundamental. From that day forward, nobody believed his sports predictions.

1:07:27I'm taking the Patriots in 30 points.

1:07:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:so my issue with panspermia is if you can make amino acids on rocks in space or in the parent body from which it came you can make amino acids on earth without the rock earth has got all the same ingredients and then some. So this urge to appeal to penspermia for me seemed less urgent. The urge was less urgent when I look at it that way. So maybe the argument in favor of it is, it is really, really hard to make life. So if it happens in one place, the chances are it's not going to happen in other places and if it's going to get there it's going to have to travel i think that's the out for that's the argument in favor of panspermia but yeah because if it's easy to make amino acids but harder to make a dna molecule maybe that's what it comes down to there's one little catch to that in the sense of geology and that the oldest rocks we have on earth are from four to about 4.4 billion years which is one of many reasons we study the new samples rugel samples and meteorites because in part the the earth is dynamic it's active it's moving the surface is constant but also the very you know few tens of millions of years of the earth's existence the surface was really bolted before the crust formed and that's what a lot of the uh scientific hypothesis hit at that it was cooked too much for these kinds of compounds to survive on earth now maybe inside is another issue and maybe the meteorites coming down and seeding after the the cooling happened either on Earth or on Mars, is much more probable now than it was, I think, before we flew both missions.

1:09:30And in fact, we have sugar too now. We have RNA sugars. That's a really big deal too.

1:09:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, the ribose, right? Yeah. Your sugar is to go with your multigreen cereals.

1:09:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:Kellogg's better get a handle on this one. Of course, as scientists, we need to be sort of skeptical of extraordinary claims. If life can explain some of this evidence, can you get to that same evidence by not invoking life at all? Well, that's what we're learning from the study of Bennu samples and Rugu samples. And, you know, I can't give you an answer, yes or no, but looking like a lot of it, a lot of the ingredients, yes, they can happen abiotically. at least the ingredients for life what happens after life comes about how it changes that is another issue but that is where we're going right now as a person who is in front of the public explaining all of this i i have challenges because for example when we see methane on mars and we know methane is a product of of um anaerobic metabolism better known as mexican food

1:10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:i ain't going there i know right yeah i mean it's it's what happens deep in your gut right the microbes are operate uh anaerobically releasing methane and so but yet the surface of saturn's moon titan has has lakes of liquid methane and so but there are no cows on titan that we know of. So clearly methane is coming from non-biotic means. And so, so it's, you know, to jump for joy when we see a chemical signature of something that we know can come from life, we have to be very honest about all the ways that it might not. Yeah, I think that's, and that's also, I think to bring it back a little bit to Benno, I think that's why it's also so important that we know the context of what we're analyzing and understand very clearly what kind of geologic processes occurred to that particular rock or rocks.

1:11:52Because organic chemists, for example, they don't know geology. They don't need to know the geology, but we geologists have been very poor over the course of time at explaining what we mean when we say things are geologically processed. And it's much more complicated than what often It is interpreted either by the organic chemist, biologist, or even the general public. So we have to be very careful about that.

1:12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Now, at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned the possibility or being cautious about a rock that might hit Earth by, you know, 2200. I don't think you pull that number out of your ass. Benu in... Not this time. Not this time. Either way, whether you pulled it out of your ass or not, either way, good luck to those people. I mean, I'm good. You say 2 ,200? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're out of the picture by then. But the next close encounter, if my records are correct, is in 2182 for Bennu. And given our orbital uncertainties, I think there's a chance it could hit Earth. in 2182. That should be plenty of time to build a defense system to deflect it.

1:13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:It should be unless funding continues to wane. Oh, then we're screwed. So, but as geologists, you probably don't think much about asteroid collisions the way the astronomers do. Is that correct? Probably. We look at what's left over.

1:13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:okay that's that's very blunt that's very blunt there that's awesome

1:13:49when life gives you lemons right what are you gonna do

1:13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:dizzy i'm laughing so hard okay yeah so the probability that i last remembered maybe it's been refined since i last checked it you're absolutely right now it was a one in 2700 chance of hitting earth in in september of 2182 and as they said that that's a non-zero chance non-zero and it sounds like it sounds like oh that won't happen then but there are people who go to vegas betting on way worse odds than that expecting to win so so these are near earth asteroids that we want to keep an eye on. And the more we know about them, the more we can maybe go back to them in the future and nudge them out of harm's way.

1:14:34That's right. That's right. 100%. You got it. Yep. Now that we understand the composition better, that's a refined value that you gave. And that's probably as accurate as we're going to get, which is pretty accurate, because I think it's September 24th of that year, the prediction is. So that's pretty accurate, but I may be wrong.

1:14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, just to bring this to closure, could you just reflect on where you guys are as geologists? When I think of the history of collaborations, if we go back before 1968 and the photo of Earthrise over the lunar surface, it was not until NOAA was founded in the year 1970 that I ever saw the ocean and the atmosphere in the same phrase. NOAA is National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And my sense was they were ocean scientists and they were atmosphere scientists. And of course, you have geologists on the land. And then as time moved on, the interplay of these major forces on Earth's surface required you guys to play nice in the sandbox.

1:15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:And then eventually we find, is it more than half of the biotic mass on Earth is below Earth's surface? there's some staggering fraction of the mass of biology below Earth's surface, which means the geologist has to walk in the room and have something to say about that. So, can you just reflect on the state of collaborations among the biologists, the geologists, and of course, the astropholk today? Right. I think because of these sample return missions and other space missions were really an exciting time period in our history. And the way to get to this is simply talk about the connection between life and prebiotic compounds.

1:16:31We know life exists. We know that the prebiotic compounds exist. And there's a gap between the two. How do you get from one to the other, right? And in the middle of that gap, we know you need things like oxygen. You need water. You need energy. But everybody forgets that to get that, what you need is a planet. and understanding how planets are formed and the baseline geology that then the final baseline below geology the physics can all play into and then work with the astronomers the remote sensors the biologists to put our various hypotheses together to test them with our knowledge in a

1:17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:big big picture scope because of course the universe doesn't care about how we have divided our sciences. The universe is just the universe. That's very true. It's our problem that we have walls between the offices of what we study. Well, Howard, this has been a delight for you to participate in this conversation. I've long wanted to do a show on Bennu and because it's been, it's been in the news a bit now. So I'm glad we have, could speak about it with the benefit of the analysis that has been ongoing. And just to toot the horns of scientists, I presume that parts of your sample return from Bennu have been shared with other labs so that whatever your results are could be verified?

1:17:58Right. Yeah. So NASA archives about 70 % of the sample. The sample team, analysis team, doesn't get more than a very small amount of a total sample. And then we had it exclusively for a two-year period. And then the community at large, scientists at large, begin to apply for samples at Johnson Space Center, where they can look up samples in the catalog. And then they're all currently, those people who have samples from around the world that are not part of the science team for OSIRIS-REC, our team at Global 2, are analyzing the sample as we speak. And several papers have already been submitted to the scientific journal to talk about their findings in print.

1:18:37And yeah, it's incredible. And that's how science works. Science works. Our government shared sample with the Japanese government as well. And our Japanese colleague, meaning Osiris-Rex sample, a Hayabusa sample were shared. And each nation is also looking at their samples as well. So it's great. Wow.

1:18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson:Impressive. As science, that's how science works. The path to objective truths in this world is not from any one lab. It is from checking your ass. That's right. That's the creative process. That's exactly right. Yeah. Thanks for actually setting the example that none of us are going to follow.

1:19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, good luck for this. And what will you be doing in London? You're headed off there now? Yeah. First, let me say thank you very much for the invitation and to join you both. It's been a lot of fun and I've learned a lot myself and I really appreciate your kindness. And I'm going to London for a three-month stay at the work at the Natural History Museum in London where we'll be going back to the square root of one and taking what we learned from studying Astro-Abenu and Astro-Aruvio samples back into the lab and looking at our meteorite collections. And then I'll be doing a bunch of lectures around the UK as well on Osiris.

1:19:52So it's time to go have a little bit of rest and recharge the batteries.

1:19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:Very nice. Very nice. And how do we, where's our best source to keep current with Bennu? Does JPL have a page on that or is it Johnson? Or do you have a page from your lab that you co-founded? Yeah, I post some things on my website and generally different members of the team. We have no centralized area other than NASA making its usual posts about what we find. And your website is what? It's haroldconnellywordpress.com. Woodbreads. Okay. Thank you. All good, sir. I try to keep it updated, but I'm bad at it. Excellent. Thank you for this. Chuck, we're done here. Well, this was great, I have to say.

1:20:41I've learned more about Benno than I ever thought I would, and I'm happy that I did.

1:20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:And I learned that you don't care if it hits Earth in September 2018. I'm not in 22 yet. I'm good. I'm 2182. First of all, let me just tell you something. If it does, my only regret is that I can't do my own touch and go mission where I collect nothing but spray paint. Hello, dumbasses on the side of the asteroid.

1:21:14For not deflecting me. Right. You've had all this time to do something. You've had all this time. Screwing it up, you morons.

1:21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right. That's all the time we have. Harold Connolly Jr., thanks for participating. Nice to meet you, Chuck. Thank you so much. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. This has been StarTalk, the Benu edition. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.

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