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[00:05:37] you are watching the Space Stories podcast, today my guest is
[00:05:40] Leonid Elenin. Leonid, hello, hello, first of all,
[00:05:44] tell us why and when did you get interested
[00:05:47] in astronomy? I absolutely accidentally got into
[00:05:50] astronomy, around the sixth or seventh grade, just
[00:05:54] in the summer during summer vacation, picking up a book about
[00:05:58] space, this book "Treasures of the Starry
[00:06:01] Sky", and as I know now, many astronomers of my age
[00:06:04] came into this profession, precisely thanks to this
[00:06:07] book, the book was written by Felix Yuryevich
[00:06:10] Zigel, that's how it is.
[00:06:42] or physics, and here a lot depended on whether the person
[00:06:46] simply took on additional hours, or if he
[00:06:50] really tried to teach
[00:06:52] this science. From my experience, I can say that for us,
[00:06:55] astronomy was very boring. I
[00:06:59] believe it's one of the most beautiful sciences.
[00:07:03] We've all seen photos of space, you've seen it live.
[00:07:06] A science that still holds a huge
[00:07:10] number of secrets. It's quite easy,
[00:07:14] I think, to get kids interested in astronomy, but for us, it
[00:07:17] didn't work out. Our classes were spent either writing
[00:07:21] tests or memorizing some unnecessary constants and
[00:07:24] formulas that I still don't need,
[00:07:27] or I gave
[00:07:30] presentations. That's how it went. Now
[00:07:33] astronomy is no longer in the school curriculum.
[00:07:37] Is it needed in the form it was in the last few years? This
[00:07:41] is a big question. I know that physics teachers
[00:07:44] undergo additional training; such programs
[00:07:48] are being run. But I understand that
[00:07:51] the number of these teachers is very small, and of course, providing all schools
[00:07:55] with such physics teachers who can truly
[00:07:59] make children fall in love with astronomy is very difficult. Therefore,
[00:08:02] undoubtedly, basic knowledge of astronomy,
[00:08:06] as I believe, is necessary. Leonid, I
[00:08:09] know that you personally discovered six comets named after you,
[00:08:13] more than 100, maybe you'll correct me,
[00:08:16] asteroids. Tell us, what
[00:08:19] are comets, what are asteroids? Let's start with the second
[00:08:22] question. Comets and asteroids, comets and asteroids are small bodies of the solar
[00:08:26] system. Essentially, they are the unused building material,
[00:08:30] the bricks from which planets were
[00:08:33] created, including the sun, then planets were created. What
[00:08:37] was not used up became asteroids
[00:08:40] and comets. The main difference is that
[00:08:43] asteroids consist of rock with metals, or
[00:08:46] there are metallic asteroids, while comets,
[00:08:50] the nucleus of comets, are rocky bodies
[00:08:52] with large inclusions
[00:08:56] of ice. These can be ice from frozen
[00:08:59] water. Of course, this water is different from the one that splashes in our
[00:09:03] oceans, but in general, it is water in terms of
[00:09:06] chemical composition, no, it is H2O
[00:09:09] in terms of isotope balance.
[00:09:12] The deuterium to tritium ratio is very different, but as specialists say,
[00:09:16] I am still an astronomer, that such water can
[00:09:19] be drunk, and you will not be poisoned, but still
[00:09:22] in terms of isotopic composition it differs from terrestrial water. In addition
[00:09:26] to water ice, comets contain ice
[00:09:29] from ammonia,
[00:09:31] and various other substances, usually very poisonous to
[00:09:34] humans. When a comet approaches the
[00:09:38] sun, it heats up, its temperature
[00:09:41] rises, the ice begins to... sublimate, well, essentially
[00:09:44] melt, yes, so melting is from solid to
[00:09:48] gaseous through liquid, sublimation is simply from
[00:09:51] solid directly to gaseous.
[00:09:54] That's when comets grow those magnificent beautiful
[00:09:57] tails, which we all love to see in photographs,
[00:10:01] that's when they appear in all their glory. As for the
[00:10:05] number, yes, I discovered six comets, in general
[00:10:08] discovering a comet was my dream since school. That is, in
[00:10:11] 1997, above the northern hemisphere, above Moscow,
[00:10:15] Comet Hale-Bopp was hanging. It was visible from
[00:10:18] the center of Moscow with the naked eye, its powerful tails were visible. I
[00:10:22] thought that someone had discovered it, how wonderful it would be to make
[00:10:26] such a discovery myself. 13 years passed, in December
[00:10:29] 2010, I was only 13
[00:10:33] years old, 13 years passed, yes, but in the end I still fulfilled
[00:10:35] my dream, I started working at the Institute of
[00:10:39] Applied Mathematics, we mainly deal with space
[00:10:42] debris in near-Earth orbits, but
[00:10:45] among other things, I suggested
[00:10:48] learning how to discover comets and asteroids,
[00:10:52] and the first comet was such a chance
[00:10:55] discovery, and what was it called, was it happiness? It
[00:10:58] has its index C2010x1,
[00:11:01] C means it's a long-period comet, 2010
[00:11:05] year, x is the first
[00:11:08] half of December encrypted, and one is
[00:11:11] the first comet in the first half of December of the tenth
[00:11:15] year, and the surname Elenin, I immediately
[00:11:18] answer a frequent question: you have six
[00:11:21] comets, five of them bear my surname, one is a minor
[00:11:39] planet. This is handled by the International Astronomical Union, so as the
[00:11:43] discoverer of a comet, I cannot propose a name,
[00:11:46] and if I discovered this object as
[00:11:49] an object itself and discovered its cometary nature, saw
[00:11:52] a tail or a gas-dust shell. to whom and reported
[00:11:56] it, then if this is confirmed, then the comet
[00:11:59] is automatically named after the discoverer, how
[00:12:03] they report via the Internet, via the Internet, now, that
[00:12:06] is, it used to be telegrams, now
[00:12:08] it's a special letter, formatted in a certain
[00:12:12] way, which is sent to the Minor
[00:12:15] Planet Center, to the Central Bureau for Astronomical
[00:12:18] Telegrams, it is sent there, this object
[00:12:22] is placed on the confirmation page, all astronomers worldwide
[00:12:25] see this and can, well, and
[00:12:29] it would be desirable for them to independently confirm,
[00:12:32] because as long as your object is only
[00:12:35] seen by you alone, it is not considered a discovery, there must
[00:12:39] be independent confirmations, when they appear, an official
[00:12:42] circular is issued, which publishes the primary orbit
[00:12:46] of the comet and gives its measurements, astrometric,
[00:12:50] photometric, that is, its position on the celestial sphere, its
[00:12:53] brightness. You know, there are no photos in the circulars, that is,
[00:12:57] they, no, they are not placed in the circulars, only
[00:12:59] text-based, so that colleagues can confirm, these
[00:13:03] photos can be requested from the Minor Planet Center if they have any doubts,
[00:13:07] for example, about the cometary nature. It happens that we discover a comet far
[00:13:11] from the sun, it, for example, on large telescopes
[00:13:14] there is visible cometary nature, on small telescopes it
[00:13:18] is not yet visible, so some astronomers confirm
[00:13:22] the cometary nature, for example, the presence of such... a nebula around
[00:13:25] the head of the comet, while some astronomers refute it,
[00:13:29] then specialists look,
[00:13:32] naturally, all astronomers have their own credit
[00:13:36] of trust, yes, there are people who never make mistakes, there are people who have already
[00:13:40] made mistakes, then they are listened to less often,
[00:13:44] in the end, an official
[00:13:46] discovery takes place, and one of my comets does not
[00:13:50] bear my surname, because I discovered it as an asteroid
[00:13:54] with a small telescope.
[00:14:27] now it's a whole network of dedicated telescopes that are only involved
[00:14:30] in searching for dangerous objects, meaning comets are dangerous,
[00:14:34] they can be dangerous, meaning comets can approach Earth,
[00:14:38] so they need to be found, now, well, how do you
[00:14:41] look into a certain
[00:14:44] telescope takes pictures of a certain area of the sky or
[00:14:48] several times a night we get photos
[00:14:51] only at night, yes, optical telescopes only work at night.
[00:14:59] night residents, and so we get
[00:15:03] photos, roughly speaking, yes, in digital format on special
[00:15:06] cameras, which differ in many ways from
[00:15:10] ordinary cameras, they have a larger dynamic range,
[00:15:13] more sensitivity, but in general it's a black and white
[00:15:17] photograph, we get such photographs,
[00:15:21] a few passes a night, three or four
[00:15:24] passes, and then... to put it very
[00:15:27] simply, we look for movement in the frames, stars will remain
[00:15:31] stars in their places, because although they move, they have
[00:15:34] their own motion, but they are very far away,
[00:15:37] so their own motion is very small and it's impossible to detect
[00:15:40] it in a few hours, while asteroids and comets are much
[00:15:44] closer, they are residents of our solar system, so they
[00:15:47] shift slightly even in tens of minutes,
[00:15:51] so we generally filter them, meaning if it's a very fast object, it's
[00:15:55] either a distant satellite or a very close
[00:15:58] asteroid. We often find objects
[00:16:02] of space debris in highly elliptical orbits,
[00:16:05] near the apogee, that is...
[00:16:37] Earth, that's how it was with the Rosetta automatic
[00:16:41] station, and it was taken for an asteroid,
[00:16:45] only a few days later, when they started to build
[00:16:48] the orbit of the new asteroid, it turned out that it was suspiciously similar to
[00:16:52] the expected Rosetta station, which was supposed to fly by, well, it's
[00:16:55] a joint NASA and ESA, NASA and ESA, yes, and yes, it's
[00:16:59] a unique project for studying
[00:17:02] comets, the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet,
[00:17:05] that's how it happens. Did it land on it or just fly
[00:17:09] by? No, this was the first mission, not a flyby, but going into
[00:17:13] orbit. For the first time, we went into orbit around a comet's nucleus
[00:17:16] in 2014, for the first time,
[00:17:20] in November of the same year, we carried out
[00:17:23] a soft landing of the Philae
[00:17:26] lander. It wasn't entirely soft. The comet has very
[00:17:29] low gravity, so to land you need to secure
[00:17:33] yourself. This lander
[00:17:36] had a whole system of
[00:17:39] harpoons, a thrust engine, and none of it worked
[00:17:42] when it was needed, so Philae
[00:17:46] bounced across the comet, but in the end, it still hit
[00:17:49] a sheer slope and remained
[00:17:52] on the surface of the planet. Overall, it completed
[00:17:55] its scientific mission, it worked for about two days, until
[00:17:59] its battery ran out, it
[00:18:01] ended up in the shade, so the solar panels weren't working,
[00:18:05] and with the power it had left, it
[00:18:09] took amazing pictures, that is, we saw the surface
[00:18:12] for the first time, that is, the comet's landscape,
[00:18:15] a huge landscape, yes, mountains, sheer cliffs, and what was its
[00:18:18] approximate size? The size of the comet's nucleus
[00:18:21] is approximately 8x8 by 16 km, this is the very heart
[00:18:25] of the comet, yes, but when
[00:18:29] its gas and dust head and tail grow,
[00:18:32] you need to understand that the comet's head, the gas and dust
[00:18:36] envelope, can extend for hundreds of thousands of kilometers,
[00:18:39] the tail can extend for tens
[00:18:42] of millions of kilometers, millions, so
[00:18:46] essentially all this comes from this small
[00:18:49] nucleus, where ice evaporates, sublimates,
[00:18:53] why doesn't it completely evaporate? It evaporates,
[00:18:57] for example, Halley's comet, yes, every 76
[00:19:01] years, yes, it returns to us, we see it, we see it, yes, it was twice in the
[00:19:05] last century, in the sixth year. At the end of the last
[00:19:08] century, it was the thirtieth recorded
[00:19:11] close approach, meaning Halley's comet, we observe it, as we know
[00:19:15] now, we have been observing it since 240 BC,
[00:19:18] it was first observed by our ancient Chinese
[00:19:22] colleagues, ancient Chinese astronomers, in 240 BC,
[00:19:25] they recorded the passage of
[00:19:28] a comet. Now we already know, we have traced its orbit
[00:19:32] back, it is very well known, we have been observing it for centuries, but in
[00:19:36] the solar system there are... so-called dead comets, that is,
[00:19:39] these are objects that do not show cometary
[00:19:43] activity, that is, they are essentially asteroids, but located in a
[00:19:47] cometary orbit, that is, an elongated orbit, in which asteroids are not usually
[00:19:50] found. Mostly all asteroids live between the orbits of Mars
[00:19:54] and Jupiter, well, yes, the asteroid belt, yes. And there are
[00:19:58] asteroids called centaurs, for example, the Centaur
[00:20:01] group, they are very similar to
[00:20:04] comets, but they have not been found to have
[00:20:08] a gas-dust shell, nor a tail, nothing.
[00:20:12] Therefore, unfortunately, we have not flown to them, we have not taken
[00:20:16] samples, but most likely, these are precisely those cometary nuclei that have completely
[00:20:19] depleted their reserves of volatile substances, all the ice, the
[00:20:23] ice has evaporated, and it's just a rock. Once it was
[00:20:26] a comet, but now it's just
[00:20:28] a rock.
[00:20:32] Do you personally have your own telescope? No
[00:20:36] longer, because, yes,
[00:20:39] of course, I use the telescopes of our institute,
[00:20:42] they are all located far away, for example,
[00:20:46] in the mountains of Altai, they are located, in the Caucasus.
[00:20:50] Our telescopes are still operating in a
[00:20:53] number of foreign countries, for example, in Mongolia. Do you need to go there or
[00:20:57] can it be done remotely? No, it's all done mostly online now. So
[00:21:01] there's technical staff on site who maintain
[00:21:04] operability, but the telescope is
[00:21:07] robotic. A program of observations is loaded onto it, and
[00:21:10] it can figure out what the weather is like around
[00:21:14] it, whether there's cloudiness or not, open
[00:21:17] the roof, launch the observation plan, observe,
[00:21:20] stop, park in the right position, close
[00:21:24] the roof, that's it. Well, then the programs must be, I don't know,
[00:21:28] intelligence that will monitor, not necessarily stay awake at that
[00:21:31] time, roughly speaking, turn it on, go to sleep, wake up in the morning, here's your
[00:21:35] comet. In general, there's only truth here, well, first of all, you
[00:21:39] have to create software, we have our own. My
[00:21:42] telescopes, on which I work, operate under
[00:21:45] the control of software that I also wrote, that is,
[00:21:49] I'm a programmer too, yes, so when they tell me that
[00:21:53] the telescope observed itself, but I taught it to observe, so it's all
[00:21:57] fair. Do we have any institutions that train astronomers?
[00:22:00] MSU, at St. Petersburg
[00:22:02] University, in Kazan, at
[00:22:06] Volga Federal University they train astronomers, in
[00:22:09] Yekaterinburg, at Ural Federal University they also train
[00:22:13] astronomers. In general, if you have the desire,
[00:22:16] you can find a place where they will teach you, they
[00:22:20] exist in Russia. Not many astronomers are needed,
[00:22:23] of course, so this is definitely a niche
[00:22:27] specialization, a niche profession, but for those who
[00:22:30] have fallen in love with the sky, I urge everyone to go into
[00:22:33] astronomy, there are enough mysteries in astronomy
[00:22:37] for young children, for their children,
[00:22:41] for their children's children, so go into
[00:22:43] space, well, I don't need to tell you, right, the more we learn about
[00:22:47] space, the more we understand.
[00:22:58] These are the latest data on the solar system, it lasts about
[00:23:02] 40 minutes, even I, considering that I thought
[00:23:05] I knew something about the solar system, about planets,
[00:23:09] asteroids, but first of all, it's very vividly made, very accessible, that
[00:23:12] is, in simple language, and it's just mesmerizing, that is, I watched
[00:23:16] it once, now I understand, but I need to watch it at least two more times to... well, to remember
[00:23:20] something. The latest data on our solar
[00:23:23] system? Yes, that's very important, it's precisely vivid and in simple
[00:23:27] language, to get kids interested,
[00:23:30] to tell them about the mysteries, to show beautiful photographs that
[00:23:33] exist, real computer graphics, all this now
[00:23:37] undoubtedly helps,
[00:23:40] and since I also popularize astronomy,
[00:23:44] I travel to planetariums in our country,
[00:23:47] and I can note that they are also developing,
[00:23:51] improving, being repaired, reconstructed, that is, you give
[00:23:54] lectures, yes, lectures are held there, you can come
[00:23:58] and watch a colorful and full-dome film,
[00:24:01] buy a book about space, if it caught your
[00:24:04] attention, interested you, that's how we draw future
[00:24:08] astronomers into our nets. In ancient times,
[00:24:10] it was believed, yes, that a comet was a harbinger of disaster, yes, that is, people
[00:24:14] were afraid, when they saw comets in the sky, yes,
[00:24:17] comets have been observed by people for probably more... years, I can
[00:24:21] say that on the ceiling
[00:24:25] of the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Pepi
[00:24:28] II, a comet is depicted, it is this
[00:24:32] comet that leads the pharaoh into the afterlife, and scientists
[00:24:36] asked themselves, what kind of comet could this be? It could be some
[00:24:39] unknown comet to us, or it could be a known one, which returns,
[00:24:43] returns, and there is a hypothesis, but not certain,
[00:24:46] of course, that it could have been the very same Comet Hale-Bopp, which...
[00:24:58] that is, its period is several thousand years, so there is such a connection of times, that is, Pharaoh
[00:25:02] Pepi I observed it, and we observed it, and this comet
[00:25:06] inspired me to discover my own comets, what an amazing
[00:25:09] connection of times. If we talk about fears, then indeed,
[00:25:13] since ancient people already
[00:25:16] knew about planets, yes, they knew about
[00:25:19] Mercury, Venus, Earth of course, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, that is, those
[00:25:23] planets that are visible to the naked eye, they already
[00:25:26] knew when these planets appeared in the sky, there was a certain order. Comets
[00:25:30] appeared in the sky suddenly, so they
[00:25:33] caused such fears, because
[00:25:35] they looked strange with these tails,
[00:25:39] people tried to predict some events
[00:25:43] based on these tails, their form, and the color of comets,
[00:25:46] only in the 15th, in the 17th century did people begin
[00:25:49] to understand that it is an object of the solar
[00:25:52] system, only at the very end of the 19th
[00:25:56] century, when we discovered the first near-Earth
[00:25:59] asteroid, which now bears the name
[00:26:02] Eros, we first understood that
[00:26:05] asteroids and comets can
[00:26:08] in principle approach Earth, before we thought that they flew
[00:26:12] far away, and we were just
[00:26:13] contemplators.
[00:26:16] By the early seventies, eighties of the last century, we knew
[00:26:20] approximately 60 near-Earth asteroids, again not many, we
[00:26:23] already knew thousands of asteroids, only 60 of them were
[00:26:27] near-Earth, and imagine the sizes,
[00:26:30] back then we were discovering large objects. That is, mostly several kilometers in size,
[00:26:34] that is, it's a quite large body, and the mass is huge, huge mass, well,
[00:26:38] roughly an asteroid with a diameter of 5
[00:26:41] km has a mass of approximately 150 billion
[00:26:45] tons. I give an example, when people ask me, what can
[00:26:48] we do if we discover such an asteroid? Bombing
[00:26:51] such an object of 150 billion tons is very difficult, when we
[00:26:55] also understand from orbit that it flies along an orbit at an average speed of 20
[00:26:59] km/s, if we calculate, I won't bore
[00:27:02] you with formulas, the kinetic energy
[00:27:05] the energy of this object, then for
[00:27:09] understanding, humanity can generate such energy
[00:27:12] in 286 million
[00:27:15] years, so unfortunately, we cannot yet fight such objects. Maybe there are
[00:27:19] some theoretical
[00:27:22] developments, and we welcome our
[00:27:26] viewers, of course, we are thinking about it. Well, firstly,
[00:27:30] we now know about 3500 near-Earth asteroids, meaning
[00:27:33] when we started looking for them, there were
[00:27:36] more and more and more of them, and we realized that in
[00:27:40] fact, Earth is in a very populated area of the solar
[00:27:43] system. Here there are also tens of thousands of near-Earth
[00:27:46] asteroids that fly past us. Of course,
[00:27:50] in their majority, they are small, tens or hundreds
[00:27:54] of meters, but still, the Chelyabinsk example. Before
[00:27:57] Chelyabinsk, astronomers believed that a near-Earth
[00:28:00] asteroid with a diameter of...
[00:28:40] I remind you that 1,600 people sought medical help,
[00:28:43] two people ended up in intensive care, only doctors
[00:28:46] saved them, so this needs to be taken
[00:28:50] seriously. We are saying this not because we want
[00:28:54] to scare people or somehow use this information, but because we must calmly
[00:28:58] and thoroughly prepare for it, because
[00:29:01] collisions in the system and in any planetary system are
[00:29:05] an absolutely natural evolutionary process. In the
[00:29:08] early solar system, there were many more.
[00:29:12] Now everything is much simpler, but asteroids
[00:29:15] are flying towards us, and of course, if we want to preserve our
[00:29:19] civilization, we need to think about this. Astronomers have a saying
[00:29:22] concerning the asteroid hazard, that astronomers
[00:29:26] don't ask whether a collision will happen or not,
[00:29:29] there's only one question: when will it happen? Right now, we are
[00:29:32] trying to track these dangerous objects, and a lot has been done
[00:29:35] here. We know about more than
[00:29:39] 95% of near-Earth asteroids with a diameter
[00:29:43] of over a kilometer, meaning these are objects that can
[00:29:47] cause a continental catastrophe, but
[00:29:51] we don't know many objects
[00:29:54] with diameters of hundreds of meters, and even
[00:29:57] less do we know about objects a few tens
[00:30:00] of meters in size, this knowledge is even more vague, as we
[00:30:04] now understand, Chelyabinsk showed that even an object with a diameter
[00:30:08] of 50 meters can, in principle, literally and figuratively,
[00:30:12] cause a stir. Well, there's a method, right, of soft and hard power, and
[00:30:15] hard power, what is that?
[00:30:19] The method of brute force, it's clear, meaning to break,
[00:30:23] destroy, hit, deflect. It seems very
[00:30:26] simple, we've all watched movies where we land on an
[00:30:30] asteroid, drill.
[00:30:32] drill, yes, by the way, that's where we place nuclear weapons, and that's correctly shown, because
[00:30:36] when people say, "Why drill, let's just detonate a nuclear bomb
[00:30:40] next to it," the main destructive effect is
[00:30:44] again the shock wave, from a nuclear explosion. In
[00:30:47] space, there's no medium for the transmission of this shock
[00:30:50] wave, so yes, we will indeed vaporize
[00:30:53] part of the substance, the asteroid will receive a certain reactive
[00:30:57] impulse, but according to calculations,
[00:31:00] this will not be enough, especially for
[00:31:02] objects the size of hundreds of meters or even
[00:31:06] kilometers. If we place a nuclear bomb,
[00:31:10] an atomic bomb, inside the asteroid, in a medium for shock wave
[00:31:14] transmission, this will be much more effective. The deeper we drill and
[00:31:18] place the bomb closer to the center of the asteroid's mass, the higher the
[00:31:21] efficiency of the explosion will be. Well, imagine that we need to land on
[00:31:25] an asteroid with a diameter of 100 meters and drill 50
[00:31:29] meters deep. This should be done by some
[00:31:33] robots. In general, it's still technically quite difficult. It won't break into exactly two
[00:31:37] halves that will fly around, and we don't know, this is precisely
[00:31:41] thousands of pieces that will fly in different directions, yes, that's another
[00:31:44] question here. Firstly, all of this is not controllable, not calculated, because
[00:31:47] we don't know how it will break apart, into how many objects. If we
[00:31:51] completely destroy it, then
[00:31:54] not one object, but shrapnel from hundreds
[00:31:57] of millions of small fragments the size
[00:32:01] of the Chelyabinsk meteorite will fly towards Earth.
[00:32:04] Then the question is, what's better, a collision with one
[00:32:07] body with a diameter of 100 meters, for example, or
[00:32:10] a collision with a hundred? Maybe they'll burn up if
[00:32:14] they're small? Partially, they will certainly burn up, small bodies will certainly burn up,
[00:32:18] but bodies of decameter size, say 10, 20,
[00:32:21] 15 meters, it's not certain they will burn up, and we can
[00:32:25] imagine if there's such a shower of bodies, similar to the Chelyabinsk one, not
[00:32:29] one body, but a whole shower. So here are many
[00:32:33] questions, both technical ones,
[00:32:36] like what we'll get in the end. We can just hit
[00:32:39] the asteroid, we don't actually need to destroy it, we don't need to
[00:32:43] annihilate it for it to disappear. We can push it, shift
[00:32:47] it a little from its orbit. This is still
[00:32:50] brute force, but we need to, yes, with one impact,
[00:32:53] an impulse, right, remember in orbit. For this,
[00:32:56] it is proposed to use a kinetic impactor, meaning we accelerate some
[00:32:59] spacecraft, hit the asteroid, and
[00:33:03] we change its orbit. Technically, we can already
[00:33:06] do this. In 2022, such an
[00:33:09] experiment was conducted, we indeed hit a small
[00:33:12] asteroid and...
[00:33:45] you need to do some tandem, that is, kinetic impact, impact by
[00:33:49] strike, yes, impact by
[00:33:51] explosion, that is, a super-accelerated
[00:33:54] torpedo that hits and then explodes,
[00:33:58] possibly hits, penetrates,
[00:34:01] a shaped charge, a shaped space
[00:34:03] charge.
[00:34:07] A new question arose in the current political situation: a certain
[00:34:10] country needs to launch a powerful hydrogen warhead
[00:34:16] into orbit, which is currently prohibited by space laws, and by law. In general, even
[00:34:20] if we make some exception, what
[00:34:24] guarantees do we have that when
[00:34:27] a certain country launches this anti-asteroid bomb
[00:34:31] into space, it won't say, "Well, plans
[00:34:33] have changed, we are now playing
[00:34:37] a different game," right? So we have no such guarantees, which makes this a very complex question,
[00:34:41] not just technical or scientific, but political too.
[00:34:45] These are methods of brute force. Methods of soft power involve
[00:34:48] continuous but prolonged influence,
[00:34:52] similar to how in rocket technology there are chemical
[00:34:55] engines, very powerful, generating a strong impulse, but which can
[00:34:59] operate for a limited time. We also have, for example, ion
[00:35:03] engines, which generate small impulses, but they
[00:35:06] can operate for years. It's the same here. Well, this
[00:35:10] needs to be done in advance, so yes, we must handle this
[00:35:14] object for decades.
[00:35:45] It is calculated that we can slightly
[00:35:48] change its orbit so that it will at some point fly
[00:35:52] thousands of kilometers from Earth. Truly,
[00:35:55] the imagination of scientists is boundless, meaning it's both
[00:35:58] engines and...