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00:05:37you are watching the Space Stories podcast, today my guest is
00:05:40Leonid Elenin. Leonid, hello, hello, first of all,
00:05:44tell us why and when did you get interested
00:05:47in astronomy? I absolutely accidentally got into
00:05:50astronomy, around the sixth or seventh grade, just
00:05:54in the summer during summer vacation, picking up a book about
00:05:58space, this book "Treasures of the Starry
00:06:01Sky", and as I know now, many astronomers of my age
00:06:04came into this profession, precisely thanks to this
00:06:07book, the book was written by Felix Yuryevich
00:06:10Zigel, that's how it is.
00:06:42or physics, and here a lot depended on whether the person
00:06:46simply took on additional hours, or if he
00:06:50really tried to teach
00:06:52this science. From my experience, I can say that for us,
00:06:55astronomy was very boring. I
00:06:59believe it's one of the most beautiful sciences.
00:07:03We've all seen photos of space, you've seen it live.
00:07:06A science that still holds a huge
00:07:10number of secrets. It's quite easy,
00:07:14I think, to get kids interested in astronomy, but for us, it
00:07:17didn't work out. Our classes were spent either writing
00:07:21tests or memorizing some unnecessary constants and
00:07:24formulas that I still don't need,
00:07:27or I gave
00:07:30presentations. That's how it went. Now
00:07:33astronomy is no longer in the school curriculum.
00:07:37Is it needed in the form it was in the last few years? This
00:07:41is a big question. I know that physics teachers
00:07:44undergo additional training; such programs
00:07:48are being run. But I understand that
00:07:51the number of these teachers is very small, and of course, providing all schools
00:07:55with such physics teachers who can truly
00:07:59make children fall in love with astronomy is very difficult. Therefore,
00:08:02undoubtedly, basic knowledge of astronomy,
00:08:06as I believe, is necessary. Leonid, I
00:08:09know that you personally discovered six comets named after you,
00:08:13more than 100, maybe you'll correct me,
00:08:16asteroids. Tell us, what
00:08:19are comets, what are asteroids? Let's start with the second
00:08:22question. Comets and asteroids, comets and asteroids are small bodies of the solar
00:08:26system. Essentially, they are the unused building material,
00:08:30the bricks from which planets were
00:08:33created, including the sun, then planets were created. What
00:08:37was not used up became asteroids
00:08:40and comets. The main difference is that
00:08:43asteroids consist of rock with metals, or
00:08:46there are metallic asteroids, while comets,
00:08:50the nucleus of comets, are rocky bodies
00:08:52with large inclusions
00:08:56of ice. These can be ice from frozen
00:08:59water. Of course, this water is different from the one that splashes in our
00:09:03oceans, but in general, it is water in terms of
00:09:06chemical composition, no, it is H2O
00:09:09in terms of isotope balance.
00:09:12The deuterium to tritium ratio is very different, but as specialists say,
00:09:16I am still an astronomer, that such water can
00:09:19be drunk, and you will not be poisoned, but still
00:09:22in terms of isotopic composition it differs from terrestrial water. In addition
00:09:26to water ice, comets contain ice
00:09:29from ammonia,
00:09:31and various other substances, usually very poisonous to
00:09:34humans. When a comet approaches the
00:09:38sun, it heats up, its temperature
00:09:41rises, the ice begins to... sublimate, well, essentially
00:09:44melt, yes, so melting is from solid to
00:09:48gaseous through liquid, sublimation is simply from
00:09:51solid directly to gaseous.
00:09:54That's when comets grow those magnificent beautiful
00:09:57tails, which we all love to see in photographs,
00:10:01that's when they appear in all their glory. As for the
00:10:05number, yes, I discovered six comets, in general
00:10:08discovering a comet was my dream since school. That is, in
00:10:111997, above the northern hemisphere, above Moscow,
00:10:15Comet Hale-Bopp was hanging. It was visible from
00:10:18the center of Moscow with the naked eye, its powerful tails were visible. I
00:10:22thought that someone had discovered it, how wonderful it would be to make
00:10:26such a discovery myself. 13 years passed, in December
00:10:292010, I was only 13
00:10:33years old, 13 years passed, yes, but in the end I still fulfilled
00:10:35my dream, I started working at the Institute of
00:10:39Applied Mathematics, we mainly deal with space
00:10:42debris in near-Earth orbits, but
00:10:45among other things, I suggested
00:10:48learning how to discover comets and asteroids,
00:10:52and the first comet was such a chance
00:10:55discovery, and what was it called, was it happiness? It
00:10:58has its index C2010x1,
00:11:01C means it's a long-period comet, 2010
00:11:05year, x is the first
00:11:08half of December encrypted, and one is
00:11:11the first comet in the first half of December of the tenth
00:11:15year, and the surname Elenin, I immediately
00:11:18answer a frequent question: you have six
00:11:21comets, five of them bear my surname, one is a minor
00:11:39planet. This is handled by the International Astronomical Union, so as the
00:11:43discoverer of a comet, I cannot propose a name,
00:11:46and if I discovered this object as
00:11:49an object itself and discovered its cometary nature, saw
00:11:52a tail or a gas-dust shell. to whom and reported
00:11:56it, then if this is confirmed, then the comet
00:11:59is automatically named after the discoverer, how
00:12:03they report via the Internet, via the Internet, now, that
00:12:06is, it used to be telegrams, now
00:12:08it's a special letter, formatted in a certain
00:12:12way, which is sent to the Minor
00:12:15Planet Center, to the Central Bureau for Astronomical
00:12:18Telegrams, it is sent there, this object
00:12:22is placed on the confirmation page, all astronomers worldwide
00:12:25see this and can, well, and
00:12:29it would be desirable for them to independently confirm,
00:12:32because as long as your object is only
00:12:35seen by you alone, it is not considered a discovery, there must
00:12:39be independent confirmations, when they appear, an official
00:12:42circular is issued, which publishes the primary orbit
00:12:46of the comet and gives its measurements, astrometric,
00:12:50photometric, that is, its position on the celestial sphere, its
00:12:53brightness. You know, there are no photos in the circulars, that is,
00:12:57they, no, they are not placed in the circulars, only
00:12:59text-based, so that colleagues can confirm, these
00:13:03photos can be requested from the Minor Planet Center if they have any doubts,
00:13:07for example, about the cometary nature. It happens that we discover a comet far
00:13:11from the sun, it, for example, on large telescopes
00:13:14there is visible cometary nature, on small telescopes it
00:13:18is not yet visible, so some astronomers confirm
00:13:22the cometary nature, for example, the presence of such... a nebula around
00:13:25the head of the comet, while some astronomers refute it,
00:13:29then specialists look,
00:13:32naturally, all astronomers have their own credit
00:13:36of trust, yes, there are people who never make mistakes, there are people who have already
00:13:40made mistakes, then they are listened to less often,
00:13:44in the end, an official
00:13:46discovery takes place, and one of my comets does not
00:13:50bear my surname, because I discovered it as an asteroid
00:13:54with a small telescope.
00:14:27now it's a whole network of dedicated telescopes that are only involved
00:14:30in searching for dangerous objects, meaning comets are dangerous,
00:14:34they can be dangerous, meaning comets can approach Earth,
00:14:38so they need to be found, now, well, how do you
00:14:41look into a certain
00:14:44telescope takes pictures of a certain area of the sky or
00:14:48several times a night we get photos
00:14:51only at night, yes, optical telescopes only work at night.
00:14:59night residents, and so we get
00:15:03photos, roughly speaking, yes, in digital format on special
00:15:06cameras, which differ in many ways from
00:15:10ordinary cameras, they have a larger dynamic range,
00:15:13more sensitivity, but in general it's a black and white
00:15:17photograph, we get such photographs,
00:15:21a few passes a night, three or four
00:15:24passes, and then... to put it very
00:15:27simply, we look for movement in the frames, stars will remain
00:15:31stars in their places, because although they move, they have
00:15:34their own motion, but they are very far away,
00:15:37so their own motion is very small and it's impossible to detect
00:15:40it in a few hours, while asteroids and comets are much
00:15:44closer, they are residents of our solar system, so they
00:15:47shift slightly even in tens of minutes,
00:15:51so we generally filter them, meaning if it's a very fast object, it's
00:15:55either a distant satellite or a very close
00:15:58asteroid. We often find objects
00:16:02of space debris in highly elliptical orbits,
00:16:05near the apogee, that is...
00:16:37Earth, that's how it was with the Rosetta automatic
00:16:41station, and it was taken for an asteroid,
00:16:45only a few days later, when they started to build
00:16:48the orbit of the new asteroid, it turned out that it was suspiciously similar to
00:16:52the expected Rosetta station, which was supposed to fly by, well, it's
00:16:55a joint NASA and ESA, NASA and ESA, yes, and yes, it's
00:16:59a unique project for studying
00:17:02comets, the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet,
00:17:05that's how it happens. Did it land on it or just fly
00:17:09by? No, this was the first mission, not a flyby, but going into
00:17:13orbit. For the first time, we went into orbit around a comet's nucleus
00:17:16in 2014, for the first time,
00:17:20in November of the same year, we carried out
00:17:23a soft landing of the Philae
00:17:26lander. It wasn't entirely soft. The comet has very
00:17:29low gravity, so to land you need to secure
00:17:33yourself. This lander
00:17:36had a whole system of
00:17:39harpoons, a thrust engine, and none of it worked
00:17:42when it was needed, so Philae
00:17:46bounced across the comet, but in the end, it still hit
00:17:49a sheer slope and remained
00:17:52on the surface of the planet. Overall, it completed
00:17:55its scientific mission, it worked for about two days, until
00:17:59its battery ran out, it
00:18:01ended up in the shade, so the solar panels weren't working,
00:18:05and with the power it had left, it
00:18:09took amazing pictures, that is, we saw the surface
00:18:12for the first time, that is, the comet's landscape,
00:18:15a huge landscape, yes, mountains, sheer cliffs, and what was its
00:18:18approximate size? The size of the comet's nucleus
00:18:21is approximately 8x8 by 16 km, this is the very heart
00:18:25of the comet, yes, but when
00:18:29its gas and dust head and tail grow,
00:18:32you need to understand that the comet's head, the gas and dust
00:18:36envelope, can extend for hundreds of thousands of kilometers,
00:18:39the tail can extend for tens
00:18:42of millions of kilometers, millions, so
00:18:46essentially all this comes from this small
00:18:49nucleus, where ice evaporates, sublimates,
00:18:53why doesn't it completely evaporate? It evaporates,
00:18:57for example, Halley's comet, yes, every 76
00:19:01years, yes, it returns to us, we see it, we see it, yes, it was twice in the
00:19:05last century, in the sixth year. At the end of the last
00:19:08century, it was the thirtieth recorded
00:19:11close approach, meaning Halley's comet, we observe it, as we know
00:19:15now, we have been observing it since 240 BC,
00:19:18it was first observed by our ancient Chinese
00:19:22colleagues, ancient Chinese astronomers, in 240 BC,
00:19:25they recorded the passage of
00:19:28a comet. Now we already know, we have traced its orbit
00:19:32back, it is very well known, we have been observing it for centuries, but in
00:19:36the solar system there are... so-called dead comets, that is,
00:19:39these are objects that do not show cometary
00:19:43activity, that is, they are essentially asteroids, but located in a
00:19:47cometary orbit, that is, an elongated orbit, in which asteroids are not usually
00:19:50found. Mostly all asteroids live between the orbits of Mars
00:19:54and Jupiter, well, yes, the asteroid belt, yes. And there are
00:19:58asteroids called centaurs, for example, the Centaur
00:20:01group, they are very similar to
00:20:04comets, but they have not been found to have
00:20:08a gas-dust shell, nor a tail, nothing.
00:20:12Therefore, unfortunately, we have not flown to them, we have not taken
00:20:16samples, but most likely, these are precisely those cometary nuclei that have completely
00:20:19depleted their reserves of volatile substances, all the ice, the
00:20:23ice has evaporated, and it's just a rock. Once it was
00:20:26a comet, but now it's just
00:20:28a rock.
00:20:32Do you personally have your own telescope? No
00:20:36longer, because, yes,
00:20:39of course, I use the telescopes of our institute,
00:20:42they are all located far away, for example,
00:20:46in the mountains of Altai, they are located, in the Caucasus.
00:20:50Our telescopes are still operating in a
00:20:53number of foreign countries, for example, in Mongolia. Do you need to go there or
00:20:57can it be done remotely? No, it's all done mostly online now. So
00:21:01there's technical staff on site who maintain
00:21:04operability, but the telescope is
00:21:07robotic. A program of observations is loaded onto it, and
00:21:10it can figure out what the weather is like around
00:21:14it, whether there's cloudiness or not, open
00:21:17the roof, launch the observation plan, observe,
00:21:20stop, park in the right position, close
00:21:24the roof, that's it. Well, then the programs must be, I don't know,
00:21:28intelligence that will monitor, not necessarily stay awake at that
00:21:31time, roughly speaking, turn it on, go to sleep, wake up in the morning, here's your
00:21:35comet. In general, there's only truth here, well, first of all, you
00:21:39have to create software, we have our own. My
00:21:42telescopes, on which I work, operate under
00:21:45the control of software that I also wrote, that is,
00:21:49I'm a programmer too, yes, so when they tell me that
00:21:53the telescope observed itself, but I taught it to observe, so it's all
00:21:57fair. Do we have any institutions that train astronomers?
00:22:00MSU, at St. Petersburg
00:22:02University, in Kazan, at
00:22:06Volga Federal University they train astronomers, in
00:22:09Yekaterinburg, at Ural Federal University they also train
00:22:13astronomers. In general, if you have the desire,
00:22:16you can find a place where they will teach you, they
00:22:20exist in Russia. Not many astronomers are needed,
00:22:23of course, so this is definitely a niche
00:22:27specialization, a niche profession, but for those who
00:22:30have fallen in love with the sky, I urge everyone to go into
00:22:33astronomy, there are enough mysteries in astronomy
00:22:37for young children, for their children,
00:22:41for their children's children, so go into
00:22:43space, well, I don't need to tell you, right, the more we learn about
00:22:47space, the more we understand.
00:22:58These are the latest data on the solar system, it lasts about
00:23:0240 minutes, even I, considering that I thought
00:23:05I knew something about the solar system, about planets,
00:23:09asteroids, but first of all, it's very vividly made, very accessible, that
00:23:12is, in simple language, and it's just mesmerizing, that is, I watched
00:23:16it once, now I understand, but I need to watch it at least two more times to... well, to remember
00:23:20something. The latest data on our solar
00:23:23system? Yes, that's very important, it's precisely vivid and in simple
00:23:27language, to get kids interested,
00:23:30to tell them about the mysteries, to show beautiful photographs that
00:23:33exist, real computer graphics, all this now
00:23:37undoubtedly helps,
00:23:40and since I also popularize astronomy,
00:23:44I travel to planetariums in our country,
00:23:47and I can note that they are also developing,
00:23:51improving, being repaired, reconstructed, that is, you give
00:23:54lectures, yes, lectures are held there, you can come
00:23:58and watch a colorful and full-dome film,
00:24:01buy a book about space, if it caught your
00:24:04attention, interested you, that's how we draw future
00:24:08astronomers into our nets. In ancient times,
00:24:10it was believed, yes, that a comet was a harbinger of disaster, yes, that is, people
00:24:14were afraid, when they saw comets in the sky, yes,
00:24:17comets have been observed by people for probably more... years, I can
00:24:21say that on the ceiling
00:24:25of the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Pepi
00:24:28II, a comet is depicted, it is this
00:24:32comet that leads the pharaoh into the afterlife, and scientists
00:24:36asked themselves, what kind of comet could this be? It could be some
00:24:39unknown comet to us, or it could be a known one, which returns,
00:24:43returns, and there is a hypothesis, but not certain,
00:24:46of course, that it could have been the very same Comet Hale-Bopp, which...
00:24:58that is, its period is several thousand years, so there is such a connection of times, that is, Pharaoh
00:25:02Pepi I observed it, and we observed it, and this comet
00:25:06inspired me to discover my own comets, what an amazing
00:25:09connection of times. If we talk about fears, then indeed,
00:25:13since ancient people already
00:25:16knew about planets, yes, they knew about
00:25:19Mercury, Venus, Earth of course, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, that is, those
00:25:23planets that are visible to the naked eye, they already
00:25:26knew when these planets appeared in the sky, there was a certain order. Comets
00:25:30appeared in the sky suddenly, so they
00:25:33caused such fears, because
00:25:35they looked strange with these tails,
00:25:39people tried to predict some events
00:25:43based on these tails, their form, and the color of comets,
00:25:46only in the 15th, in the 17th century did people begin
00:25:49to understand that it is an object of the solar
00:25:52system, only at the very end of the 19th
00:25:56century, when we discovered the first near-Earth
00:25:59asteroid, which now bears the name
00:26:02Eros, we first understood that
00:26:05asteroids and comets can
00:26:08in principle approach Earth, before we thought that they flew
00:26:12far away, and we were just
00:26:13contemplators.
00:26:16By the early seventies, eighties of the last century, we knew
00:26:20approximately 60 near-Earth asteroids, again not many, we
00:26:23already knew thousands of asteroids, only 60 of them were
00:26:27near-Earth, and imagine the sizes,
00:26:30back then we were discovering large objects. That is, mostly several kilometers in size,
00:26:34that is, it's a quite large body, and the mass is huge, huge mass, well,
00:26:38roughly an asteroid with a diameter of 5
00:26:41km has a mass of approximately 150 billion
00:26:45tons. I give an example, when people ask me, what can
00:26:48we do if we discover such an asteroid? Bombing
00:26:51such an object of 150 billion tons is very difficult, when we
00:26:55also understand from orbit that it flies along an orbit at an average speed of 20
00:26:59km/s, if we calculate, I won't bore
00:27:02you with formulas, the kinetic energy
00:27:05the energy of this object, then for
00:27:09understanding, humanity can generate such energy
00:27:12in 286 million
00:27:15years, so unfortunately, we cannot yet fight such objects. Maybe there are
00:27:19some theoretical
00:27:22developments, and we welcome our
00:27:26viewers, of course, we are thinking about it. Well, firstly,
00:27:30we now know about 3500 near-Earth asteroids, meaning
00:27:33when we started looking for them, there were
00:27:36more and more and more of them, and we realized that in
00:27:40fact, Earth is in a very populated area of the solar
00:27:43system. Here there are also tens of thousands of near-Earth
00:27:46asteroids that fly past us. Of course,
00:27:50in their majority, they are small, tens or hundreds
00:27:54of meters, but still, the Chelyabinsk example. Before
00:27:57Chelyabinsk, astronomers believed that a near-Earth
00:28:00asteroid with a diameter of...
00:28:40I remind you that 1,600 people sought medical help,
00:28:43two people ended up in intensive care, only doctors
00:28:46saved them, so this needs to be taken
00:28:50seriously. We are saying this not because we want
00:28:54to scare people or somehow use this information, but because we must calmly
00:28:58and thoroughly prepare for it, because
00:29:01collisions in the system and in any planetary system are
00:29:05an absolutely natural evolutionary process. In the
00:29:08early solar system, there were many more.
00:29:12Now everything is much simpler, but asteroids
00:29:15are flying towards us, and of course, if we want to preserve our
00:29:19civilization, we need to think about this. Astronomers have a saying
00:29:22concerning the asteroid hazard, that astronomers
00:29:26don't ask whether a collision will happen or not,
00:29:29there's only one question: when will it happen? Right now, we are
00:29:32trying to track these dangerous objects, and a lot has been done
00:29:35here. We know about more than
00:29:3995% of near-Earth asteroids with a diameter
00:29:43of over a kilometer, meaning these are objects that can
00:29:47cause a continental catastrophe, but
00:29:51we don't know many objects
00:29:54with diameters of hundreds of meters, and even
00:29:57less do we know about objects a few tens
00:30:00of meters in size, this knowledge is even more vague, as we
00:30:04now understand, Chelyabinsk showed that even an object with a diameter
00:30:08of 50 meters can, in principle, literally and figuratively,
00:30:12cause a stir. Well, there's a method, right, of soft and hard power, and
00:30:15hard power, what is that?
00:30:19The method of brute force, it's clear, meaning to break,
00:30:23destroy, hit, deflect. It seems very
00:30:26simple, we've all watched movies where we land on an
00:30:30asteroid, drill.
00:30:32drill, yes, by the way, that's where we place nuclear weapons, and that's correctly shown, because
00:30:36when people say, "Why drill, let's just detonate a nuclear bomb
00:30:40next to it," the main destructive effect is
00:30:44again the shock wave, from a nuclear explosion. In
00:30:47space, there's no medium for the transmission of this shock
00:30:50wave, so yes, we will indeed vaporize
00:30:53part of the substance, the asteroid will receive a certain reactive
00:30:57impulse, but according to calculations,
00:31:00this will not be enough, especially for
00:31:02objects the size of hundreds of meters or even
00:31:06kilometers. If we place a nuclear bomb,
00:31:10an atomic bomb, inside the asteroid, in a medium for shock wave
00:31:14transmission, this will be much more effective. The deeper we drill and
00:31:18place the bomb closer to the center of the asteroid's mass, the higher the
00:31:21efficiency of the explosion will be. Well, imagine that we need to land on
00:31:25an asteroid with a diameter of 100 meters and drill 50
00:31:29meters deep. This should be done by some
00:31:33robots. In general, it's still technically quite difficult. It won't break into exactly two
00:31:37halves that will fly around, and we don't know, this is precisely
00:31:41thousands of pieces that will fly in different directions, yes, that's another
00:31:44question here. Firstly, all of this is not controllable, not calculated, because
00:31:47we don't know how it will break apart, into how many objects. If we
00:31:51completely destroy it, then
00:31:54not one object, but shrapnel from hundreds
00:31:57of millions of small fragments the size
00:32:01of the Chelyabinsk meteorite will fly towards Earth.
00:32:04Then the question is, what's better, a collision with one
00:32:07body with a diameter of 100 meters, for example, or
00:32:10a collision with a hundred? Maybe they'll burn up if
00:32:14they're small? Partially, they will certainly burn up, small bodies will certainly burn up,
00:32:18but bodies of decameter size, say 10, 20,
00:32:2115 meters, it's not certain they will burn up, and we can
00:32:25imagine if there's such a shower of bodies, similar to the Chelyabinsk one, not
00:32:29one body, but a whole shower. So here are many
00:32:33questions, both technical ones,
00:32:36like what we'll get in the end. We can just hit
00:32:39the asteroid, we don't actually need to destroy it, we don't need to
00:32:43annihilate it for it to disappear. We can push it, shift
00:32:47it a little from its orbit. This is still
00:32:50brute force, but we need to, yes, with one impact,
00:32:53an impulse, right, remember in orbit. For this,
00:32:56it is proposed to use a kinetic impactor, meaning we accelerate some
00:32:59spacecraft, hit the asteroid, and
00:33:03we change its orbit. Technically, we can already
00:33:06do this. In 2022, such an
00:33:09experiment was conducted, we indeed hit a small
00:33:12asteroid and...
00:33:45you need to do some tandem, that is, kinetic impact, impact by
00:33:49strike, yes, impact by
00:33:51explosion, that is, a super-accelerated
00:33:54torpedo that hits and then explodes,
00:33:58possibly hits, penetrates,
00:34:01a shaped charge, a shaped space
00:34:03charge.
00:34:07A new question arose in the current political situation: a certain
00:34:10country needs to launch a powerful hydrogen warhead
00:34:16into orbit, which is currently prohibited by space laws, and by law. In general, even
00:34:20if we make some exception, what
00:34:24guarantees do we have that when
00:34:27a certain country launches this anti-asteroid bomb
00:34:31into space, it won't say, "Well, plans
00:34:33have changed, we are now playing
00:34:37a different game," right? So we have no such guarantees, which makes this a very complex question,
00:34:41not just technical or scientific, but political too.
00:34:45These are methods of brute force. Methods of soft power involve
00:34:48continuous but prolonged influence,
00:34:52similar to how in rocket technology there are chemical
00:34:55engines, very powerful, generating a strong impulse, but which can
00:34:59operate for a limited time. We also have, for example, ion
00:35:03engines, which generate small impulses, but they
00:35:06can operate for years. It's the same here. Well, this
00:35:10needs to be done in advance, so yes, we must handle this
00:35:14object for decades.
00:35:45It is calculated that we can slightly
00:35:48change its orbit so that it will at some point fly
00:35:52thousands of kilometers from Earth. Truly,
00:35:55the imagination of scientists is boundless, meaning it's both
00:35:58engines and...