WEBVTT 00:00:10.409 --> 00:00:12.409 Ok. So are you ready to be transported out of this world? 00:00:16.388 --> 00:00:23.337 Yeah. All right. Well, imagine that you were able to step into a time 00:00:23.370 --> 00:00:30.355 machine and go back far, far back in time to a time and place where the 00:00:30.388 --> 00:00:36.695 solar system was not even existing at the time place in the galaxy near a 00:00:36.728 --> 00:00:43.246 massive star that's about to go supernova. Imagine this is about 5 billion 00:00:43.279 --> 00:00:48.256 years ago. 00:00:48.289 --> 00:00:53.686 So you see the supernova going off from a safe distance, of course, and it 00:00:53.719 --> 00:00:57.835 releases the energy equivalent of something like quadrillions upon 00:00:57.868 --> 00:01:03.217 quadrillions of nuclear bombs. And the shock wave that goes out, it 00:01:03.250 --> 00:01:07.915 compresses some of the interstellar gas and dust that's nearby and it 00:01:07.948 --> 00:01:13.605 triggers the formation of new stars. One of these new stars is our very 00:01:13.638 --> 00:01:19.516 own star, the sun. And now imagine that you're looking at the swirling 00:01:19.549 --> 00:01:25.736 cloud of gas and dust around our newborn son and you look closely and it's 00:01:25.769 --> 00:01:31.355 cooling down slowly and you start to form the very first solids, the first 00:01:31.388 --> 00:01:36.897 millimeter centimeter size solids from this cloud of gas and dust and 00:01:36.930 --> 00:01:41.227 these little pebbles that are forming, they collect together, they stick 00:01:41.260 --> 00:01:46.036 together they form these little rocks and then those stick together, they 00:01:46.069 --> 00:01:50.257 form these boulders and the boulders stick together to form asteroids and 00:01:50.290 --> 00:01:56.236 the asteroids accumulate together to form planets like the earth. 00:01:56.269 --> 00:01:59.486 So 00:01:59.519 --> 00:02:06.587 if you were to grab a little bit of the earliest pebbles that were forming 00:02:06.620 --> 00:02:11.156 in that environment, squish them together, put them in a bag and bring 00:02:11.189 --> 00:02:14.517 them in that time machine back to the present day. What might that look 00:02:14.550 --> 00:02:22.550 like? This is exactly what it would look like. And this is a meteorite. 00:02:22.649 --> 00:02:27.505 So, meteorites really are the remnants from that earliest phase of the 00:02:27.538 --> 00:02:32.047 earliest history of our solar system. They are, in fact our time machine 00:02:32.080 --> 00:02:36.876 to be able to go back in time and look at that space and time when our 00:02:36.909 --> 00:02:42.136 solar system was just starting to form, 00:02:42.169 --> 00:02:45.126 I'm gonna step back just a little bit and, and talk about what a meteorite 00:02:45.159 --> 00:02:50.906 really is. These are rocky or metal rich objects that come from elsewhere 00:02:50.939 --> 00:02:55.335 in our solar system. Most of them have traveled billions of miles in 00:02:55.368 --> 00:02:59.186 interplanetary space before they've fallen on the earth and they've 00:02:59.219 --> 00:03:04.156 survived passes to the earth's atmosphere and they fall on the surface and 00:03:04.189 --> 00:03:07.225 can be recovered. 00:03:07.258 --> 00:03:13.396 So that's meteorites. Now, what my goal is in this talk 00:03:13.429 --> 00:03:17.946 is to essentially convince you that meteorites are not just some oddball 00:03:17.979 --> 00:03:23.827 rare phenomenon. They are fundamental to our understanding of our past and 00:03:23.860 --> 00:03:30.025 of our future. My work, which I'm, I'm really passionate about, um, it 00:03:30.058 --> 00:03:35.816 basically involves figuring out uh clever ways of decoding the information 00:03:35.849 --> 00:03:41.316 that's encoded in the chemical chemicals that make up these rocks. And 00:03:41.349 --> 00:03:46.767 we're doing that in my laboratory by looking at the different components 00:03:46.800 --> 00:03:50.146 that make up these materials and trying to learn something about when they 00:03:50.179 --> 00:03:54.846 formed and how they formed. 00:03:54.879 --> 00:03:58.475 So, what I'm gonna do today, there's so much wealth of information that 00:03:58.508 --> 00:04:03.025 we've garnered from uh from meteorites that it would be impossible to 00:04:03.058 --> 00:04:06.156 cover that in the, in the space of 15 minutes here. What I'm gonna do 00:04:06.189 --> 00:04:12.005 though is to condense that down to five essentials, five things that 00:04:12.038 --> 00:04:16.765 anybody who cares about the future of our planet, anybody who is curious 00:04:16.798 --> 00:04:21.515 about our past uh should know about meteorites. So the number one thing is 00:04:21.548 --> 00:04:28.166 that meteorites tell us that the age of our solar system is 4.5679 00:04:28.199 --> 00:04:30.947 plus minus 0.0003 00:04:30.980 --> 00:04:38.217 billion years old. How do we know that age? This is actually measured in 00:04:38.250 --> 00:04:43.627 my laboratory using radioactive elements that we use as clocks in these 00:04:43.660 --> 00:04:50.406 meteorites. This is almost like figuring out the age of a middle aged man 00:04:50.439 --> 00:04:55.916 to um within a day. So you can exactly precisely determine exactly the day 00:04:55.949 --> 00:04:59.765 , the month, the year that this person was born to within a day. So this 00:04:59.798 --> 00:05:05.726 is an extremely precise age, but it matters, we need to know exactly what 00:05:05.759 --> 00:05:10.236 the context is for all of the events that happened following the formation 00:05:10.269 --> 00:05:14.546 of our solar system. And this is the age that gives us that context for 00:05:14.579 --> 00:05:17.916 the timeline of everything else that's happened in our solar system. 00:05:17.949 --> 00:05:21.116 Following the initial formation like the formation of the planets 00:05:21.149 --> 00:05:25.986 formation of the earth and the moon, the origin of life in our planet. 00:05:26.019 --> 00:05:32.015 Number two, there are materials preserved in meteorites, little tiny dust 00:05:32.048 --> 00:05:36.765 grains that are older than our solar system. So this little vial that you 00:05:36.798 --> 00:05:40.406 see here that's got this cloudy material in the bottom. These are billions 00:05:40.439 --> 00:05:44.726 upon billions of tiny diamonds that condensed in the atmospheres of other 00:05:44.759 --> 00:05:50.036 stars before the sun was even born by looking at the chemistry of these 00:05:50.069 --> 00:05:53.437 little tiny grains. We can learn something about the evolution of the 00:05:53.470 --> 00:05:57.286 galaxy before the sun was even born. 00:05:57.319 --> 00:06:00.116 Very cool. 00:06:00.149 --> 00:06:05.486 So you think that meteorites are rare? Well, think again, because you're 00:06:05.519 --> 00:06:10.137 actually standing on a planet that's a huge agglomeration of a ton of 00:06:10.170 --> 00:06:15.627 meteorites or more than a ton of meteorites really um meteorites. You can 00:06:15.660 --> 00:06:19.366 think of them as the lego building blocks of planets like the earth and 00:06:19.399 --> 00:06:24.127 the moon. This actually is a picture of actually multiple images that were 00:06:24.160 --> 00:06:29.336 taken by uh a NASA spacecraft called the Deep Space Climate Observatory. I 00:06:29.369 --> 00:06:33.336 love these images. Uh They're some of the best selfies of our, of our home 00:06:33.369 --> 00:06:39.757 planet. Um And you can see the moon moving in front of the earth here and 00:06:39.790 --> 00:06:46.075 it looks very serene, but this is nothing like what our planet looked like 00:06:46.108 --> 00:06:50.437 4.5 billion ago years ago when it was just starting to form, after the 00:06:50.470 --> 00:06:56.416 formation of our solar system, it was forming by the agglomeration of 00:06:56.449 --> 00:07:01.627 giant meteorites coming together to form, form our planet. And this 00:07:01.660 --> 00:07:07.616 process was so energetic that the entire surface of our planet at the time 00:07:07.649 --> 00:07:14.096 was covered with an ocean of magma. And as the earth gradually was cooling 00:07:14.129 --> 00:07:20.257 down, uh there was another huge impact of a mars sized meteorite that 00:07:20.290 --> 00:07:24.796 crashed into the earth ejected this debris into orbit around the earth. 00:07:24.829 --> 00:07:28.697 And we think that the moon actually formed from a coalescence of that 00:07:28.730 --> 00:07:33.846 debris that was surrounding the earth. And so meteorites really are 00:07:33.879 --> 00:07:39.856 essential to understanding the origin of the earth. And the moon 00:07:39.889 --> 00:07:44.116 number four meteorites likely brought the raw materials for life to the 00:07:44.149 --> 00:07:48.825 early earth. So this is not just organic compounds like the amino acids 00:07:48.858 --> 00:07:51.507 that were brought in by some of the types of meteorites that we have in 00:07:51.540 --> 00:07:57.205 our collections, but also uh bio essential elements like phosphorus. They 00:07:57.238 --> 00:08:02.536 were brought in by meteorites and eventually led to the type of chemistry 00:08:02.569 --> 00:08:08.205 that was required to take us from, from the chemistry to life. And so the 00:08:08.238 --> 00:08:11.796 reason why you and I are here today, it could very well be because of the 00:08:11.829 --> 00:08:16.745 material that was seeded to the early earth by meteorites. 00:08:16.778 --> 00:08:22.176 And number five meteorites have changed the course of the evolution of 00:08:22.209 --> 00:08:27.257 life on our own planet. And as you all, well, most of you probably know 00:08:27.290 --> 00:08:32.096 that 65 million years ago, there was a large b light, something like 10 00:08:32.129 --> 00:08:37.956 kilometers or six miles in diameter that crashed into the Yucatan Basin. 00:08:37.989 --> 00:08:42.635 And it resulted in the extinction of more than three quarters of all 00:08:42.668 --> 00:08:46.417 species on the earth, including the dinosaurs. 00:08:46.450 --> 00:08:51.505 So that particular event, that extinction event was also important because 00:08:51.538 --> 00:08:57.446 that's what led to the possibility of a small warm blooded mammals to 00:08:57.479 --> 00:09:01.927 flourish and eventually made the way for humans to be able to exist here. 00:09:01.960 --> 00:09:06.167 And that's the reason why you and I are are here in this place and this 00:09:06.200 --> 00:09:11.145 time. So that's, that's amazing, right? So meteorites five ways in which 00:09:11.178 --> 00:09:15.385 really they define our past and the course of evolution of life origin and 00:09:15.418 --> 00:09:21.625 evolution of life on our planet. What about the future? Well, 00:09:21.658 --> 00:09:26.086 our cosmic neighborhood is teeming with asteroids, 00:09:26.119 --> 00:09:31.895 these red, yellow and green dots that are shown here in this visualization. 00:09:31.928 --> 00:09:35.726 They're showing all of the known media known asteroids at the current 00:09:35.759 --> 00:09:43.106 time and most of these are larger than about a kilometer. There are about 00:09:43.139 --> 00:09:47.287 hundreds of thousands of other smaller asteroids out there that we've not 00:09:47.320 --> 00:09:52.625 even detected yet. So these smaller asteroids are probably not going to 00:09:52.658 --> 00:09:56.895 cause the type of glo global catastrophe that killed off the dinosaurs, 00:09:56.928 --> 00:10:02.885 but they're probably enough to cause a lot of death and destruction if 00:10:02.918 --> 00:10:07.586 they were to hit a large populated area. And just to sort of make that 00:10:07.619 --> 00:10:13.316 point, um, many of you probably been up to me up in northern Arizona and 00:10:13.349 --> 00:10:17.667 that was actually created by an object that's about, that's estimated to 00:10:17.700 --> 00:10:21.645 be about 100 ft in diameter. And it created a crater that's about a mile 00:10:21.678 --> 00:10:27.616 wide. So this is an event that happened about 50,000 years ago now. And at 00:10:27.649 --> 00:10:30.657 the time when this happened, the energy that it deposited was the 00:10:30.690 --> 00:10:35.967 equivalent of something like 100 and 50 atom bombs. And so that you can 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:39.427 imagine the type of destruction to plant life and animal life that 00:10:39.460 --> 00:10:42.866 happened in this part of the continent as a result of that impact. And 00:10:42.899 --> 00:10:47.456 that could be devastating for any large city if it were to happen today. 00:10:47.489 --> 00:10:52.246 Now, that event happened 50,000 years ago. And the probability we estimate 00:10:52.279 --> 00:10:59.206 for uh an impact that size 100 ft or so in diameter uh to happen is it's 00:10:59.239 --> 00:11:04.217 estimated to be once every 50 to 100,000 years. So that's something we're 00:11:04.250 --> 00:11:07.875 basically due for another one. It could happen next month or it could 00:11:07.908 --> 00:11:13.596 happen 50,000 years from now. But it's not a question of if it's a matter 00:11:13.629 --> 00:11:17.586 of when there's going to be a large asteroid that's gonna be on a 00:11:17.619 --> 00:11:23.816 collision course to the earth. And so what are we gonna do? About it. So 00:11:23.849 --> 00:11:30.145 all of the natural hazards that we know about asteroid collision is the 00:11:30.178 --> 00:11:35.157 one that could essentially wipe out our species. But it's also the one 00:11:35.190 --> 00:11:38.246 that is imminently preventable. 00:11:38.279 --> 00:11:43.525 How are we gonna prevent it? Well, there's 22 ways that we actually, 00:11:43.558 --> 00:11:47.537 there's two things that we have to do. It's not one or the other. We have 00:11:47.570 --> 00:11:50.736 to be studying meteorites. We have to be studying asteroids to understand 00:11:50.769 --> 00:11:54.706 their chemistry, their structure. Uh We have to be looking at the how the 00:11:54.739 --> 00:11:58.206 orbits of these asteroids evolve. And all of these pieces of information 00:11:58.239 --> 00:12:03.037 will be necessary to develop the strategies to redirect asteroids that 00:12:03.070 --> 00:12:07.297 might be headed on a collision course of the earth. And then of course, we 00:12:07.330 --> 00:12:14.667 have to also inspire the next generation of uh of Children of kids to be 00:12:14.700 --> 00:12:20.255 willing to invest in the future and to be good stewards of our home planet. 00:12:20.288 --> 00:12:25.106 So we are actually doing all of these things. Uh We're studying 00:12:25.139 --> 00:12:29.005 meteorites, we're studying asteroids trying to understand what we can 00:12:29.038 --> 00:12:32.677 about their composition about their structure. We're also using space 00:12:32.710 --> 00:12:39.875 rocks to inspire kids of all ages and it's actually kind of a, a wonderful 00:12:39.908 --> 00:12:42.657 thing. I don't know if you've ever experienced that when you see a 10 year 00:12:42.690 --> 00:12:47.765 old, when they, when they were totally enthralled with something I've seen 00:12:47.798 --> 00:12:51.946 these kids that when you give them the space rock to hold in their hand, 00:12:51.979 --> 00:12:54.645 they are completely awe inspired. Just knowing that they're holding 00:12:54.678 --> 00:12:59.576 something in their hand that is older than the earth, that's the oldest 00:12:59.609 --> 00:13:03.606 rock in the solar system. It's an amazing thing to watch. And I wanna be 00:13:03.639 --> 00:13:10.885 able to use that same inspiration to excite or spark an interest in stem 00:13:10.918 --> 00:13:15.816 fields. Basically science, technology, engineering, math. So using space 00:13:15.849 --> 00:13:20.927 rocks as a vehicle for, for inspiring that kind of interest, um How are we 00:13:20.960 --> 00:13:25.086 gonna do that? Well, we've been doing that locally um for many, many years. 00:13:25.119 --> 00:13:29.346 But what we'd like to do is to extend that globally. And we're doing, 00:13:29.379 --> 00:13:33.496 hoping to do that by taking kids on a virtual field trip of the solar 00:13:33.529 --> 00:13:38.736 system. And how we're gonna do that is we're gonna create an immersive 00:13:38.769 --> 00:13:42.086 virtual environment. And this is something that the Center for media 00:13:42.119 --> 00:13:45.946 studies is collaborating with the Center for um education through 00:13:45.979 --> 00:13:50.486 exploration here at A SU and we are developing this immersive environment 00:13:50.519 --> 00:13:54.326 where you'll be able to walk into the vault of our meteorite collection. 00:13:54.359 --> 00:13:58.476 You'll be able to go to any one of the drawers and open them up and we 00:13:58.509 --> 00:14:04.427 have 3d color laser scans of all of our meteorites that you can basically 00:14:04.460 --> 00:14:08.566 pick up a meteorite from a drawer and look at it in three dimensions to 00:14:08.599 --> 00:14:12.287 experience it as a three dimensional object. There'll be embedded videos 00:14:12.320 --> 00:14:15.706 that will provide information about the samples and what we're learning 00:14:15.739 --> 00:14:20.537 from these types of materials. And so we'd like to be able to make this 00:14:20.570 --> 00:14:24.446 really exciting for kids to be able to explore places in the solar system 00:14:24.479 --> 00:14:29.667 where they may some someday hope to go perhaps and maybe they will never 00:14:29.700 --> 00:14:32.307 be able to go, but they will be able to vicariously go there through 00:14:32.340 --> 00:14:36.265 looking at these rocks. They'll actually get to be geologists studying 00:14:36.298 --> 00:14:39.765 rocks on other worlds. 00:14:39.798 --> 00:14:43.407 They'll be able to go to places like this primitive asteroid like this 00:14:43.440 --> 00:14:49.566 asteroid. It AAA and look by looking at rocks like this one which we think 00:14:49.599 --> 00:14:54.346 come from asteroids like this, they'll be able to visit the asteroid Vesta. 00:14:54.379 --> 00:14:59.356 This is the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt. And we think 00:14:59.389 --> 00:15:03.037 that this is actually a small planet which underwent complete melting 00:15:03.070 --> 00:15:06.826 early in the history of the solar system such that uh the all of the iron 00:15:06.859 --> 00:15:11.057 nickel metal sank to the core and you have a dense mantle and a lighter 00:15:11.090 --> 00:15:14.446 crust just like the structure of the earth. And in fact, we have 00:15:14.479 --> 00:15:18.191 meteorites in our collections that come from the crust of this asteroid. 00:15:18.224 --> 00:15:22.682 There's a large impact basin in the southern part of this asteroid which 00:15:22.715 --> 00:15:27.390 was uh studied quite well actually by a NASA spacecraft called Dawn. And 00:15:27.423 --> 00:15:30.571 we now know that these types of meteorites that we have in our collections 00:15:30.604 --> 00:15:33.571 come from this very asteroid. And so we'll be able to explore the geology 00:15:33.604 --> 00:15:37.066 of this one asteroid by looking at these things and then of course, there 00:15:37.099 --> 00:15:40.275 are meteorites that we know come from the moon. And so we'll be able to 00:15:40.308 --> 00:15:42.986 explore, the kids, will be able to explore the geology of the moon by 00:15:43.019 --> 00:15:47.047 looking at rocks like this one which we believe comes from the highland 00:15:47.080 --> 00:15:52.076 part Harlem highlands of the moon. And then finally, there's not been a 00:15:52.109 --> 00:15:55.846 sample return a spacecraft that's gone to Mars and brought back samples. 00:15:55.879 --> 00:16:00.326 But we've got these free samples from Mars. These are meteorites that come 00:16:00.359 --> 00:16:05.287 from Mars. And this is an example of one that comes from an area on Mars 00:16:05.320 --> 00:16:10.446 that had volcanism happening on it um about 200 million years ago. So this 00:16:10.479 --> 00:16:14.057 is a relatively young rock that's coming from the surface of Mars. You'll 00:16:14.090 --> 00:16:18.436 be able to do geology by looking at these, these samples and trying to 00:16:18.469 --> 00:16:21.726 understand the history of that planet through these rocks. And so the goal 00:16:21.759 --> 00:16:26.476 really for us is to try to make it really exciting for kids uh to study 00:16:26.509 --> 00:16:31.395 the space rock to basically um learn something about places where these 00:16:31.428 --> 00:16:35.826 rocks come from, to explore the solar system through them to be inspired 00:16:35.859 --> 00:16:39.836 by, by looking at these uh by trying to understand the environments where 00:16:39.869 --> 00:16:43.486 they form. And we want to inspire them to be curious about not just the 00:16:43.519 --> 00:16:48.246 planet that they live on but the solar system and the universe that they 00:16:48.279 --> 00:16:53.836 inhabit. And to recognize that for the first time in the history of this 00:16:53.869 --> 00:16:59.316 planet. There's a species that inhabits our planet as human beings that 00:16:59.349 --> 00:17:03.936 have the capacity to actually do something about an asteroid that might be 00:17:03.969 --> 00:17:08.137 on a collision course to the earth. So 00:17:08.170 --> 00:17:14.085 I believe that we can use space rocks as a means of inspiring kids to 00:17:14.118 --> 00:17:20.016 recognize that the future is what we can, what we choose to make it. Thank 00:17:20.049 --> 00:17:22.049 you.