Catch of a lifetime: Scientists’ Starfish eyes asteroid rubble
For two Southwest Research Institute scientists, the best thing about Tuesday’s launch of the Jeff Bezos-funded Blue Origin rocket from Van Horn was not so much the promise that an elite few may soon orbit in space, but that a novel asteroid-sampling device was on board and taking the first big step toward scientific stardom.
The founder of Amazon, believed to be the richest person on the planet, formed Blue Origin in 2000 with the intent of one day taking healthy and wealthy regular citizens above the 62-mile boundary that generally defines the entrance to outer space. But in the meantime, Blue Origin has tapped into the profitable side business of testing new technologies and carrying along scientific experiments.
Alex Parker and Dan Durda are two Boulder, Colo.-based scientists with SWRI, the San Antonio research lab, who watched intently from the West Texas desert outside Van Horn as Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket carried their baby, the Box of Rocks Experiment II (BORE II).
It featured a new technology, the Clockwork Starfish sampling device, which they hope will retrieve asteroid debris.
“For innovation,” Parker said, “we looked to nature and millions of years of evolution.”
When folded up, the Starfish on this week’s flight was about the size of a metal coffee cup commuters might take to work. Spread out, these little robots are only about 5 inches across.
Inspired by the aquatic echinoderm, which turns part of itself inside out to swallow prey larger than its mouth, the Starfish is a tetrahedron with magnetized sides that will be able to attach itself to asteroid dust and rubble, which usually contains magnetic material. The Starfish will store the material by turning itself inside out and then return to its mother spacecraft.
That’s the plan, at least. Tuesday’s rocket launch let the scientists see how the Starfish would behave in some low-gravity situa
tions, just one of many tests that will be required before its true mission in life: attaching to the asteroid Apophis as it passes Earth on April 13, 2029.
“To have an asteroid of this size (about 1,120 feet wide) pass this close and so predictably is an event that may happen only about once every 1,500 years,” said Parker, the experiment’s principal scientist. “There’s no danger to us. We know where hundreds of thousands of asteroids are with exact precision.”
But time is the biggest obstacle, Durda said.
“We must intersect with Sir Isaac Newton and all the natural constraints of having the planets perfectly align so that a spacecraft can rendezvous with the device,” he said.
The BORE II team, which also includes SWRI research scientist Akbar Whizin, engineering technologist Michael Shoffner and senior research engineer Brian Pike, has only about a decade to perfect the Starfish’s hardware and then do the tough part.
“A long sequence of things must go perfectly,” Parker said, “including getting the Starfish to launch themselves off the surface” of the asteroid.
To improve their chances in 2029, they hope to deploy per
haps 100 or more of them to Apophis in hopes that at least several dozen will successfully land, perform and return.
They are surprisingly cheap in materials cost — less than $100 apiece, said Parker, who assembled this week’s prototype by hand. Tuesday’s version of the Starfish was a 3D-printed hard-yet-bendable plastic, but future models will likely be aluminum or titanium.
And their skilled design and
labor costs would make the Starfish a bit more expensive one day on, say, Amazon.
Finding the asteroid rubble won’t be that difficult. The scientists say asteroids have been pummeled for millions of years by space clutter hurtling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, leaving their surfaces covered with dust, pea-sized gravel and larger chunks. And the SWRI team won’t need that much. About 4 pounds would be con
sidered a great success; anything over 150 grams, or 5.25 ounces, will be acceptable.
While scientists have studied asteroids for decades and gotten very small samples, Parker said, “we’ve never been able to look inside an asteroid with a seismic study before, so this natural active seismic experiment from the Apophis flyby could give us our first real look into how small asteroids are built. It would be a strong test of all the theories we’ve built up over the years.”
“These asteroids that pass so close to the Earth are wonderful targets for future resource utilization in space,” Durda added. “They are gold mines in the sky. For both our safety, the Earth’s, and for economic reasons, we want to interact with asteroids.”
Durda said the idea of sampling an asteroid’s surface has been percolating since at least 2005 — Apophis was discovered in 2004 — when he discussed the possibilities at a scientific conference in Rio de Janeiro.
Is it possible, Parker was asked, that all those Starfish might simply miss Apophis?
“I can’t say I would have ever made a mathematical mistake that bad,” he laughed. “If that were possible, the mission would have never gotten off the ground.”
Parker and Durda don’t hesitate to say that successfully putting the Starfish on Apophis could define their careers.
“This will be the first time that something I’ve assembled has gone into space. That’s a pretty big threshold,” said Parker, who will turn 42 when Apophis is at its closest to Earth.
“We like what we do,” Durda said, “and we are at the frontier of knowledge. I consider myself very, very lucky. This is immense fun.”