Chasing Chicxulub 2: Inside Astrophysicist Dora Foehring's Mission to Avert Armageddon

Dr. Dora Föhring, planetary defense scientist at ESA, discusses Earth's cosmic shield against asteroids. From observing elusive space rocks to actively deflecting them, she shares insights on near-Earth objects, the groundbreaking DART mission, and the future of planetary protection.

Key Topics:

• Challenges and importance of near-Earth asteroid detection
• Earth's asteroid impact history and future risks
• The DART mission: Humanity's first asteroid deflection test
• Current state and future of planetary defense
• Search for extraterrestrial life in our cosmic neighborhood
• Personal journey and adventures in astronomy

Timestamps: 
00:01:49 - Observing near-Earth asteroids: Challenges and techniques 
05:22 - Importance of studying Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) 
08:09 - Frequency and potential impact of asteroid collisions 
10:21 - Asteroid sizes: From meter-sized to planet-killers 
17:22 - Apophis: The asteroid making a close approach in 2029 
19:42 - Getting an asteroid namesake: The naming process 
22:30 - Inside the DART mission: Changing an asteroid's course 
25:17 - Are we ready for regular asteroid deflection? 
27:20 - The search for alien life: Where should we look? 
29:08 - An astronomer's travelogue: La Palma, Hawaii, Italy 
32:06 - From sci-fi to reality: Dr. Föhring's path to astronomy 
35:24 - Would you go to space? Thoughts on cosmic travel

Notable Quotes: "If you wait long enough, something's bound to hit you." - Dr. Dora Föhring on large asteroid impacts

"I think there are crazy people, I'm crazy, there are people doing crazy things all the time. Just I guess the question would be like, what are you trying to achieve with that?" - Dr. Föhring on space travel

Espresso for the Mind: Be a "yes person." Embrace new challenges and experiences, stepping out of your comfort zone in both personal and professional life. Dr. Föhring's journey from stargazing child to asteroid defender exemplifies the rewards of saying yes to the unknown.

Guest's Song Choice for the Aspiring Astronaut's Playlist on Spotify: "Hell on Earth" by Iron Maiden

Follow-up:

• Explore ESA's planetary defense initiatives: https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Planetary_Defence
• Watch DART mission impact footage: https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart
• Dive into the Near-Earth Object database: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/

Space Café Podcast Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/47P7oLrueWMvhYGxcerIw6?si=75b7feef7f144e23

You can find us on Spotify and Apple Podcast!

Please visit us at SpaceWatch.Global, subscribe to our newsletters. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter!

Transcript

SCP_116_Master

[00:00:01] Markus: What if I told you a planet killing asteroid could be hurtling toward Earth right now? 

 Hello everyone, this is the Space Cafe Podcast, and I'm Markus. 

 That's right, the next extinction level event could happen not in our lifetime. But, well Sometime in the future, a Chicxulub type asteroid, the kind that ended 200 million years of dinosaur dominance, might already be on its way.

We do not know when or if Chicxulub 2 might strike, but the threat is real. Luckily, we have what the dinosaurs didn't, planetary defense strategies. At least in development. Today we're diving into the fascinating and urgent world of near Earth asteroids and planetary defense. Joining us is Dr. Dora Föhring, planetary defense scientist at the European Space Agency ESA, and an adventurer at the forefront of tracking the celestial threats.

Dr. Föhring was part of the international team that successfully altered an asteroid's orbit for the first time in human history. She'll share her experiences from observing elusive asteroids to participating in humanity's first asteroid deflection mission, DART.

Are we ready to defend Earth from a cosmic impact? Well, let's try to find out! 

[00:01:49] Dora: I remember when I was an undergraduate, we had to do labs, astronomy labs, and we had a bunch of different projects that we could choose from. And most of them were fairly straightforward, globular clusters, things like that. And I remember there was this one project on near Earth asteroids and the instructor was saying, Oh, this one's really challenging.

And I was like, that's what we should do. And I think what first drew me to trying to observe near Earth asteroids is exactly that it's technically a very challenging thing to do because many times, if you're just observing, don't want to diss anyone's work, of course, but many times you're just observing, taking pictures of the sky, you can you're looking at stationary things and you 

[00:02:47] Markus: can Try to 

[00:02:47] Dora: get your perfect adaptive optics, your perfect multi slit spectrograph on there, and and you just sit on the object.

So I did some spectroscopy during my time, and you're just sitting there. So I find, The really exciting thing about NEOs is that they're there when you have the chance. You have to get them because you might not get a chance the day after. I'm, I was doing my PhD in the UK, so it was very cloudy.

You took whatever chance you got. That was like my initial introduction to NEOs. And then afterwards I got a chance to observe NEOs when I was on La Palma. Even though that was not the main focus of my PhD, but so as a student support astronomer, we would often get kind of requests or director's requests of, okay, here are some targets on this night that you can observe.

And many times people requested things that were like, oh, it has to be perfect photometric night Perfect seeing, arc second seeing or 0. 7. And they would almost never get observed. But then when people ask for NEOs, many times you're just interested in getting the position very accurately.

Oh yeah it's partially cloudy or it's partially, the weather's not that great, but yeah, we can get that NEO for you. So I ended up doing a lot of NEO observations and then after my PhD somehow, um, I was in the perfect position to, to go on to, to I did a postdoc in NEOs in Hawaii, but I should add to that, so my actual PhD was also specialized in instrumentation.

That started with, again, that I always liked tinkering with stuff. And I used to have a bunch of theorists, or I still do, theorist friends, and they were always way smarter than me. And But then when it came to doing an experiment or, even just baking a pizza in the oven they were just terrible.

So that's where I found my niche that okay, I can do this. And and I really enjoyed it. doing that kind of things. And and yeah, so I, I had both the instrumentation background and the kind of observational background that made me ideal for what they wanted me to do there in Hawaii.

Okay. So every year we have asteroids that are actually hitting the Earth. So we know from records of craters that in the past there have been Large impacts such as the Chicxulub crater, which is we think is what was the crater that was caused by the meteorite that or that killed the

asteroids. 

Yes. Yeah. So I think that's the ultimate concern that we're. worried that could happen to us. And we want to first understand what is the likelihood of something like that happening. So first to understand the population of NEOs. How many are there? What's their distribution? Are there just, many smaller ones or are there lots of more bigger ones?

and then so now we know that they're not super, super common. Like we don't need to be worried about being wiped out by one of these. Next year then we look at, okay, but there are, of course, smaller ones and there's been the Chelyabinsk event in 2013 which was about I'm trying to guess around three meters in size.

I I keep forgetting these numbers. But,

um, 

 Exactly. Even though that one was a smaller asteroid impact and then mostly of course, burnt up in the atmosphere the shock waves actually were enough to break windows and cause damage. So it's something that people are beginning to realize more and more that this could happen.

And it's, something we should look out for and understand. And then you have the very smaller objects, which are actually quite common. And people are surprised when I say Oh, there's on average about an impact per year of this one meter sized objects. And they're like, Oh, really?

I didn't know that. And most of them hit the ocean, so you're not going to know about them. But there's always a danger that if something hits in the populated, they're mostly going to burn up in the atmosphere. People are concerned in areas with some geopolitical tensions that, 

that could be mistaken for and something more sinister.

And so it's in our interest to warn people oh, there's something coming.

Um, and then from a 

purely, 

I'm gonna cheat a little bit because I have a very nice slide, actually. I wish I could share it with you or send it to you, but it's a slide that we regularly talk about when we give talks. And it's a really nice graphic that ESA produced, and it's got okay, okay. Basically the take home message is that we have these one meter size objects that hit the earth. There's on average per every year. And most of them we don't know of. So 99. 9 percent of them are still to be found.

And that's something that we're working on. So there's still a lot of work for us to do. These are of course harmless, so they wouldn't cause any kind of damage. But then when you get to the Chelyabinsk size, the 10 meter, then, so then there's a, there was Tunguska, which was another impact that happened.

So that, that was more of a 30 meter sized object. These are less common. , we're talking about around a million of these 10 meter sized objects and These would hit, one of them would hit us approximately every 10 years, so Chelyabinsk sized roughly objects.

Uh, okay, so it can get a bit more technical. It's not like we know we know the ones that we know, which are about, let's say, the latest graphic says about 7, 000, I think there's probably more than that, but from that population, from the distributions, we can infer. that there are about a million that we still haven't

found. But in total that's the kind of number we think we should be looking

 Okay. Before we move on, so like of these objects we're also mostly haven't found most of them. So we haven't found like 99. 3 percent of them with With the kind of, let's say, jelly bean size. With the Tunguska size, , we're around 80 percent that we haven't found. It's still, we still need to do a lot of work. There's still

 so 

we think it was something between 10 to 15 kilometers in 

size. So really 

huge. But the good news is there are not that many of those objects and we think we found almost all of them.

[00:11:22] Markus: They're already inside the solar

system. 

[00:11:36] Dora: So we think there may be 2 percent that we haven't found. And the ones we haven't found, if we haven't found them, it's probably because they have some kind of complicated orbit that would make it difficult for us to observe. Mm 

[00:12:10] Markus: hmm. 

If you wait long enough. Yeah. 

[00:12:16] Dora: so the thing that we're not sure about is how often something like this would hit Earth. But yes, if you wait long enough something's bound to hit you.

Yeah. Yeah. And I guess it's partly so because, you imagine orbits and you think, Oh, these orbits are how they always were, how they always will be, but that's actually absolutely not true. And so especially with the smaller objects it's not just pure gravity that's acting on them. You have things like solar radiation pressure.

So actually the light from the. Sun, the photons actually hitting it are actually modifying its orbit slightly. And then you have the Yarkovsky effect, which is another effect. But so they're not static, they're not, okay, place something in this orbit, it's always going to be in this orbit, it's not hitting the earth now, it's never going to hit the earth. And then you might have interactions between. The different objects and it's not something that, yeah, it's not deterministic in that sense. 

[00:13:37] Markus: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm 

[00:13:38] Dora: hmm. I in a way, it's very similar to weather forecasting, except we're doing asteroid forecasting but there are two aspects, the observations, what you measure and then the models and the numerical calculations, which give predictions. First of all, I can talk through the whole process of planetary defense. Um, first of all, I guess it would start with the observations. There are, at the moment, several large surveys that are surveying the sky every night. These are just going to get more and more frequent as More countries, more organizations realize that this is an important thing. And they survey the sky every night. Typically how we do it is we take sets of images. So let's say a pair of images and then 20 minutes later another pair. Then you could go back to the same field after four nights or however long. And then you compare the difference between the images and see if anything has moved.

And then you see if that motion continues and if it, if you can fit an orbit to it. So the typical kinds of orbits that can be fit, the standard one is a heliocentric orbit. So if you find something that's moving and that you can fit it to a heliocentric orbit, you know it's something that's in the solar system.

that's or, 

[00:15:20] Markus: uh, 

[00:15:31] Dora: It's not a, It's not a, straight line. It's definitely on a celestial sphere. It might appear as a straight line because the sky is very large and you're just looking at a very small part of the sky. there are, of course, projections involved. You are projecting. a sphere onto 

a flat CCD image. and there's math involved.

So what we just do is we provide positions and then these positions then get linked by the orbital computational software. To various orbital options and it's not a one orbit. It's based on the uncertainty that you have. It's a range of possible orbits. 

[00:16:23] Dora: So the more, the more observations you have, the more precisely you can define the orbit.

If you only have a few observations, you could fit a lot of different kinds of orbits. So you could even fit some that are heliocentric, some that are geocentric. Geocentric orbits are interesting because usually that means that the thing that we're observing is actually something that has been launched from Earth.

A satellite, a rocket, a booster, so then we know, okay, we don't need to worry about that particular thing. But it has happened that we observe these things, and if you don't know that initially what they are, because they're made of many times like metal, reflective material, they appear like a much larger asteroid. And then once okay, it's just a booster, then you can stop worrying about it.

In terms of should we be concerned? No. It's going to be a spectacle. It's going to be a great opportunity to highlight the importance of what we do in planetary defense.

Um, 

 Not the best one to tell big stories, but there are big stories about Apophis 

[00:17:48] Markus: and, basically it 

[00:17:49] Dora: was the riskiest object for a very long time until observations removed it some years ago.

So, And for a long time, yeah, people were worried and people thought that it has a high chance of hitting the Earth but the most recent observations have conclusively ruled out the chance that Apophis is going to hit the Earth

 2029. 

Yeah, so I think it's like something like 325 meters. It's considerable, yes. Yeah, it's going to come, I think, within the geostationary orbit, I think. So it's super, super close.

[00:18:35] Markus: It's coming back, yes. 

[00:18:54] Dora: So I think there have been calculations done. I think it's not a trivial calculation to make. And some people were legitimately concerned that Even if it doesn't hit the Earth this time, it might come back around and hit us the next time it comes. I think, as far as I'm aware, that's been also conclusively ruled out at this point in time.

But now, who knows, the third or fourth time there might be complicated other interactions. But we know the orbit of Apophis very well and at the moment I wouldn't be worried about it.

Who 

I do. Yeah, I do. That was a very nice surprise for me, but it's a little treat, let's say, in the community that after working in the field for a certain number of years you get nominated, to have your own asteroid. 

Yes. 

Um, yes, yes, yes. So I think there's some rule that you cannot name an asteroid after yourself. So if you discover an asteroid, you could name it after someone else. So when the commit, when the committee decided that they have every few years, they have a big meeting where they announce who.

They would award these asteroids too. It's typically asteroids that have already been discovered many years ago by a survey somewhere. So it's typically these are all discovered by surveys and then

they hold on to them. 

yeah, 

I have a colleague and a friend who, he's discovered a couple of asteroids himself and he's hanging on to them until he has enough for all his friends and family so he can name them all after each one of them and not offend anyone.

 I think it's just the rules of the International Astronomical Union. they decided it to be like 

that. 

 You can name comets. The comets are typically named after their discoverer.

Many times it's just the name of the survey, which is less fun. But, um, I have no idea why it's that way.

 That's, That's true. Yes. So that's actually true. I think the asteroids were named, or the asteroids that are named after us, they're all main belt asteroids. So they don't pose any risk to the earth. I think it's true that NEOs, I think don't think you could name them after yourself.

 so It all started back when I was in Hawaii and the Dart team was getting together and there was this idea to test this asteroid deflection mission. The idea was to see whether this is the first time in humanity that we can actually do something about a potential impacting asteroid. Of course, Didymos and Dimorphos were not impacting asteroids, they were just sitting there.

But the theory behind it was that because it's a binary, you can Measure the period of the system very easily and see if you have made any change and if you change the velocity of the system, then you change the period as well. So that was the theory behind it, to hit the small asteroid and see if you can produce this change.

And to start off with, the system needed to be studied in That's a very good question. That's a very good question. so two things. One is you touched upon, can you actually see it? And so the answer is so the brightness, I think it was around, it's like 17th magnitude. So it's something that you could observe, but the main, One thing was that when DART hit the asteroid, there was a predicted very large spike in the brightness due to all the dust and material that was being ejected.

And actually that was a very challenging question that Modellers thought a lot about is how bright this thing was actually going to get because they didn't know and they were revising their models week after week, almost and so it was also challenging for us because we're trying to get Pass on the information to the observers like, it's not something you could program that easily in uh, like I was mentioning with, with the Gemini observations, like take 

10 second exposures, you had to be a little bit like, oh, we'll start with taking 10 seconds, if it gets, if it starts saturating your image maybe you want to start shorter exposures and not exactly, but you had to be a little bit more, ready to adapt your strategy and and how things evolved.

And that was really part of the exciting thing.

 I don't think it's going to be an Iron Dome. I think there are obviously large costs involved in building such a mission. It's not like you pay your 20 or whatever and you get one of these. It's expensive, it's complicated to build such a mission, and I think, the DART mission was many years in the planning and involved a large number of scientists. Now, if we would have to be launching this year after year, that would be quite, quite a different thing would be Quite challenging and taxing, I think, on all of us.

[00:26:02] Markus: Wow 

[00:26:11] Dora: My journey of finding it's a very deep question. I think there's always More to discover? There's of course the journey outward, there's always the journey inward I think, gosh it's like metaphysical almost what we're touching upon I think that's right, because initially the questions I was curious about were the questions that Everyone is curious about what else is there?

Is there life in, outside of the uni or outside the Earth somewhere else? Is, what happens after death? What happens before, before birth? And yeah, there are questions that physics, science cannot answer. So then it's a kind of journey inward in terms of finding What I would be really excited to find, and I think everyone would be really excited to find alien life, I think.

But again, it's a kind of it's really deep. Like why do we really want to find alien life? In a way it's to, to have a way to see ourselves better, I think. Look at ours.

[00:27:23] Markus: Yeah.

[00:27:29] Dora: I certainly think that's a good way to start, I think. I

mean, I think certainly we should start with the solar system. Start with the things that are close to

us,

Our own neighborhood. Start with Mars then So moons of Jupiter. I would say, have a, quite likely that there's something going on. Venus, I'm not sure. Could be not. That's where I would start.

[00:29:05] Markus: Ah, 

cool.

[00:29:11] Dora: I think I wrote that some time ago. I think it used to say Dreamer, but I think I thought, oh that, I should change that now to Adventurer. The adventures. I think it just started happening to me, I guess my first adventure, let's say. I, as a student I was one year I was doing a studentship on LA Palma. So it's a small island and there's not that much to do there. You get a bit bored after a while, you start going a bit crazy. And. So then, after some time, I noticed that the people who were like really happy there, they were all scuba diving. I started doing scuba diving on the weekends.

And then I've it just kept happening. So then after my PhD, I ended up going to Hawaii. Continued the scuba diving, plus some hiking, some, there you can start getting into a bit more challenging hikes and I think I really caught the kind of outdoor spirit there, like there are just so many amazing things that you can do there, you can go kayaking hiking, sailing, um, and now I'm in Italy and I thought, okay, it's time to calm down, but actually there are very cool things you can do in Italy as well.

the scuba diving is continuing, but here in Europe, it's a bit cold. I think The next step will be probably to get some kind of dry suit certification, and yeah I really enjoy traveling to challenging places, let's say also around Europe and yeah it I find it helps offset, sitting in at the office and the desk 

all the time.

[00:30:59] Markus: Yeah.

[00:31:01] Dora: No. Could say Hawaii is like La Palma in a way, but it's at least completely different. They're all beautiful places. I think that's what they have in common.

I had the Romans ask me the same question. They're like, Dora, you've lived in all these fantastic places and Hawaii, why on earth did you come to Rome? And they're like, oh, but you live in Friscati, so I guess that's okay. it's I was there on a temporary research position and here I have a permanent job.

That's the 

short answer.

The longer answer is that, it's a fantastic place, but then at the same time, it's very remote. Here I'm a lot more connected, both to my friends, my family, to other things going on. It's much easier to travel, to do things. Gets very same old after a while, but I would of course love to go back.

[00:31:56] Markus: yes. Yeah.

Yeah. 

[00:32:03] Dora: Yeah, I think it was. I think even as a child, I was really fascinated by just the nature around us, whether studying insects or even just taking pens apart, putting them back together. And then I got really. Fascinated by astronomy just from books that I encountered and then later on by watching science fiction shows like Star Trek.

do you remember Sliders back in the day? It was a show about a physics student, like graduate student, I think or undergraduate even, who was like tinkering with this magic, magical scientific remote control that could open portals into and that really inspired me. I was like, man, you can do that with physics.

That must be so cool. And yeah I had a little book on like astronomy and constellations and I used to go into my garden and look up at the stars, but yeah, I think that was really the kind of first fascination through, through being inspired by. Science fiction, and then later by the actual science and also scientists themselves through like reading books Such as books by Richard Feynman and be like, oh, wow, they're really cool people.

I want to learn more I want to be like them or do cool things like they're doing.

 it's, 

funny because I was watching your podcast with Andy Rifkin and you asked him the same question, or something similar I think it would depend on what the mission actually involved. I think it was like a one way ticket to Mars. I would say no, simply because I think, can, or I hope I can accomplish more by being here.

But I think it was, if it was like a there and back trip that lasts maybe a year or so, I'd do it for sure. Then I guess there's also the risk factor. involved would I be the first person to do it on a slightly untested rocket? Maybe there are far more qualified people for that than I am.

But if it was a regular thing that people would do and it was fairly tried and tested yeah, why not? I think there are crazy people, I'm crazy, there are people doing, crazy things all the time. Just I guess the question would be like, what are you trying to achieve with that?

Is it to prove something to yourself? Is it to see something different? Is it to experience something different? They're very rich people trying to climb Everest just to prove that, that they can do it. or go to the bottom of the ocean like we've seen. 

[00:35:19] Markus: Yeah. Yeah that's 

[00:35:24] Dora: I, 

I didn't listen to the whole thing. I briefly 

listened in. 

[00:35:28] Markus: Oh, oh gosh. 

Okay, Oh gosh. 

One, One, 

piece of music. Oh.

Oh gosh. Oh, 

[00:36:05] Dora: that's fantastic. I love it. It would be something from Iron Maiden, and it would be one of their, one of their longer songs, just to make it last longer. Um, yeah, why not? Um, what was their their most Recent song, I think it's called Hell on Earth, I think. 

And it's actually like a very uplift 

No it's very, no, it's very uplifting. It's basically about like how he wants to improve things and now there's a hell on earth but he wants to escape from it and make things better and how he would make things better.

Yeah. 

[00:36:43] Markus: Fantastic.

Oh yeah, it's a good 

one Yeah. I 

[00:37:10] Dora: think that's the name of it. Let's double check. 

He's definitely singing about Hell on Earth. It is called Hell on Earth by Iron Maiden, yes.

Eleven minutes. 

[00:37:23] Markus: Okay. 

[00:37:36] Markus: Yeah. Oh nice. 

Oh gosh. 

Oh, I, 

[00:37:56] Dora: I think I would say like you should be a yes person. And if you're not sure about something, just say yes. Other than, unless it's something silly your flatmate wants to wash their dirty laundry with, just say yes to challenges and be open to to, to new discoveries and to people.

Putting yourself out of your comfort zone. When I first got told oh, I have this chance to go to Hawaii, I was like, I think my mother was like, is this a scam? And, and I think many people would have said no, and because of whatever, it's too complicated. It's too scary.

It's too different, too difficult. Um, and yeah, and coming here also. So yeah, I would say. Definitely Okay, yeah, thank you as well. Um, I hope that was okay. 

[00:38:55] Markus: And that's a wrap on our cosmic adventure with Dr. Dora Föhring. What a journey we've been on today from tracking elusive space rocks to making history by actually nudging an asteroid off course.

Talk about a job that's truly out of this world. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling a mix of awe and relief. All at the incredible work of Dr. Föhring and her team are doing, and relief that we've got these brilliant minds watching our cosmic backs. It's reassuring to know that while Chicxulub 2 might be lurking out there, we're not sailing ducks anymore.

Remember when we used to think asteroid defense was just sci fi movie stuff. Well, Dora Furing and her colleagues at ESA are turning that fiction into fact, one space pabble at a time. They are writing a new chapter in human history, and we got a front row seat to hear about it.

I hope this episode has sparked your curiosity about our place in the cosmos, and maybe even inspired some of you to look up at the night sky with a new perspective. Who knows, maybe we've got some future planetary defenders listening right now. If you enjoyed our chat with Dora Furing, don't keep it a secret.

Share this episode with your space loving friends or anyone who needs a reminder that there are some seriously cool jobs out there. And hey, while you're at it Why not leave us a review? It helps other cosmic explorers find our little corner of the podcast universe. Until next time, keep your eyes on the skies, but rest easy knowing that Dora Furing and her team are on Asteroid Watch.

This is Markus, signing off from the Space Cafe Podcast. Stay curious, stay cosmic, and we'll catch you on the next orbit. Bye bye.