A conversation with Brian Day, the Director of Communication and Citizen Science for NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. For more information, check out https://sservi.nasa.gov/overview/.
Transcript
Matthew Buffington (Host):You are listening to the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast, episode 51. This week we’re talking to Brian Day, the Director of Communication and Citizen Science for NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute also known as SSERVI. In fact, this week scientists from all over are coming to Ames for the 4th Annual NASA Exploration Science Forum, hosted by SSERVI, to discuss a wide range of topics about the inner solar system. Brian works on outreach programs based on lunar science and planetary exploration. He also provides outreach support for web-based mapping tools for exploring the moon and Mars, as well as digital imaging and tracking systems that track meteors as they fall to the Earth. So, for all that and more, here is Brian Day.”
[Music]
Host:Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got to NASA, how you got to Silicon Valley.
Brian Day: Well, I got to Silicon Valley years ago, actually, as a software engineer, so no points for originality there. I did some volunteer work at NASA Ames. I actually was helping out with the website. Kind of like the mammoths at the La Brea Tar Pits, I got stuck and kind of sucked in.
Host:Once it brings you in, you can’t quite get out.
Brian Day: Yeah. So I’ve been here for 17 years now and having a lot of fun doing it.
Host:Was this the early days? Are we thinking Prodigy? Are we thinking Geosites? How far back are we going on these websites?
Brian Day: Well, I was teaching web programming and JavaScript at San Jose State [University] at the time. Some of the websites here needed a little bit of help, and so I came in to do that.
Host:Yeah. Cool. Then, from that, I mean, you just kind of got to know people, or how did that – ?
Brian Day: Yeah. Well, my background is I was a pilot and also an astronomer. So, turned out, from a content standpoint, there were some job possibilities for me to move into. I’ve just kind of bounced around the center, doing a variety of different things. Now I’m at the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute – way too long a name, but a really cool place – and leading up planetary mapping and modeling there, as well as citizen science and a number of other cool projects that I get to work with, including the Desert Fireball Network.
Host:Oh, cool. Tell people a little bit – the Solar System… the long word. It’s an acronym for SSERVI.
Brian Day: Yeah. What is this Solar System –
Host:Yeah. What is this thing?
Brian Day: – Exploration Research Virtual Institute? It’s a really neat institute headquartered here at NASA Ames, but with research facilities and teams scattered across the country and around the world, bringing together the disciplines of planetary science as well as exploration, so we’re taking a look at, from a science and engineering standpoint, looking at destinations within the inner solar system, where we might, in the reasonable future, actually send humans. It’s a very, very exciting area. We’re looking at our moon, the moons of Mars, the asteroids, that type of thing.
Host:Previously, it was called the Lunar…
Brian Day: We were at one point –
Host: Went through a renaming.
Brian Day: – the NASA Lunar Science Institute. We were focused on the moon. Then Headquarters gave us a bigger sandbox to play in.
Host:Nice. You get the whole solar system now.
Brian Day: Well, we’re still staying in the inner solar system, yeah, but it’s definitely a bigger and quite frankly really interesting playground to play in.
Host:For the folks listening, we have the podcast, but we also have different videos – little short videos – we put up on YouTube and up on Facebook, and there was one that we were working with you on. It was the lunar and the Mars mapping, correct?
Brian Day: That’s right. That’s right.
Host:So how’d you get looped into that stuff?
Brian Day: Well, that’s a fascinating program. We actually are producing these mapping and modeling portals that consist of visualization and analysis tools that help us do planetary science, but also are designed to help us do site selection and analysis for upcoming missions.
For instance, we are involved right now in developing tools and analysis for selecting the first human landing sites on Mars. This is really cool stuff.
Host:This is way cool.
Brian Day: There’s some really neat destinations on Mars to go to. But beyond producing these tools for mission planners and planetary scientists, we are tasked to also make all of this available and accessible to students and the general public, because it is absolutely essential that the public not just watch us do this, but actually be participants in this process.
That’s really key, because, when we talk about one of these Mars exploration zones, we’re talking about a circle with a 100-kilometer radius. That’s a really big area, and we’ve got a bunch of these that we’re examining right now. If you go to marstrek.jpl.nasa.gov, and anyone’s welcome to do that, you’ll be able to explore Mars as seen through the eyes of many different instruments aboard many different spacecraft.
In the next few months, we’re going to be adding a lot more data focusing on these potential landing sites. As we are pointing our high-resolution cameras on these now specific areas and gathering more and more data, we’re going to need as many eyes as possible looking at these areas, scouring these areas, seeing them in resolutions that we’ve never seen before, and helping us identify: What are the really cool features? What are the really cool things that we will want to explore? Again, this is an area where not only can the public participate, we desperately want them –
Host:Need to. [Laughs]
Brian Day: Yes. This is something we’re all going to do together. We manage this out of the SSERVI here at NASA Ames, but we have a really brilliant development team down at JPL. They are putting together – we’ve got this Mars Trek, so that’s M-A-R-S-T-R-E-K.jpl.nasa.gov. We’ve also got Moon Trek, so you can explore the moon in fine detail. We’ve done one for the asteroid Vesta, and surprisingly enough, it’s called Vesta Trek.
Host:[Laughs] Excellent.
Brian Day: And we’ve got more coming down the pipe. Really exciting stuff.
Host:Where does most of that information come from? Does it come from the satellites?
Brian Day: Yes. We have a number of spacecraft right now in orbit around Mars, and we’ve had some in the past, so this gathers historical data as well as current data. You can have, in the case of the moon and in the case of Mars, many, many, many different instruments aboard a variety of different missions, allowing you to take a look at the surface as seen through visible light, through laser altimetry, through spectrometry, through gravity mapping, a wide variety of things. So it gives you the ability to really see the surface in many, many, many different ways.
Host:I get a kick out of it, because I remember talking from people who are working on Kepler or on any of these other telescopes where they’re gathering in all this data, but then they turn and look to the scientific community to be, of course, yeah, we have NASA scientists who are sifting through the stuff, but also open it up to the scientific community, like, “See what you guys can see.” This isn’t that much different in the sense of, “Here is all the information we know about the surface.” What can the community students, researchers, other labs – what can they figure out using the same data?
Brian Day: Yeah, absolutely. This is something that we see all of the time. If you take a look in the astronomy community, you have a constant flow of discoveries being made by amateurs. It’s different than nuclear science or biophysics or some of these other fields of science. In astronomy, the amateur community plays a huge role. People with backyard telescopes – we’ve been involving them in some of our missions for a long time, and they’re doing really valuable work.
Back during the LADEE mission, which we ran, again, out of NASA Ames here, we had amateur astronomers monitoring the surface of the moon and actually recording meteoroid impacts on the surface of the moon during the course of the mission, looking at how those impacts could cause changes, possibly, to the atmosphere and the dust content above the lunar surface.
Host:You had mentioned earlier the Fireball Network.
Brian Day: Right.
Host:What exactly is that, for those with no clue?
Brian Day: What is the Desert Fireball Network? Okay. SSERVI consists of about nine domestic research teams scattered throughout the country and 10 international partners around the world. And our Australian partner, which is run out of Curtin University, they have put together this really cool network of autonomous cameras spread out across the Australian Outback. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Australian Outback.
Host:Not yet.
Brian Day: It is quite an impressive desert.
Host:I just hear very large bugs. [Laughs]
Brian Day: Yeah. Well, yeah, and large expanses of wide open nothing, which is actually, in some cases, really good. For instance, if you are looking for a meteorite, it will stand out –
Host:It will stick out.
Brian Day: – there very nicely. We have over 50 of these autonomous camera stations scattered across the Australian Outback, looking up at the sky above 2.5 million square kilometers.
Host:Wow.
Brian Day: These camera stations actually overlap their fields of view. So, as a fireball comes down through the atmosphere, we can image it on multiple cameras and therefore get a precise 3-D path of that fireball as it comes down through the atmosphere. We’re able to locate its precise position to within a minute of arc.
These cameras actually have LCD shutters that are flickering on and off, on and off, timed to a GPS signal. And so, if you think of a camera taking a picture of a fireball, you get this nice streak coming down through the sky, but with that shutter flickering on and off, it turns into a series of dots and dashes that encode the precise time of the GPS to within a millisecond. With this, we get the precise path of the fireball coming down through the sky, as well as its velocity and how fast it decelerates, and that can tell us what its mass is. Then the system can actually tell us, “Is this big enough that it may have actually dropped actual rocks on the ground?”
Host:Or if it burned up. Yeah.
Brian Day: Right. Did it burn up before reaching the ground, or was this big enough to actually leave meteorites on the surface? And if so, it tells us where to go look for them.
Host:I was going to say. Wow.
Brian Day: But even better than that, the system can also back-calculate –
Host:Oh, wow. Yeah.
Brian Day: – what the object’s orbit was before it encountered the Earth.
Host:Like a forensic scientist. You’re working backwards –
Brian Day: Exactly.
Host:– to see what happened.
Brian Day: CSI Solar System.
Host:Nice. Trademark Brian Day. [Laughs]
Brian Day: Yeah. What we are able to do is, if you can find these rocks on the ground, freshly fallen rocks from space, and then you can trace back –
Interviewer:Where they came from.
Brian Day: – where they came from within the solar system, possibly what asteroid family they belong to, now you have something that you can actually determine the mineralogy of and see where it came from. It’s a sample return mission on the incredible cheap.
Host:Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. You don’t have to go out and grab it.
Brian Day: Exactly.
Host:Wait for it to come to you.
Brian Day: Exactly. To date, we’ve gotten four of these, when we’ve seen them come in and actually recovered the stones off the ground, and some of them have been really, really fascinating. The most recent one actually came in last Halloween, October 31st. Lit up the sky, and the cameras caught it, and the team went charging out into the Outback and found this beautiful, beautiful meteorite, freshly fallen.
Host:Oh, wow. You think of the YouTube videos or things that people have seen of, you know, dash-cams –
Brian Day: Exactly. Yeah.
Host:– that capture that flash and that coming in.
Brian Day: It makes you think, “Well, why do we do this? What’s the purpose behind it?”
Host:Apart from being really cool.
Brian Day: Well, yeah. I mean, that’s really cool. It’s fun.
Host:You’ve got to get to the practical – [Laughs]
Brian Day: But there are several really good reasons to do this. One is from a pure science standpoint of understanding these rocks. Again, I’m an astronomer. Now, astronomers are not the only scientists at NASA. We’re just the best-looking scientists at NASA.
Host:[Laughs] Nice.
Brian Day: But there are many, many different types of scientists here at NASA, and some of them are geologists. If you become a geologist, you learn to be able to hear the stories that rocks have to tell. Rocks can tell you stories of how they formed, when they formed, where they formed, the conditions under which they formed. It is very much in our interest to understand this planet that we live on.
Host:Very much so.
Brian Day: We are very tied to this planet still to this day, and so the better we understand it, the better we do. But as a geologist, you would love to be able to find the really early rocks from the beginning of the Earth. But we can’t find those. Because the Earth is subject to wind and rain –
Host:Erosion.
Brian Day: – and plate tectonics. All those really early rocks are gone. We can’t get those stories, but as we retrieve these meteorites, many of them are pristine samples from the earliest days of the solar system, and they can tell us how the Earth formed and how the other planets in our solar system formed. They also, in a number of cases, will carry fascinating, fascinating organic chemistry that can tell us how we got started, how life got started. That’s cool stuff. So from a scientific standpoint, these things are a goldmine.
But then there’s another, perhaps more practical, reason to be doing this. We think of space as being empty, but it’s not. There are these flying rocks out there that can cause great damage. Just ask the dinosaurs.
Host:[Laughs] Well, you figure the stars are the stuff – that’s the stuff you can see…
Brian Day: That’s right.
Host: – because, literally, it emits light, but there’s all kinds of rocks, asteroids, planets…
Brian Day: There is all kinds of stuff that can sneak up on you. As a matter of fact, several times a year, we will have asteroids come inside the moon’s orbit, closer to us than the moon. In many cases, they sneak up on us. That’s not a good thing.
Host:[Laughs] Not a good way to be surprised.
Brian Day: An example, back in February of 2013, we had an asteroid about 17 meters in diameter, about 10,000 tons, come charging in, hitting our atmosphere over Siberia, over Russia, and blowing up over the city of Chelyabinsk.
Host:Okay. This is as it burns up coming into the atmosphere?
Brian Day: That’s right.
Host:Boom.
Brian Day: It blew up with about 500 kilotons –
Host:I was going to say. Yeah.
Brian Day: – force. It was dramatic, I mean, especially when you think that the Hiroshima bomb was 16 kilotons. So this was big. This was really big. We estimate that, from these incoming space rocks, we can get a Hiroshima-sized blast here in the Earth’s atmosphere about once every 10 years.
But, then there are the bigger ones. Then there are real big ones that you have to worry about. There are over a million estimated near-Earth asteroids with diameters greater than 30 meters. Remember Chelyabinsk was only 17 meters, and that sent people to the hospital, damaged buildings. Over a million of these things greater than 30 meters, and we’ve detected less than 1 percent of them. So understanding this near-Earth environment that we live in, that’s important.
As the Fireball Network is out there determining these orbits and where the stuff is coming from, that’s an environment we want to understand.
Host:Looking at that network, I mean, obviously, I’m imagining it’s not seeing things until they’re really, really close.
Brian Day: That’s right. The Desert Fireball Network only records these things as they’re entering the atmosphere. Okay. A little bit of terminology –
Host:I was going to say.
Brian Day: – is probably appropriate here. When these rocky objects are out in space, we call them meteoroids.
Host:Okay.
Brian Day: Okay? As they come into the atmosphere and through friction and ram pressure heat up, as they collide with the molecules in our atmosphere and light up the sky, that is called a meteor. If pieces survive and make it to the ground and you can pick them up, then those are meteorites. So meteoroid out in space, meteor as it’s coming down through the atmosphere, meteorite when you pick it up off the ground.
Now, a typical meteor, if you go out and you watch, say, a meteor shower at night, then the typical meteor you see – the falling star – that’s caused by an object about the size of a grain of sand.
Host:Oh, really?
Brian Day: Your typical meteor is about the size of a grain of sand. But what if something comes in that’s bigger? A rock or a boulder. Then that really lights up the sky. It is spectacular. That is what we call a fireball. That’s what the Desert Fireball Network is recording. It’s recording these big chunks.
Now, the little pieces of sand, they vaporize before they get anywhere close to the ground. But the big chunks coming in that cause the fireballs, that have a chance of putting something on the ground that we can actually examine – that’s what we’re after with the Desert Fireball Network.
The Desert Fireball Network, again, this has had great success out in the Australian Outback, but now what we’re trying to do, working with our colleagues in Australia to expand the Desert Fireball Network. What we want to do is make it so it’s not just an Australian network, but now it’s an international network. What we’re doing is we’re working on expanding this to additional locations within North America, including in the U.S.
Host:I was going to say the desert areas, looking at Nevada, Utah, out –
Brian Day: The desert Southwest of the U.S. is a prime place.
Host:Seems perfect.
Brian Day: There’s other places in North America that are great. South America has some wonderful locations. We’re talking with Africa, locations in Asia. We’re really looking at expanding this so we get a more complete view. This is what our job is right now, is to work with the Australian team and our colleagues and international partners to expand the Desert Fireball Network from being a local Australian network to becoming a global international network.
Host:This is the critical NASA role in this whole part, is making for sure not only that NASA does its own science, but it’s making sure that people aren’t living on islands unto themselves, to make those connections and be like, “Oh, cool. These people in Australia are doing this. How can we connect you with other people of like-minded, similar projects, so we’re learning as a group instead of just on our own in silos?”
Brian Day: Exactly. This is what NASA is able to really bring to the table. That’s exciting. This is a very exciting time. We’re finding a number of potential partners around the world that are really quite enthusiastic about becoming part of this. So this is going to be a lot of fun, but as we look at these partnering institutions around the world, it gets bigger and better than that, because, again, this is where we can involve not just the research institutions, not just the scientists – the professional scientists. Tis is where we can get the citizen scientists involved.
One of the things that this team in Australia has done so well. They’ve put together this incredible mobile app called Fireballs in the Sky. That allows people, just anyone –
Host:Go download this.
Brian Day: It’s available for Android. It’s available for iOS. You install it on your mobile phone. And if you see a fireball – and you really want to see one, believe me.
Host:Yeah.
Brian Day: They are fun to watch. But if you see one of these things, this app allows you to essentially submit your observation. Through augmented reality, you can hold your phone up, see that part of the sky where it was. If there’s still a train visible, you can use that as a guide, but you have a number of parameters that it will prompt you for that allows you to essentially recreate that fireball that you just saw. Its brightness, its color, its duration, how it fragmented. Did it make a sound?
Host:Oh, wow.
Brian Day: You can reconstruct what you just saw. When it’s just right, then you can submit that.
Host:Okay. It’s more data points.
Brian Day: Yeah. Exactly. It’s more data points. It enhances and it expands upon the camera network. When we had our last meteorite recovery down in Australia, a number of the observations came from people using these apps on their cell phones.
Host:Are you guys able to do it retroactively? Well, in the sense of, I think of, when something happens like that, the YouTube videos start just popping up like crazy. I mean, there may be something.
Brian Day: I mean, it’s always great if you could catch it on video.
Host:Totally.
Brian Day: Hard to do. But again, these things make quite an impression, and so, if you see one, you want to immediately – you can grab your phone, and you point it to just where you were looking, and you reconstruct what you just saw while it’s still fresh in your mind. One of the great things about these fireballs is oftentimes they will leave a glowing train in the sky that can be a nice prompt for you.
Host:Yeah. Even after it’s shocked you and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, what happened?”
Brian Day: Yeah.
Host:– then you can pull your phone up and just capture it and bring it in.
Brian Day: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You can learn a lot more about fireballs in the sky by going to fireballsinthesky.com.au, as in Australia.
Host:Nice.
Brian Day: And you can get all kinds of wonderful details about this fantastic app, and you can become part of the Desert Fireball Network team, as we expand this into being a global network.
Host:What do you see as the next steps after that? Because when you’re talking about tracking these fireballs, understanding where they landed, but then also looking backwards of where they came from, I mean, I think for most people, the thing goes into your head of “How can this prevent us from – knowing when things are coming?” That’s probably outside of the scope of this, but I would imagine…
Brian Day: Well, it’s part of a bigger question. You’re right. Our ultimate goal is planetary defense, and NASA has an office just for that. Protecting ourselves from these things that go thump in the night in a really big and nasty way.
Host:Big flash.
Brian Day: I like to point out to people that the first step in protection is detection.
Host:Exactly.
Brian Day: One of the things that is happening now is a new generation of telescopes and observatories is being established with an express purpose of monitoring the sky for these flying rocks. We don’t have anywhere close to 100 percent coverage yet, but we’re working on it, and we’re getting to the point now where we have actually been able, successfully, to actually see this whole lifecycle of an object from being a meteoroid in space, when we first detected it, and be able to say, “Hey, this is going to meet us.”
So we’ve been able to see it as a meteoroid, and then record it as a meteor lighting up the sky, and then even picking up pieces on the ground as meteorites. The technology is now getting to the point where we can do that. That’s important. That is important. As we build bigger and greater numbers of these telescopes, we’ll be able to get a more accurate census of these objects and be able to give ourselves bigger and bigger lead times, and that is the key to planetary defense: having enough time to do something. If you know something’s coming your way, but you have years of notice, then a little shove can amount to a big difference over time.
Host:Yes. Absolutely.
Brian Day: But if you only discover it a couple days in advance –
Host:That window is closed. [Laughs]
Brian Day: – then it’s just kind of put your hands over your head and…
Host:Hope.
Brian Day: Yeah. Understanding this near-Earth environment that we live in is key. So that’s why, with the Desert Fireball Network, we’re not just about finding these objects on the ground, but understanding their orbits, understanding this environment of where we have these orbits that are crossing the Earth’s orbit. That’s important.
Host:Cool. This is fascinating stuff, and a good point of the whole, “detection versus protection.” People see movies like Armageddon or Deep Impact, and –
Brian Day: Yeah.
Host:– especially as children of the ’90s, your head goes into it. But it’s like, at this point, we need to understand what is even out there.
Brian Day: That’s right. Here’s something that we can actually do. Here’s something how anyone can participate in, quite frankly, an effort that may save the world.
Host:Absolutely.
Brian Day: When faced with this kind of disaster or potential disaster, realistically, the solution is never going to be giving Bruce Willis a nuclear bomb. That’s rarely the answer to any problem.
Host:[Laughs] Giving a bunch of ocean oil drillers – put them off into a spaceship. Go for it.
Brian Day: But giving thousands of people these apps to go out there and track and monitor and understand –
Host:Help us to better understand.
Brian Day: – this near-Earth environment that we live in. Now, that’s something that could really work.
Host:For those folks, if they have any questions, anything for Brian, we are on Twitter at @NASAAmes. We are using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley. Anybody who has any questions, they can just go ahead and ping us. We’ll hook it on up over to Brian. I have a feeling that this will be one of many conversations we’ll be having in the future.
Brian Day: I look forward to it.
Host:Excellent. Well, thanks for coming on over.
Brian Day: Thank you so much.
[End]