Picture this: there’s an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. What exactly would we do – and who’s working behind the scenes to keep us safe?
Picture this: there’s an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. What exactly would we do – and who’s working behind the scenes to keep us safe? In this episode, David Karsten is joined by Associate Professor Nicholas Timms and Professor William Rickard to explore the fascinating science of planetary defence.
o How a Moon rock changed a career [00:58]
o Planetary defence 101 [02:32]
o Space rocks and the tools unlocking their secrets [04:50]
o What Asteroid Bennu is teaching us about life’s building blocks [07:40]
o The story of WA’s Mother’s Day meteorite [10:24]
o Popcorn asteroids, Apophis and the DART mission [15:45]
o Potentially hazardous objects: Whose problem is it anyway? [19:47]
o The future of planetary defence and space research [22:17]
Associate Professor Nicholas Timms, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Nick is a leading expert in rock and mineral deformation and geochronology and has focussed his recent research on impact cratering and extra-terrestrial geology. Deeply immersed in the field, Nick is director of the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University, a team member for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission and member of the CASA Moon NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI).
Professor William Rickard, Director, John de Laeter Centre
Professor Will Rickard is an experienced materials scientist with a successful record in applied research and analytical facility management. He collaborates widely with researchers and industry as the subject matter expert for advanced materials characterisation. Will is the Director of the John de Laeter Centre where he manages a suite of core research facilities and co-ordinates a number of projects in defence, materials science and geoscience disciplines.
This podcast is brought to you by Curtin University. Curtin is a global university known for its commitment to making positive change happen through high-impact research, strong industry partnerships and practical teaching.
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au
Host: David Karsten
Content creator and recordist: Caitlin Crowley
Producer: Emilia Jolakoska
Social Media: Celeste Fourie
Executive Producer: Anita Shore
Curtin University acknowledges all First Nations of this place we call Australia and the First Nations peoples connected with our global campuses. We are committed to working in partnership with all Custodians and Owners to strengthen and embed First Nations’ voices and perspectives in our decision-making, now and into the future.
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Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of Curtin University.
00:00:00:03 - 00:00:09:16
Sarah Taillier
This is The Future Of where experts share their vision of the future, and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
00:00:09:18 - 00:00:30:04
David Karsten
I'm David Karsten. Earlier this year, an asteroid was briefly predicted to have more than a 3% chance of colliding with Earth. The highest impact risk ever recorded for an object of its size. That chance has since dropped to below 1%. But what if next time it doesn't? What exactly would we do? And who's working behind the scenes to keep us safe?
00:00:30:05 - 00:00:53:21
David Karsten
Well, today I was joined by Associate Professor Nicholas Timms, an expert in rock and mineral deformation and geochronology, and Professor William Rickard, director of Curtin's John de Laeter Center, home to some of the most advanced analysis tools on Earth. In our chat, we discussed exciting new discoveries by Curtin scientists and how ancient space rocks could hold the key to protecting our planet's future.
00:00:53:23 - 00:01:04:08
David Karsten
If you'd like to find out more about this research, you can visit the links provided in the show notes. Nick, to begin with, can you walk us through how extraterrestrial geology became a part of your career?
00:01:04:10 - 00:01:16:09
Nicholas Timms
Yeah. For sure. So my expertise, I guess is, is analyzing samples. So, samples that have come from Earth, usually as, as my career's progressed as a geologist.
00:01:16:09 - 00:01:40:05
Nicholas Timms
But extra terrestrial samples became kind of part of my life, I guess, 2007, I think it was a long time ago now. And, it was a colleague of mine in Curtin who basically handed me a sample that he'd have, and it was having a lot of trouble with understanding. And he asked me to analyze it using the fancy equipment and the expertise that I have.
00:01:40:05 - 00:02:12:17
Nicholas Timms
And I said, okay, what's the nature of the sample? So this is a piece of the moon? No. Right. So mind immediately blown. Mind immediately blown. It was then the first time I'd, you know, held a piece of moon in my hand. But since then, I've worked on all of the samples that were collected from the Apollo missions or every single mission, and it's extended to, all of the samples that have been returned to Earth, by various space missions and as well as still analyzing, geological samples from Earth as well.
00:02:12:19 - 00:02:32:23
Nicholas Timms
So it's a it was a kind of a pivotal moment for me. And it just got me excited and into this whole thing to do with planetary science and analyzing extraterrestrial materials to find out what we can find out about, our solar system that much, much further than I'd ever thought before. Just thinking about how the Earth works as a geologist.
00:02:33:00 - 00:02:42:08
David Karsten
Nick, your research also touches on planetary defense. Yeah. Can you explain planetary defense for us and tell us how real the threat of asteroid impact actually is?
00:02:42:10 - 00:02:54:16
Nicholas Timms
So, yes, there are potentially hazardous asteroids out there. Near-Earth objects have got, they've been discovered out there in the solar system that have got orbits which are Earth crossing, or they come close to Earth.
00:02:54:18 - 00:03:19:07
Nicholas Timms
And, the clever people who work out those orbits also give a probability of those objects hitting Earth in the early days of discovery, like the one from last year. I think that one had a 3% chance of hitting hitting Earth. And that was very early on before they had really fine tuned the orbit. I think there's a lot less now, but there is still a there's quite a big list of, potentially hazardous asteroids out there.
00:03:19:09 - 00:03:48:16
Nicholas Timms
And the the field of planetary defense, is all encompassing in so far as finding those asteroids, understanding those asteroids and objects, figuring out what the hazards are and trying to, mitigate those risks in, in different ways, to, to basically either see how we can redirect them or, nudge them out the way so they don't hit Earth and don't cause a problem for humans or life on Earth as we know it.
00:03:48:18 - 00:03:56:02
David Karsten
Can you tell us about some of the missions that have actually returned asteroid samples to Earth, and, and how geologists like yourself are involved?
00:03:56:04 - 00:04:11:06
Nicholas Timms
There have been a few missions by different space agencies to some of these near-Earth objects, some of these near-Earth asteroids, to actually collect samples from their surfaces and and bring them back to Earth. Have there have been three so far?
00:04:11:08 - 00:04:40:15
Nicholas Timms
Some by the Japanese space agency who, very, you know, pioneers in this. And then one more recently by NASA called the OSIRIS-REx mission, which went to an asteroid Bennu and landed in 2023 and and and and brought us by far the largest sample of asteroid that's ever been collected and here occurred. And we've got a team of scientists who are privileged enough to be on the science team as mission scientist, to actually analyze those, fragments of asteroid that were brought back.
00:04:40:17 - 00:04:51:18
Nicholas Timms
And so I'm, a part of that, whole mission and have been diligently analyzing some very small particles of this asteroid material since they've been returned.
00:04:51:23 - 00:05:02:05
David Karsten
Will Curtin's John de Laeter Center has some of the most advanced tech on Earth. What role did these tools play in helping Nick analyze those extraterrestrial materials?
00:05:02:07 - 00:05:09:19
Nicholas Timms
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The John de Laeter Centre at Curtin Universitys, you know, well equipped with some really, you know, state of the art instrumentation.
00:05:09:19 - 00:05:30:05
William Rickard
So, you know, when we want to study these really precious materials, we have such a small amount, that comes back to to earth. Curtin University is very fortunate to, you know, have a beautiful, record over a long period of time to do quality science with this material. And so we we get some of this material by being part of these sample analysis teams.
00:05:30:07 - 00:05:48:15
William Rickard
And then, but, you know, NASA and Japanese space agency or Chinese space agencies or European Space Agency, they want the most amount of information from the smallest amount of material and to do the least amount of damage. So we've we've got to have the best tools to be able to extract that information. And it's going to be really, really accurate.
00:05:48:15 - 00:06:15:18
William Rickard
So we, have optical microscopes, we have electron microscopes, we have, X-ray analysis equipment, laser equipment, mass spectrometry, all these different tools. And we've designed a kind of workflow where we can go from the macro scale, and all the way down to the atomic scale. We have a tool called atom probe tomography, which we can extract the atoms of the sample almost one by one and reconstruct it in three dimensions to get, you know, absolutely all the information we can.
00:06:15:18 - 00:06:41:07
William Rickard
And so, so we do that to try understand the chemistry, the, microstructure, but also the isotopic composition. So that can tell us how old it, that, the sample is, the provenance where it may have came from, other parts, whatever the parent body that, that this material, was, was from. So, yeah, their wealth of information and, but requires a state of the art instrumentation to extract that.
00:06:41:09 - 00:06:54:05
David Karsten
I guess that combination of instrumentation, does that make you, what does it make Curtin or the John de Laeter Centre a sought after, I guess, destination for some of the sample material, as far as the agencies are concerned? Do they do look, do they look to the JDL is the place to go?
00:06:54:06 - 00:07:09:24
William Rickard
Absolutely. I mean, we don't get these samples just because we put a hand up or they samples come to Curtin because they have that combination of, world class experts from Earth and planetary science, but also within the John de Laeter Centre, and, and world class instrumentation.
00:07:09:24 - 00:07:36:17
William Rickard
So having that that combination of the, the know how and the tools to do that, is why, we've got a reputation to be able do it in the past, and it's why we, we get involved in these missions. And, yeah, it's, it's a team effort. It's a lot of work. But, you know, when you put in a sample in an instrument and, you know, straight away you're looking at things that people have never seen before, you know, there's there's, minerals there that that have never been studied before.
00:07:36:17 - 00:07:41:07
William Rickard
There's you never know what you might see the next day that that's that's that's really exciting.
00:07:41:07 - 00:07:52:00
David Karsten
The analysis on the asteroid, was called Bennu. Yeah. Spinning. That wasn't necessarily for planetary defense, but nevertheless, it was some exciting discoveries. Tell us about what you uncovered. So,
00:07:52:00 - 00:08:01:17
Nicholas Timms
Curtin University got some of the earliest samples from from that mission as they were gradually opening and revealing what was what was, returned.
00:08:01:19 - 00:08:23:13
Nicholas Timms
And there was some talk of whether there was any contamination from the Earth and in those samples. So they sent us some samples really early on to look at. And we had look at them under a electron microscope and some other equipment as well. And we discovered the salt, sodium chloride, the same kind of stuff that you put on your chips, salt in meteorites.
00:08:23:13 - 00:08:47:23
Nicholas Timms
So rocks that have come from space and made their own way here is really, really rare. Find salt in a sample that is is brought to Earth in a spacecraft and remain pristine. Hasn't seen the atmosphere of Earth, hasn't been, sitting on the ground with water and so on was really special. It just, it provided a window into what it's like on these asteroids or what used to be like on these asteroids.
00:08:47:23 - 00:09:23:17
Nicholas Timms
Billions of years ago. And it was the first discovery on, amongst many other discoveries by the international research team of different salt like minerals, the kind of things that you get on a salt lake out in West Australia. Bush today, that was really a good indication of what the environment was like at some point on what we call the parent body, the, the, the space object baby planet, I guess, the that was the asteroid Bennu was formed from bits of because we can see salt and all these different kinds of salt minerals on there.
00:09:23:19 - 00:09:56:24
Nicholas Timms
We can get a sense of what kind of, temperatures and what kind of, fluids were around on that body. And that's super, super important. Not not because it's a nice story is because, colleagues elsewhere, other colleagues on the sample analysis team who have specialist in looking at organic materials, found a huge range of organic compounds, all different building blocks of life, prebiotic organic material and, on Earth, at least salt or salty environments.
00:09:56:24 - 00:10:29:24
Nicholas Timms
Briny environments are places where organic material can develop and polymerize and thrive. So we can couple, you know, our findings with their findings and have a window into the fact that this, you know, protoplanet had all of the right ingredients for forming life. We haven't found life, but it's it was all there. It was all set really early on in the solar system, which is a really intriguing kind of story, going back to planetary defense and the notion of a strategy should an asteroid collide with Earth in the future.
00:10:30:01 - 00:10:54:01
David Karsten
A meteorite landed in the Western Australian wheat belt on Mother's Day. Can meteorite teach us anything in relation to planetary defense? Absolutely. So the we're calling it the Mother's Day meteorite for obvious reasons. If you're around in Perth or in the Western Australian region generally, you know, 606 30 in the morning, I forget exactly when. And you saw a huge fireball streak across the sky.
00:10:54:03 - 00:11:27:17
Nicholas Timms
That was a meteor coming in. And eventually at the end of that, dropping stones, which, part of that, the fragmented parts of that, that meteor. And this is what we call in the Mother's Day meteorite. And, it's important to try and get those samples really quickly because they can become contaminated from Earth. So they and that contamination can change the rocks a bit, like, rust can change, you know, your car if it's, you know, left too long in the and, you know, next, the next to the ocean.
00:11:27:17 - 00:11:57:19
Nicholas Timms
So we, we want to collect those meteorites as quickly as possible after they've fallen, so they don't change their properties. And if we can collect them fast enough, we can. You know, look at the exactly what the fingerprint of composition, of where what kind of object it came from. We can, use track where the fireball came from and, predict what its orbit was around Earth and whether whether it's similar or different to some of these other Near Earth objects.
00:11:57:21 - 00:12:27:03
Nicholas Timms
And we can start connecting what we can see from the rock to what we can see via telescopes in space. So fortunately, for us at Curtin, we have a great, facility called the Desert Fireball Network, which has cameras in the desert pointing at the sky, waiting to capture images of fireballs as they come in. So then we can use those images, triangulate where it would have dropped a meteorite, and then triangulate also back to what the orbit was.
00:12:27:03 - 00:12:48:12
Nicholas Timms
And, we had the team out there searching for that, when it was discovered. Just so happened. And how fortuitous. And for for listeners who perhaps I don't understand the geography that we're talking about. It was in the wheat belt area between the town of Norseman and and Harden. So that's in the the southwest corner of Western Australia, very remote.
00:12:48:12 - 00:13:12:09
Nicholas Timms
And what landed in a salt lake. So it was actually it's, it's it's landing, spot for this particular chunk that that was found was actually visible via, a plane. Right. Sure. So it was captured on two of the Desert Fireball Network cameras. That wasn't enough to really narrow down the search area of where it might have predicted, where it might have dropped, to, you know, a couple of kilometers.
00:13:12:09 - 00:13:33:14
Nicholas Timms
It was more like 50km², which is really big. So our team published that result. And to the general public to say, hey, look, if you're in the area and you find something, maybe this is why you want to look. And, the same time the team went out into an airplane and flew over the search area and a lot of it was Salt Lake, maybe 30% of the search area was Salt Lake.
00:13:33:16 - 00:13:48:10
Nicholas Timms
The rest of it was thick bush. So the idea was, okay, if it's hit the salt Lake, you'll be able to see that as a disturbance on the surface real quick. And, I think they spotted disturbances on a couple of the salt lakes, and they could see a character walking across the salt Lake to right where they were.
00:13:48:10 - 00:14:12:08
Nicholas Timms
And this is the policeman who found the first fragment of that Mother's Day meteorite. Since then, a couple of days later, our team went back out there before the rains were about to come and found a lot more, and they joined up with a policeman who found it was an amateur collector who's a really nice guy. And this morning we've been looking at those and try to prepare those for analysis and the labs at Curtin to figure out more about it.
00:14:12:08 - 00:14:34:18
Nicholas Timms
So it's, it's a really exciting time at the moment to figure out exactly what that that rock. And though those, those rocks can tell us and link it back to these, potentially hazardous asteroids, in our vicinity of, vicinity of Earth and, help in the pursuit of planetary defense. Well, what a thrill to be a part of such a developing story.
00:14:34:18 - 00:14:46:20
David Karsten
We're right on the cusp of of finding out what the makeup of this particular meteorite is. And how long do you think it will be before, the results of that analysis will be made available for us to to chew over.
00:14:46:20 - 00:14:53:04
Nicholas Timms
I can't promise, but maybe could. We're talking off the order of a couple of weeks to maybe a couple of months.
00:14:53:04 - 00:15:06:19
David Karsten
So, something might, might, might come out of, this, but it looks like a special one. Well, this is just one of many exciting strands of research underway at the General Data Center. Are there any future missions and sample returns you're looking forward to?
00:15:06:21 - 00:15:12:17
William Rickard
Yeah. So, I mean, it's, real renaissance in, analysis of this, material.
00:15:12:18 - 00:15:40:21
William Rickard
I think, really, I mean, we we're we're understanding the materials, you know, geologists and material scientists, but we're, we're linking that with people are doing remote sensing. So these there's ongoing missions. So the, satellite that dropped off the capsule that came back and returned that the material from, asteroid Bennu, it's continuing on. And so that's going to now call the, SARS apex mission, and that's going to go see, office, another near us.
00:15:40:23 - 00:15:45:06
William Rickard
Potentially hazardous, object and study that with remote sensing.
00:15:45:06 - 00:15:53:13
David Karsten
For those of us who, unaware, could you tell us a bit more about Apophis? How close will it come to Earth? And what do researchers hoping to learn from that near Earth encounter?
00:15:53:15 - 00:16:34:13
Nicholas Timms
So asteroid Apophis is going to rendezvous with Earth. It's got a it's got the Earth crossing orbit. And in 2029, it's going to come really close to Earth. And this is going to be within, in between Earth and the geostationary satellite. So it's really it's really, really close. So the, the mission out there at the moment is going to monitor as it comes through. It's close pass with Earth to see what happens as any bits come off it, or is it bringing its friends or, or how it how is it's going to how is it going to be deflected by Earth? We think that it's not going to hit Earth, so we don't need to go with some, some deflecting kind of technologies. But it's it's certainly a it's a it's going to be a close miss.
00:16:34:15 - 00:16:50:22
David Karsten
Will, is there anything else we'll be looking at when this asteroid flies past Earth? What we need to know is, is, you know, when we do go there, what we're going to do, you know, at the moment, you know, even when NASA went to, Bennu, they thought they were going to be landing on a solid, surface.
00:16:50:22 - 00:17:13:01
William Rickard
So everything was built around, you know, basically landing on a solid. And when they went to land on it, they're basically landing on something with the, you know, the material properties, like a bowl of popcorn. So you just push straight through it. Really? Yeah. So, there's a lot we thought we knew that it was completely wrong. And so if you are going to try to do, mitigation strategy against, an asteroid that was coming to Earth and you saw what?
00:17:13:01 - 00:17:31:19
William Rickard
It was a solid, but it was really a rubble pile of lots of small, pebbles that aren't particularly, well, stuck together putting a nuclear bomb in there. It's probably not going to work. So, we've got to, understand the material to help understand the mitigation strategy and test different things out. Oh, my gosh, I'm totally.
00:17:31:20 - 00:17:41:10
David Karsten
This is completely out of my wheelhouse, boys. But you're saying, will that that it's it had the, I guess the consistency of a popcorn bowl a popcorn.
00:17:41:10 - 00:17:48:22
William Rickard
Yeah. Yeah. So lots of sort of little balls, that are only just sort of just touching each other. But you could probably put your hand straight through it if you wanted.
00:17:48:22 - 00:18:07:11
William Rickard
So this, the touch and go mechanism, which was supposed to just sort of dust off the surface, so to speak, end up displacing about, six tons worth of material because it was basically so loosely held together when it fired its thrusters and its gas, collection system. It just blew all the material away because it was so, weakly held together.
00:18:07:11 - 00:18:12:22
William Rickard
So it shows that what we thought was there is not not the case. And so we've got a lot to learn.
00:18:12:24 - 00:18:31:01
Nicholas Timms
So in terms of asteroid, properties and you know what we can learn from the samples and, and really feedback out that interplanetary defense is really important. We can measure the strength of this material, and how that will react if we have deflection technology and things like that.
00:18:31:03 - 00:18:51:08
Nicholas Timms
NASA in in 2022 had a mission and not many people know about this is called a Dart mission or this it's acronym is Dart. It means double Asteroid Redirection Test. Oh, and in 2022 it went to a double asteroid that is two little, little rocks sort of orbiting each other. And the idea was to do a deflection test.
00:18:51:08 - 00:19:12:20
Nicholas Timms
So, it fired itself, the spacecraft into one of the asteroids to move its orbit, and, to see if that if it transferred the momentum enough to, to shift it off course. And this is a kind of technology that we might want to employ for planetary defense one day. And so it was the first ever test of something like this.
00:19:12:20 - 00:19:44:04
Nicholas Timms
And it was really, really successful. And it did it did a much better job than, than than the scientists were predicting. And we've learned so, so much from that. And, in 2026, there's going to be a joint European Space Agency and Japanese space Agency mission called Hera, which is going to go back to those twin, asteroids and kind of look at the damage to to map out the cloud of stuff that was that was produced, during, during that collision.
00:19:44:04 - 00:20:08:21
David Karsten
And that's, that's going to be an exciting thing to see as well. Will, you spoke before about the whole notion of what is it that we do if if something like this were to happen in the future, a possible collision? What the question of jurisdiction. Is it right? Is there a, I guess, an international body, devoted to to creating policy on this, or are we united on this or does it become one country's problem?
00:20:09:00 - 00:20:29:18
William Rickard
The there is, some international, bodies that that are looking at this, whether we're united in principle, what would happen when, you know, you've got to have a huge investment in money for a mission. It would be interesting, but yeah, it will require, a huge effort from from lots of the, countries around the world to do this.
00:20:29:18 - 00:21:00:05
William Rickard
So there'll be, people looking at the, the, remote sensing of, of the object to try understand its properties, link that within with the studies such as the work that we've done on actual, samples that have returned from similar types of objects. And then there'll be, yeah, a suite of teams trying to get, a mission to fly something to it and then, hopefully use an informed approach to kind of, yeah, apply a successful strategy.
00:21:00:10 - 00:21:25:03
Nicholas Timms
So I agree, I think is a is an international problem and it's going to require an international solution and, and cooperation all the way. There's just been a scientific conference actually in South Africa on planetary defense. And we had some of us, PhD students from Curtin attend there. And they reported back that the conference had also had policymakers and scientists talking together, which was a really interesting combination.
00:21:25:05 - 00:21:51:00
Nicholas Timms
And they were at and, asking and trying to address the question that you just asked, that what whose responsibility is it? What if we deflected it, but it deflected to, you know, a country that wasn't Australia? And how do we deal with things like this? They're they're all really interesting, problems. But also just the, just the scientific problem of, of deflecting asteroids and changing their course.
00:21:51:02 - 00:22:10:12
Nicholas Timms
There are some ideas out there, but only one of us, one of them has ever been tested. So it's going to create it was going to require an international effort to develop more missions, to test other technologies, so we can figure out which is going to be the best option. And I think most people agree that nuking them is not a good option at all.
00:22:10:14 - 00:22:16:16
Nicholas Timms
It creates lots of little ones, which it it turns a missile into a shotgun with it.
00:22:16:18 - 00:22:27:15
David Karsten
Yes. Maybe that method is strictly for the movies. Nick, you've been studying planetary samples since 2008 2009. What do you foresee happening in the next decade or two in this field of research?
00:22:27:19 - 00:22:45:03
Nicholas Timms
The samples that we have, in hand, extraterrestrial samples of either meteorites, which are rocks that have made their own way here or they've been returned by astronauts, the Apollo missions from the moon, of which there were only a limited number, and they stopped in 1973.
00:22:45:05 - 00:23:08:19
Nicholas Timms
Or they're these robotic sample return missions from asteroids. There aren't that many. There's not a lot of material at all. And one thing that seems to be progressing quite well is, is a new era of space travel, space exploration. And, and we can all see space and all of the other companies, accelerating their capabilities to go back to the moon and so on.
00:23:08:19 - 00:23:37:05
Nicholas Timms
So one thing that would be possible is bringing a lot more material back from these things. And one challenge that we have a scientist is actually analyzing so much material. So I think incorporating things like machine learning and automating the processes that are painstakingly manual right now would be a really, really good, way that we can improve on understanding planetary materials and and the advances in instrumentation have never ceased to surprise me.
00:23:37:05 - 00:24:00:13
Nicholas Timms
I've I've had a longish career so far, you know, in the geosciences and more recently in planetary sciences and how the instruments have advanced, over that period of time is fantastic. And I think, talking to the instrument developers and saying what our needs are as planetary scientists to to help, you know, really forge those along. It's worked in the past.
00:24:00:17 - 00:24:29:11
Nicholas Timms
We've we, certain type of ion micro probe, called a shrimp was developed is specifically to look at lunar samples when they came. And we, have until recently we had to at Curtin, one of two of maybe a dozen in the entire world. So it's that kind of instrument development, which is really exciting, I think in the future. Plus, the automation and machine learning and getting to high throughput of lots of volume of samples, I think would be great.
00:24:29:13 - 00:24:34:22
David Karsten
Well, with all this progress, what's next for the center in terms of equipment and research infrastructure?
00:24:35:00 - 00:25:07:11
William Rickard
The university management knows that that high quality research requires high quality research infrastructure. So we need the tools to be able to to do these great analysis. And so and to attract people from around the world to, to use them. So the. Yeah, the universities, you know, building a, a building called a Future Sciences building and it's going to have a flawed is dedicated to, to really housing these tools. So it's no point parking, you know, you're amazing. Ferrari in a in a terrible garage if you parked that in a in a beautiful showroom.
00:25:07:11 - 00:25:30:01
William Rickard
Actually, the tool not only look better will actually, work better. So if we want to push the limits to get better resolution to a more sensitive analyzes, this is, the building will allow us to do it. So we're really excited to to be doing that. And, you know, so it's it's not just having one tool, you know, lots of universities have, you know, a single tool that can do a really, really cool thing.
00:25:30:03 - 00:25:53:17
William Rickard
But what we're we're building here with this, with the center now, but also moving into the future, is a suite of tools that can answer a wide range of questions and not just look at a problem from one angle, is to really use a number of different, probes, to, to tell you all, or you can find out about a sample and particular things like sample return missions.
00:25:53:17 - 00:26:00:02
William Rickard
When you have such a small amount of material and you really want to get the most amount of information. Yeah, we're we're really well set up to do that.
00:26:00:04 - 00:26:15:04
David Karsten
Well, gentlemen, these are exciting times here at Curtin and at the John de Laeter Centre. It's it's been an absolutely fascinating chat with both of you. Thank you very much for coming in and just divulging some of this exciting, material and research that you're working with at the moment.
00:26:15:06 - 00:26:15:19
William Rickard
Thank you.
00:26:15:20 - 00:26:22:24
Nicholas Timms
Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to share of whatever I get excited about. I just would love the world to see what I see.
00:26:23:01 - 00:26:24:04
William Rickard
Thank you. It's been a lot of fun.
00:26:24:10 - 00:26:37:02
Sarah Taillier
You've been listening to The Future Of a podcast powered by Curtin University. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and don't forget to subscribe to the future of on your favorite podcast app.
00:26:37:04 - 00:26:37:20
Sarah Taillier
Bye for now.