An Asteroid by Any Other Name With Special Guest Latif Nasser 

The idea of an asteroid from outer space crashing into Earth has captured the imaginations of science fiction directors for decades. But here at NASA, we take potentially hazardous near-Earth objects seriously. We have a planetary defense office that plans for every scenario—we’ve even practiced nudging an asteroid off course with spacecraft. But there are tens of thousands of objects in near-Earth space, and the first step in protecting against potential impacts is spotting, tracking and managing every single one of them. Learn how NASA does just that from Joe Masiero, a scientist on the asteroid survey mission NEOWISE. Then, join friend of the show Latif Nasser, co-host of the podcast Radiolab, to untangle the mystery of a strange space rock that’s not quite a moon but not quite a normal asteroid, either.

Introducing NASA’s Curious Universe         

Get curious with NASA. As an official NASA podcast, Curious Universe brings you mind-blowing science and space adventures you won’t find anywhere else. Explore the cosmos alongside astronauts, scientists, engineers, and other top NASA experts who are achieving remarkable feats in science, space exploration, and aeronautics. Learn something new about the wild and wonderful universe we share. All you need to get started is a little curiosity. 

NASA’s Curious Universe is an official NASA podcast hosted by Padi Boyd and Jacob Pinter 

Discover more ad-free, original NASA shows at nasa.gov/podcasts 

Find the full NASA’s Curious Universe catalog at nasa.gov/curiousuniverse 

 

[Music: Scorpio Season by Bisset] 

 

JACOB PINTER: Hey space nerds! Curious Universe is back. This is a brand-new episode. I think you’re really gonna like it. 

 

PADI BOYD: And just to let you know… this fall, we’re trying something different. Through the end of the year, we’ll be back in your feeds once a month with a new adventure.  

 

JACOB: Now sit back, strap on your astronaut helmet, and enjoy the show! 

 

[Voyager 2 launch broadcast: 3, 2, 1, we have ignition, and we have liftoff] 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

[Sound of street ambience, car windshield wipers running] 

 

[Music: The Electrician’s Dub by Lomas] 

 

JACOB PINTER: It’s 2013… and just after sunrise on a cold February day in Chelyabinsk, Russia.  

 

PADI BOYD: The sky is a dark blue. Snow is piled high on the rooftops. A few cars meander down the streets. 

 

JACOB: And dozens of miles above the town, a meteor the length of a six-story building is hurtling towards Earth.  

 

[Sound of asteroid rumbling through space, then exploding] 

 

JACOB: Then, it hits the atmosphere, exploding into tons of pieces.  

 

PADI: The arc of red across the sky turns the dark morning as bright as midday.  

 

[Sound of sirens, car alarms blaring] 

 

JACOB: In Chelyabinsk, cars screech to a halt on the icy roads as all eyes turn to the sky. The shockwave sets off car alarms and shatters windows across six cities, injuring more than a thousand people.  

 

PADI: Afterwards, NASA weather satellites detect a cloud of debris circling the entire globe. The scariest part? No one had seen it coming. A bigger asteroid could have wiped out the city. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JOE MASIERO: The Chelyabinsk impactor, it really brought attention to the hazard that even small asteroids can pose to us.  

 

JACOB: That’s Joe Masiero, a scientist at Caltech who works with NASA to track near-Earth asteroids. 

 

JOE: My elevator pitch for my work is that I use an infrared space telescope to look for asteroids coming close to the Earth and make sure they don’t hit us. 

 

PADI: Like the rest of his team, Joe takes defending our planet seriously. He keeps a piece of the Chelyabinsk meteorite with him as a reminder of what can happen when we’re not watching the sky. 

 

[Opening theme music: Curiosity by SYSTEM Sounds] 

 

PADI: This is NASA’s Curious Universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I’m your host, Padi Boyd… 

 

JACOB: And I’m your co-host, Jacob Pinter. And in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. 

 

PADI: Today on the show… planetary defense. City-destroying asteroids are the stuff of science fiction disaster movies. But here at NASA, they’re a threat we take seriously. So, strap in… Joe’s going to take us on an adventure through near-Earth space to see how exactly NASA keeps you safe from space rocks down on the ground.  

 

JACOB: And stick around, because later on we’ll talk with Latif Nasser, host of the podcast Radiolab, to dig into a strange asteroid mystery that one of our colleagues here at NASA helped him solve.  

 

[Opening theme music fades out] 

 

PADI: Now, to protect Earth from asteroids, the first step is finding them. And that’s not an easy task… in the vastness of space, asteroids are tiny and can be difficult to spot.  

 

[Music: Scratch At Dawn by Lomas] 

 

JACOB: But spotting space rocks is what Joe Masiero does. His story starts with a spacecraft the size of a small sedan, called the wide-field infrared survey explorer, or “WISE.” 

 

[WISE launch broadcast: 3, 2, 1. We have ignition, and liftoff of a Delta II rocket and WISE, searching for stars and galaxies never seen before…] 

 

PADI: WISE is an unlikely hero in this story. It wasn’t designed to spot near-Earth objects at all. Its original goal was to look at the whole sky and discover faraway galaxies and a weird category of stars called brown dwarfs… and to build up an atlas of interesting targets for future spacecraft like the James Webb Space Telescope to zoom in on in much greater detail.  

 

JOE: And so wise was that pathfinder, that all-sky map, to allow people to figure out where the cool things in the sky. 

 

JACOB: We’re talking about cool in more ways than one… those faraway objects give off a lot more heat than light. So, to spot them, WISE had to look into space in the infrared. 

 

JOE: So, this is light beyond which your eye can see. It’s the light of heat. 

 

PADI: In the infrared, dim means cold. These distant, dim, cold galaxies are objects you’d never be able to see from the ground… you’d be blinded by the heat of our atmosphere. Even in the cold of space, the pie tin-sized telescope onboard WISE had to be packed inside a tube of solid frozen hydrogen… so that it would stay cool enough. Scientists didn’t want WISE to accidentally detect the heat from its own electronics, while it was out looking for stars. 

 

JOE: So, we have this 40-centimeter telescope inside a giant thermos bottle that we lovingly refer to as R2-D2. It’s this big white thermos with a bunch of tubes on the side that looks kind of like R2-D2. 

 

JACOB: When the team switched on WISE’s R2-D2 telescope and looked into space with its infrared eyes, they saw a lot more than galaxies and stars… 

 

JOE: Some of the brightest things in the sky at those long wavelengths are the asteroids. They’re glowing at exactly those wavelengths. And so, when you look at the sky at 10 microns, it is just full of asteroids. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JACOB: Why? Because it turns out the asteroids near our planet are, weirdly enough, about room temperature! If you could stand on one, except for the whole thing about not having an atmosphere and being really far from home, you might be pretty comfortable! 

 

JOE: Asteroids get their heat from the Sun much like the Earth does, and so if you are about as far from the Sun as the Earth is, you’ll be about the same temperature. And so, the asteroids that are about the distance from the Earth, away from the Sun, are a little bit warmer than it would be at room temperature here. 

 

PADI: Since they’re so warm, these asteroids were super bright in WISE’s images, compared to the dim, cold, galaxies much further away. For the astrophysicists, they were almost a nuisance.  

 

JACOB: But as a side project, the team cataloged them anyway, eventually identifying over 100,000 objects in the asteroid belt, out past Mars. Then, after finishing its planned 6-month survey, WISE was out of time. Its hydrogen coolant had run out. So, the team put WISE in hibernation. They pointed its solar panels toward the Sun and turned it off. 

 

[Music: Forward Thinking by Lomas] 

 

PADI: NASA has been interested in asteroids for a long time. In 1998, Congress asked us to find at least 90% of all asteroids near Earth bigger than about a half mile within the next ten years. 

 

  JOE: So, near-Earth objects are, it’s kind of a line in the sand.  

 

JACOB: Near-Earth objects are asteroids or comets that get within about 30 million miles from Earth’s orbit. That’s a lot of ground to cover, but it gives us a big margin of safety. 

 

JOE: And these are just objects that are, over hundreds of years, might have orbits that can move them around enough that we should want to pay attention to them and stuff that could have a planetary flyby or could be drifting in from the main belt. 

 

PADI: To date, we’ve found some 35,000 near-Earth asteroids. Now, don’t panic; these are mostly friendly neighborhood asteroids with no chance of hitting us. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JACOB: But some of them are what we call potentially hazardous asteroids… ones that get within 5 million miles of Earth’s orbit. And that may still sound far… but is too close for comfort! 

 

JOE: Because that’s the close approach distance that, in a hundred-year time span, the photon pressure from the sun and the gentle tugs from the gravity of all of the objects in the solar system could move that orbit enough, in about a century. 

 

PADI: These are those disaster movie asteroids… the kind that could potentially hit us and cause big problems. NASA’s search for them was well underway by 2013, when the Chelyabinsk meteor hit. But that impact made planetary defense a global priority.  

 

[Music: Run On The Spot by Lomas] 

 

JACOB: The same day it exploded over Russia, the United Nations called for a global asteroid warning system. In 2016, NASA launched its Planetary Defense Coordination Office and started holding regular asteroid impact simulation drills. We wanted to find and track every near-Earth object, to make sure we would never be blindsided again. And with these new planetary defense goals, NASA needed a spacecraft ready to find asteroids that would complement the agency’s ground-based telescopes… and we needed it, like, yesterday! Joe had just the one in mind… WISE! The same one his team had WISE-ly, ahem, left hibernating a couple of years before. Without its coolant, WISE wasn’t the telescope it once was… but it could still see asteroids close to Earth… the warmer, brighter ones… perfectly well! 

 

JOE: And so, we said, you know, if we could turn this back on, we could detect, you know, a couple 100 objects every year for as long as we want to survey. 

 

[Music fades out] 

PADI: NASA agreed, and WISE was resurrected… as NEOWISE! And with its focus fully on space rocks, it quickly began spotting near-Earth asteroids scientists hadn’t seen before. 

 

JACOB: So, you might be wondering, if you’re on the NEOWISE team and you spot a new asteroid, what do you do? Well, first, you make sure everyone knows about it. 

 

JOE: A few months into reactivation, the computer system said, “I think I found a new object.” We reviewed it, and we said, “Yeah, this does look new.” And we reported to the Minor Planet Center. 

 

[Music: Softly, Softly by Moenks] 

 

PADI: The Minor Planet Center is an office of the International Astronomical Union. The IAU is like the Census Bureau of space… responsible for keeping track of every object out there, from asteroids to exoplanets. To go from what they call a candidate new asteroid to a confirmed one, you need to know its orbit. And since NEOWISE just takes a wide snapshot of the sky at a single point in time… it’s up to other people, from big observatories around the world to amateurs in their backyards, to confirm that orbit.  

 

JACOB: For this specific asteroid Joe’s team spotted a few months into reactivation, that wasn’t easy. 

 

JOE: And the problem with it was that it was in the deep south of the sky. And so, we were getting follow up from observers in Australia and New Zealand. I had to get one of the big telescopes in Chile to tip all the way over to get follow up observations. And what was really cool is, a few weeks after we discovered it, it was going to have a close pass with the Earth in the daytime sky. Our friends who do research using radio waves were able to ping it with radar and to get these beautiful radar images of this object that only a few weeks ago we hadn’t known about. And now suddenly we’re getting this nice, resolved, 3-D shape model effectively from radio. And it demonstrated how interconnected and how important all the various pieces of this near-Earth object community are to understanding what these objects are. 

 

JACOB: Three times a week, like clockwork, for ten years, Joe and his team met and went through the list of detections, reported their findings to the Minor Planet Center, and worked with the community to track them. Everyone pitched in, because when it comes to near-Earth objects, there is no one on Earth who isn’t affected. 

 

JOE: Planetary defense is a team sport, and it’s of global concern, right? It’s defense of the planet. And so, we all really do have to work together.  

 

[Music fades out] 

 

PADI: Now for the fun part… when you discover something new in space, the Minor Planet Center gives it a number. But that’s not very catchy. So, they also give you the right, or privilege, depending on who you ask, to name it! For example, there’s a mysterious group of asteroids in the main belt called the Barbarians. They’re remnants of the earliest days of our solar system. And they’re called that because the first one discovered was named Barbara. Then astronomers kept finding more of them. So, you know, the plural of Barbara…  

 

JOE: Uh, so this is… yes, our community has a way with names. 

 

[Music: Making Magic by Moenks] 

 

JACOB: It all started with the planets, long before you or I were looking up at them… Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These were big important bodies in our skies, visible to the naked eye. So, the ancient Romans decided they’d name them after their mythological gods. Then, in the 1700s, a British astronomer with a telescope discovered a new planet and named it, ahem, drumroll please… Georgium Sidus… after King George the Third, the ruler at the time. That made astronomers in other countries upset. And after a lot of debate, they swapped it to the name we know today… Uranus, for Greek God of the sky. 

 

JOE: And then we got into this habit of looking for more planets out there, finding more and then giving them mythological names.  

 

PADI: Neptune got the same treatment, named for the Roman god of the sea. Then, in the early 1800s, astronomers started spotting smaller objects… what we call “dwarf planets” and asteroids today! They named them after goddesses. 

 

JOE: And so, you first you found Ceres, and then you found Pallas and Juno and Vesta. And the asteroids started getting these mythological names. And then we found so many asteroids we started running out of mythological names. And so, the main belt kind of became honorifics to various people that the discoverers could choose.   

 

PADI: By now it’s the late 1800s. Which brings us back to the Barbarians.  

 

JOE: And so Asteroid 234, was named by the discoverer after Barbara. And this was long enough ago that I’m actually not sure which Barbara it’s referring to. Nowadays you have to write up a paragraph explaining who the person is and giving some background, but back then, it was just a name. 

 

JACOB: Actually, no one knows who this Barbara was. The New York astronomer who discovered Asteroid 234 might have had St. Barbara, the patron saint of mathematicians, in mind. We do know that the guy who discovered the Barbarian group’s unique properties is on board with the group name now, although Joe says it took a while for him to come around. Oh, and that was Asteroid 234, right? Well, now we’re well into names with six digits.  

 

JOE: Uh, we’re in the um, I think in like, the six hundred thousands, or almost getting close to the seven hundred thousands now. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

PADI: That’s… a lot of objects to name. Who keeps track of them all? Well, remember the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union? The IAU has another branch, the Small Bodies Nomenclature Committee, that reviews proposals. And there are some rules…  

 

JOE: Anything in near-Earth space has to be named after a deity of some kind, from some religion. It has to be, it can’t be after a person. You don’t want, like, you know, asteroid Bob to be impacting the Earth next week, like that was, they just want to rule that out, that possibility. 

 

PADI: For the main belt asteroids, it’s more open ended. There are some limitations, but you can name them in honor of family members, friends, celebrities…  

 

JOE: One of the other rules is that the discoverers are allowed to propose two names per month. So, when you have 33,000 objects, you know, that’s only 15,000 months we have to wait. So, in about, you know, couple thousand years or so, we’ll be able to name all of our objects. 

 

[Music: Gazing at the Galaxy by Moenks] 

 

JACOB: The NEOWISE team has named a lot of asteroids in honor of team members, especially those who’ve passed away in the 30-some years from the time the original mission was first proposed.  And as the person who’s discovered some of those asteroids, Joe’s been able to choose some names himself… 

 

JOE: I have named asteroids after, you know, my family members, after my kids, some of my friends for my when I got married, I named an asteroid after all my groomsmen, for instance. So that was one of my wedding gifts to them. 

 

JACOB: Those were main belt asteroids. For potentially hazardous rocks closer to Earth…  

 

JOE: The unfortunate thing is, for a lot of these objects, we don’t know a lot about them, right? We know their orbit, but we don’t know a lot more about it, and so you kind of want to wait until you have a little bit more information, right? What makes this asteroid special? How do I assign a name to it? Right? To really make the names mean something. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JACOB: Over ten years, its mission extended a year at a time as it kept returning great data, NEOWISE saw so many possible asteroid intersections along the racetrack of Earth’s orbit.  

 

PADI: It collected enough data that scientists are now going beyond asking what’s out there and answering questions about the different sizes and physical properties and origins of near-Earth objects.  

 

JACOB: But NEOWISE has been on borrowed time since it was reactivated a decade ago. Early in 2024, its second wind started running out. As we approach solar maximum, you might have heard our Sun is getting more active, spitting more flares and coronal mass ejections out into space…  

 

JOE: But what it’s also doing is injecting energy into Earth’s upper atmosphere and causing it to puff up a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit, and a few extra molecules of atmosphere make a big difference to a spacecraft. And so, each time one of these coronal mass ejections hits the Earth, as we’re tracking the spacecraft, we’ve noticed it drops by, like about a kilometer. 

 

[Music: Disturbed Dreams by Doney] 

 

JACOB: According to the navigation team, sometime in the fall of 2024, NEOWISE will have sunk enough in its slow spiral towards Earth that it won’t be able to stay in orbit. It’ll take a final dramatic plunge down to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere in a fiery streak, not unlike the space rocks it spent ten years looking out for, keeping us safe. 

 

JOE: Most likely it’s going to be over the ocean, because most of the Earth is the ocean, but maybe we’ll be lucky, and someone will take a photo of it. We’ll see. 

 

PADI: The team knew the end was coming… as NEOWISE’s orbit decayed, its data would soon become too ragged to process. On July 31, they gathered around the monitors in the operations room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Joe said goodbye to NEOWISE. They remotely put the spacecraft into safe mode, turned off its instruments and computers, and sent it a final flight path.  

 

JOE: So just make sure you stay pointed at the Sun and hang out there and hold this attitude. Uh, and then on August 8, we had our final decommissioning, where we turned off the transmitter for the last time.  

 

JOE: And so, we had the whole team gathered around. They were walking us through. Here’s what’s going on, here’s what you’re seeing. And then they sent the last command. 

 

[NEOWISE decommissioning broadcast: Final power off command. The command has been sent and received by the spacecraft. So, everything is completed. We are no longer receiving telemetry data. Right now, time is 22:20. I now declare NEOWISE decommissioned.] 

 

JOE: And yes, after we had the decommissioning, we did have a party. You know, it was a memorial for NEOWISE, as it were. Celebration of life, celebration of science. 

 

[NEOWISE decommissioning broadcast: What a great mission, what a great team. I can’t say enough about this team.] 

 

JOE: And it was, you know, I mean, I wouldn’t say sad, it’s bittersweet, right? It’s, especially for me, I, you know, I joined the mission two months before launch, right out of graduate school, so I’ve been working on this for all of my professional career at this point. And so, it’s a change, right? But there’s new stuff on the horizon. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JACOB: Yep, there sure is! With a decade of experience on NEOWISE, most of Joe’s team is moving on to a new project: NEO Surveyor, the first spacecraft built from the ground up to discover near-Earth objects… and to answer questions NEOWISE couldn’t. 

 

[Music: What Was Reported As by Flynn] 

 

PADI: We’re still learning new things about asteroids all the time. Last year, Latif Nasser, host of WNYC Studios’ Radiolab, contacted NASA with a question about a mysterious object… and the answer made us think about our universe in a whole new way. 

 

JACOB: Yeah, there are many asteroids out there, to undersell it a little bit, and Latif went down the rabbit hole about one space rock in particular. This is a super fun story with lots of twists and turns, and I was so glad to just have a minute to chat with Latif about it. So, here we go. Keep all that asteroid stuff we just learned tucked in your mind, because it’s going to come right back. And enjoy the story. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JACOB PINTER: Today’s extra special, because we have a live studio audience.  

 

LATIF NASSER: [Laughs] 

 

[Sound of applause, cheers] 

 

JACOB: It feels like, feels like being on Cheers or something.  

 

LATIF: [Laughs] 

 

JACOB: So, thank you for being here. Well, let’s start with the hard questions. Latif, can you introduce yourself? What’s your name? Who are you? What’s your deal? 

 

LATIF:  Sure. My name’s Latif Nasser. I am the co-host of the show Radiolab, but in general, I feel like I’m just, I am a professional nerd, like, like yourself, like a lot of the people that work here. 

 

JACOB: Well, let’s nerd out, because we’re at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and we just spent most of the day touring around and seeing stuff that we do here.  

 

LATIF: I’m so stoked there. I don’t know, it’s been, I feel like it’s a kid in a candy store kind of a day.  

 

JACOB: Well, we’re glad you schlepped out here. We’re really happy to have you.  

 

LATIF: Thank you. Thanks for having me. 

 

JACOB: So you’ve gone down this rabbit hole about space and our solar system and how we name things that we see in that solar system, which we’ll get all into. But where did that start for you? What was like the entrance to the rabbit hole? 

 

LATIF: For this particular project, like, it really caught me off guard. So it was now probably almost like two years ago, my son was two years old at the time, I was putting him to bed in his crib, and on the, because I’m, as you know, a space nerd, I had a solar system poster on his wall, and it just sort of like, out of the corner of my eye, I saw on that solar system poster, as I was putting into bed, Venus had a moon.  

 

[Music: Enigma’s Embrace by Goodman] 

 

LATIF: And I was like, that’s weird. Like, I didn’t remember, I don’t remember ever learning that in school. Like, does Venus have a moon? But I was like, okay, whatever. So, I put him to bed, and then I went to my bedroom, and I looked up, “Does Venus have a moon?” And the first result is, of course, from NASA saying Venus has no moon. And then I was like, huh, like, and that felt like I was like, that’s really like, maybe I just, maybe I was imagining it or something. And so, then the next morning, when my kid woke up, I went back to his room and it was right there, and Venus had a moon. And then not only did Venus have a Moon, Venus had this, the Venus moon, this Venusian moon had on this poster, it had a name, and it was Z, O, O, Z, V, E, Zoozve. And I was like, that’s so specific, like that can’t be a, that’s not a mistake, that’s not an accident. 

 

JACOB: Yeah. 

 

LATIF: And then I Google that, and then there’s no English results. 

 

JACOB: Hmm. Were there other languages results?  

 

LATIF: Yeah, there were Czech results, and they were all about zoos. And I was like, that’s not right.  

 

JACOB: [Laughs] 

 

LATIF: So, I was like, what is going on like that doesn’t make any sense.  

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JACOB: To fast forward a bit here, what Latif did next was track down the poster’s illustrator. He swore Zoozve wasn’t a practical joke or the name of his dog… the artist said he’d found it on a list of moons online. As far as Latif was concerned… this was a dead end. So, Latif phoned a friend. A friend named Liz Landau, who is a communications specialist here at NASA. And if that name sounds familiar, it’s because Liz has produced a few episodes of Curious Universe in the past! And she was also in the audience when I talked with Latif. 

 

LATIF: So, I still couldn’t figure it out, and actually Liz was the one who cracked it. Thank you. So, she texted me back, and she was like, “It’s not Zoozve, it’s 2002VE.” So ,the Z’s were twos and the O’s were zeros, and so it’s 2002VE. And she was like, “It’s a real thing. It is actually a thing in space.” This is not a map artifact or a someone spilled a, you know, a drop of ink or something on a poster, like this was a real thing out there in the solar system. And then so I managed to track down the guy who discovered it, who was a guy called Brian Skiff at the Lowell Observatory. He was involved with this big scale, like mass observation of asteroids, like starting in the late ‘90s, early 2000s where they were just trying to, like, find and label as many of these things as possible, in case one of them was trying to hit Earth. And so, he was the person sort of on shift that night when, when it was discovered. For me, I was like, “Oh, finally, someone who knows about this thing, the guy who discovered it!” 

 

JACOB: Yeah. 

 

LATIF: And then he was like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never heard of this thing.” 

 

JACOB: [Laughs] 

 

LATIF: And I’m like, “How have you never heard of it? You discovered it!” But it turned out just because it is one of those mass… 

 

JACOB: Because they’re finding a ton of them. 

 

LATIF: He’s like discovering so many things. They’re finding so many. I think he said one night they discovered like, 2,000 of them, or something. 

 

JACOB: This sent Latif straight back to square one. If even the person who discovered it couldn’t tell Latif what this Zoozve thing was, then who could? Well, Liz was still on the case. She pointed Latif to a scientific paper by a group of astronomers who happened to be really interested in Zoozve. Except they didn’t call it Zoozve. They used its official name at the time: 2002-VE-68. These astronomers confirmed this was indeed a very interesting space rock. But, for a reason Latif didn’t expect. 

 

[Music: Machine Melody by Trachtenberg] 

 

LATIF: So, a moon generally orbits a planet, a planet generally orbits a star. This thing, it’s out there. It’s an asteroid that kind of knocked loose. It’s near Venus. It’s orbiting the Sun, but it’s orbiting the Sun at basically the same rate and the same distance from the Sun as Venus. And it’s far enough away from Venus that it wouldn’t act like a moon, but as it’s going around the Sun, it’s also very slowly going around Venus, it’s doing both. It’s doing what a planet does and it’s doing what a moon does. But that thing, that type of object, that orbital pattern, people had hypothesized, had speculated that such a thing, including Darwin’s son, had speculated that such a thing could have existed for like, 100 years. But then this one, Zoozve, around Venus, was the first one of those they ever discovered. And they call them quasi-satellites, or quasi-moons 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

LATIF: Is it a moon, or isn’t it? It’s sort of a moon, but kind of not. It’s too far away to be a moon, but it is going around the thing that it’s supposed to be going around, but it’s also going around these other things. So, it’s like, it’s this, it’s this weirdo. It’s this kind of strange, checks off some of the columns of column A, checks off some of the columns of column B kind of thing. 

 

JACOB: This was the point that really blew Latif’s mind.  Because quasi-moons aren’t the only weirdo asteroids in our solar system! There is this whole class of misfits… called co-orbital objects. 

 

LATIF: There’s not just quasi-moons, there’s these, like horseshoe moons. So, they’re like, going around like a moon does, except, you know, they, like, they don’t do the full loop. They just, like, at one point, they just kind of make a U-turn and then go back around. You’re like, “What, that’s possible?” 

 

JACOB: [Laughs] 

 

LATIF: Or another one that’s just going, like, it’s doing a little comma shape, and they call that one a tadpole and like, there are, there are tadpole moons? Like, you look closer and you’re like, “Wait, there’s, this isn’t the only, I mean, this is the first of its kind weirdo, but there are a lot of other kinds of weirdos out there.” And, and you’re like, “Oh, huh. Like, we don’t just live in a cookie cutter suburban neighborhood, like there are weirdos in our neighborhood,” you know what? I mean? That’s kind of how it feels. 

 

JACOB: So, you, not to spoil the surprise, I guess. But you went to some lengths to actually get this thing to officially have the name Zoozve, not 2002VE68? 

 

LATIF: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s right.  

 

JACOB: Um, why? You know, once you found all this out as you’re sort of processing and learning, why was it important to you to officially give it the name Zoozve? 

 

LATIF: Part of it. It felt like almost, not to diminish it at all, but it felt like the punchline to the joke. It felt like there needed to be. It felt like the natural conclusion. I was like, “Okay, I discovered this thing,” that felt like, I mean, it’s just a rock. It’s a rock the size of the Eiffel Tower or something. It’s a potato-shaped Eiffel Tower rock. And so, it’s just a rock, but then, like, all of a sudden, the more I learned about it, and even the way it felt like it was, at least for me, like, kind of redefining, like, what movement is possible in our solar system, you know?  

 

[Music: The Search for Solutions by Moenks] 

 

LATIF: And like, I was like, “Wow, that’s cool, and that’s special.” And that feels like it deserves more than, you know, like 2002VE68 it’s almost like a, feels like a, like a, like a phone number, a car serial number or something. It just like, was this randomly assigned thing. And I was like, “No, no, this is special. This is more special than that. It deserves a name.” And it felt like that name was so perfect, because it was, you know, from my Google experience, it was like a unique name, and I was like, “Oh, and this feels like, I mean, this was the first one we found like this. So this is a unique thing.” And so it feels, it just feels natural, you know, it felt like a, it felt like the sort of obvious, like, it just clicked, right? You know? 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JACOB: Yeah. So, you know, I imagine if you are one of these space scientists scanning for these types of bodies, and you find one, and you want to name it, you probably have some resources like, you know, “Okay, I need to do X, Y and Z to give it this name.” But when you are not actually a scientist like that, when you’re just kind of a guy who wants to name something, where do you start? 

 

LATIF:  [Laughs] Yeah, well, right so I had no idea. So I asked, you know, a bunch of the people that I talked to in the course of the reporting, like, how do you, how do you name things? And they had all named stuff before. Brian Skiff, he had named, he had found four in a row, and then he named them after the Beatles, or he’s named so many of them, to the degree that he says that he has naming fatigue, because he just, like, he’s discovered so many things. He’s like, just, “There’s no more names. Like, I can’t, what am I gonna name them?” 

 

JACOB: [Laughs] 

 

LATIF: But anyway, so I asked them, I was like, “Okay, how do you do this? And they’re like, “Okay, there’s this group, the International Astronomical Union, and they have within their group, a subgroup called the Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature.” And they walked me through it. I didn’t even tell them that I was trying to, I was just like, “Oh, if, if one theoretically wanted to name a thing…” 

 

[Music: Ocean Oscillation by Trachtenberg] 

 

JACOB: [Laughs] 

 

LATIF: [Laughs] And then I sort of, they outlined the process for me. And then I was like, “Okay, I got to do this.” And then I had to, kind of first, I had to win over Brian, because he’s the discoverer. So, the discoverer kind of gets the sort of first dibs to put in a name contender. And at first, he thought the idea was really dumb, and then I convinced him, and then that hopefully the write up that he put in had to convince the committee. It’s this committee of, I don’t know what, like 13 or something, astronomers around the world. And so yeah, but then eventually they voted on it, and there was, there’s this, like one hitch that I thought was going to be the fatal flaw, which was that for everything a certain distance from the Earth, it has to have a mythological name. And so obviously Zoozve did not, because it was not really a name. And so, we were trying to, like, like, back-invent, like, retcon a mythology. 

 

JACOB: [Laughs] Yeah, a minor deity named Zoozve. 

 

LATIF: Right, a minor deity named Zoozve in some obscure culture. And we’re like, that’s not gonna work. Let’s just be honest. And hopefully this thing will sail by on charm alone. But we were like, maybe, will it, won’t it? And then it did, and then they officially accepted the name. And it was like, we did not expect that was gonna happen, yeah. 

 

JACOB: And a lot of people probably assume that this is, that NASA is the group that names the asteroids or whatever. But it’s not our lane. It’s the IAU. 

 

LATIF: Right, and no disrespect intended, I’m kind of glad it’s not, because I think that, so the International Astronomical Union, which does work with NASA, I think quite a bit, it’s the whole world. It’s representing the whole world. And I think that’s how it should be, like they still have this mythological requirement, but it’s no longer just, you know, ancient Greek and Roman names. So now, when they’re naming stuff, it’s off of any culture, you know. So, it can be from any part of planet Earth, and that’s, you know, that feels right for the sky. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

JACOB: We like to say that Curious Universe is for first time space explorers. And it’s funny, because you kind of are in this story, or you’re exploring a new part of space for the first time for you. Um, what did this process teach you about space and just how we explore it? 

 

LATIF: I think for this story, one of the really cool things that I learned that I didn’t know about was the three body problem. You can only predict, the sort of system is so chaotic, that you can only predict where Zoozve is gonna go for certain, so for a few hundred years, we know it’s gonna leave Venus. We don’t know what it’s gonna do after that, it could do anything. Like, to me, I don’t know, that was kind of the thesis of the whole piece that I learned, and kind of the, I feel like, the revelation that Zoocw gave me. It’s like, like, we all think we live because of those posters, we all think we live in like a clock, and it’s, it’s actually like, it’s, it’s like we live in a club, like anything can happen, like we’re all dancing, and maybe we’ll be dancing over here, and maybe we’ll be dancing over there, and maybe these two will switch partners, and it’s like, wow, that’s cool.  

 

[Music: Future’s Arrival by Hosenfeld] 

LATIF: That’s the solar system we live in. And I’m like, Whoa. Like anything is possible, and anything is possible everywhere. That, to me, is like, wow, that’s so cool. 

 

JACOB: I think it’s one of those things too, where it’s really easy, especially as someone who is not a scientist, who has no advanced degrees, to hear about science and think, “Oh, we understand this pretty well.” And then the more you learn, the more you have these questions, and the more you figure out, the more you realize we don’t know anything. 

 

LATIF: Oh yeah. 

 

JACOB: There’s so much that we don’t… 

 

LATIF: Oh yeah. And that’s like, that’s what I crave. I feel like, that’s what I’ve spent my whole career chasing, is that feeling of being tiny and clueless. That’s what I love. That’s why I feel like I do what I do, what we do. It’s because you like, just, I crave that hit of like, learning over and over again, yeah, how much we don’t know, how much. And like, also sorry, just because I’m here. Like NASA is the place where, when I didn’t know, right, was Venus a moon I looked up on NASA, right? NASA was, in some ways, like the arbiter of, like, what is known in the universe, right? And then later, full circle. You all, I don’t know if you did it or somebody else here, put it on the on the NASA website for the Venus page. Now, there’s a little thing, if you look up, it’s like, Venus has no moons, but it does have this crazy little thing called Zoozve. 

 

JACOB: [Laughs] 

 

LATIF: And so, so, but it’s like, it’s so cool that, yeah, I don’t know, like, even to be here, the kind of the ultimate arbiter of what is known in the universe. And, like, even here, people are like, I don’t know. I have no idea. Like, and that’s like, oh, I don’t know that to me, it, it’s so humbling and exciting, and it makes me want to sort of like, yeah, like, ride shotgun, or look over the shoulder of the people who are like, who are, who are on the cusp of, of learning new things. 

 

JACOB: Yeah, but it’s always, it’s always, I don’t know, but let’s find out.  

 

LATIF: Yeah. 

 

JACOB: And let’s figure out how to find out. 

 

LATIF: Yeah, God, It’s so exciting. What an exciting place you work. Yeah. Really, really, really exciting. 

 

[Closing theme music: Curiosity by SYSTEM Sounds] 

 

PADI: This is NASA’s Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by Christian Elliott. Our executive producer is Katie Konans. The Curious Universe team includes me, Padi Boyd, Jacob Pinter, Maddie Olson and Micheala Sosby. Krystofer Kim is our show artist. 

     

JACOB: Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of SYSTEM Sounds. Special thanks to the folks at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the International Astronomical Union and the Radiolab team. And if you’re still curious about planetary defense, check out episode from season five of Curious Universe, called “Defending the Planet from Asteroids.” 

 

PADI: As always, if you enjoyed this episode of NASA’s Curious Universe, please let us know by leaving us a review and sharing the show with a friend. And remember, you can “follow” NASA’s Curious Universe in your favorite podcast app to get a notification each time we post a new episode. 

 

[Music fades out] 

 

PADI: But some fifteen percent of them are what we call potentially hazarous. Hazardous. Hazardous asteroids, hazardous asteroids, hazardous asteroids. That’s a good vocal exercise. 

 

[NASA Audio stinger: 3, 2, 1. This is an official NASA podcast.]