Canora man contributes to history

On September 8, 2016 under perfect conditions in Cape Canaveral, Florida, an Atlas V rocket lifted off carrying a payload that will take a sample of an asteroid named Bennu that will, scientists hope, help them unravel the origins of life on Earth.

On hand to witness the historic event was Canadian Space Agency Senior Mission Scientist Tim Haltigin, who is responsible for overseeing Canada’s contribution to project dubbed  OSIRIS-REx for Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer.

The Canadian bit is a laser altimiter on the top of the satellite called OLA. Once OSIRIS reaches Bennu, which measures approximately 500 metres in diameter, OLA will take thousands of measurements to map the asteroid and find a suitable place to take the sample. 

Haltigin hails from the Yorkton area having grown up on a farm near Canora.

“Just thinking back to the launch on Thursday, as I was watching this thing go up one of the things going through my head was, ‘I wish I could pull 10-year-old me off the farm and just plant him beside me and say, ‘this, this is why we’re doing it’ ,” he said. 

“It’s incredibly exciting, it’s historic ground-breaking science, and to be part of that, I honestly don’t know how to describe it."

The project started in 2004 and, if all goes well, it will be another seven years before the probe returns to Earth with its precious cargo.

“This thing has basically gone from a concept on a piece of paper to a spacecraft the size of an SUV,” Haltigin told Yorkton This Week. “So many people have put in so much work and so much time into getting this thing built and to see it go is a feeling of accomplishment, it’s a feeling of relief, it’s a reminder that the real work actually starts now, getting ready for the mission itself. It’s a lot of emotion for everyone, but excitement and relief are probably two of the big ones.”

Despite the long timelines, Haltigin remains patient.

“I think you would start to get impatient if you were bored and if there was nothing left to do except wait, but we’re going to be awfully busy,” he said. 

“The science team is starting to ramp up now so during the cruise, basically from now until we get to the asteroid in 2018, there’s still a ton of work to do making sure all of our data processing software is working correctly, making sure it’s communicating properly with all the ground systems, planning all of our observations, simulating data and preparing for when we get there. 

“When we get there we’re not going to have time to do dress rehearsals then. We’ve got to be ready to hit the ground running when we get there because the schedule during the mission itself is very, very tight and so we’re basically spending the next two years just getting ready for that and practicing.”

Getting a pristine sample from an asteroid is so important because it represents a time that is lost to researchers back here on Earth.

“The mission, if we’re successful with this one, will actually be the largest sample returned from anywhere other than the Apollo missions, so this is going to be incredible,” Haltigin explained. 

“You can think of it almost as a time capsule. If we can go back and capture the sample and study it, it’s the equivalent of going back four, four-and-half-billion years and looking at what the chemistry of the early solar system [was] so that’s why this is particularly exciting. 

“If you think about the Earth as a cookie that’s been sitting on your counter for a while and if your job was to figure out what that cookie was made of, you could do it with some level of certainty. But the thing is all the ingredients have been mixed, they’ve been baked they’ve been crumbled, they’ve been dehydrated so things have happened to them over the course of time, but this is an opportunity to go back into the mixing bowl and pull out a chocolate chip and a bit of baking soda. The raw ingredients of the planets are captured in these materials, in these minerals, so that’s why it’s so important to understand them in their pristine state.”

But it’s not just a project for the present.

“One of the really important things that we want to stress here is that although it’s the science team now that gets to work on a portion of the sample, a large portion of the sample we’re putting away and we’re not touching and we’re not going to open for a long time because we want these samples to be available perfectly pristine so future generations of scientists can work on it,” Haltigin said. 

“So, students in a high school chemistry class now, thinking ‘how am I ever going to be able to use this,’ or a kid in an undergraduate geology class, these are the people that are ultimately going to be working on the sample. What we tried to do here is pave the careers for a new generation of scientists so it’s up to them to get ready for it. 

“If you look at things that we’re learning from the Apollo program, for example, these are samples that are now 50 years old and we’re still making brand new discoveries on them because we’ve got equipment now and we’ve got scientific maturity to ask different questions now that frankly just didn’t exist then. 

“And the leaps probably in the next 50 years are going to be even greater so understanding how we can do these analyses and the types of questions these people are going to be able to ask and work on, that’s the really exciting part.”

Haltigin came to space exploration by a kind of circuitous route.

He started out studying biochemistry and doing malaria research before switching to geography. That led to rivers, river dynamics and hydraulic engineering to the end of helping trout habitats.

During that time some friends at McGill University entered a European Space Agency competition looking for ideas on how to find water on Mars.

“I said, ‘I don’t know anything about this, but I’m really good at making Powerpoint presentations, so let me help out,” Haltigin recalled.

“We worked on it together and we sort of made it through round after round of selection and the European Space Agency ended up flying us to Barcelona as finalists in this international competition. 

“We didn’t win, but when we got back the professor who was sort of supervising the work, basically offered me a position to do a Ph.D. on the subject because we had advanced the concept so well.

“I ended up completely switching gears from hydraulics of trout habitats to comparing landscapes in the Canadian high arctic to similar ones on Mars.” 

The CSA had funded much of Haltigin’s research and when he graduated hired him as a research scientist.

“It was definitely not if I do ‘A’ then you get to ‘B',” he said. “It was more like if I do ‘A’ then maybe you’ll eat an orange and see a dog. Things happened to line up in the right way eventually. I’m just really lucky to be where I am right now.”

That good fortune, he believes, comes with responsibility.

“One of the things that really struck me on Thursday was that I was representing my town, my province, my country and my planet all at the same time and it’s pretty overwhelming to be honest because you feel like you’re taking people along for the ride and you want to be able to share the experience with everyone. 

“You know how it is in Yorkton or places like Canora. It’s a small town and everyone is like extended family in one way or the other, so to be able to share any part of the experience, it’s really important to me.”