Earth's First Planetary Defense

Live Science

Earth is hit by asteroids all the time, but to avoid severe damages in the future NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) seeks to validate a method to protect us.  Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

Transcript

00:00DART is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

00:05The Earth is hit by asteroids and pieces of asteroids all the time.

00:10Every year or so we get hit by things maybe the size of a table.

00:14The kind of object that DART is going to visit is an object that's about the size of the Washington Monument.

00:20Those kinds of objects hit us every few thousand years and they would cause severe damage on a regional scale.

00:27We chose to do this demonstration at a binary asteroid.

00:31It's called Didymos. This is actually approximately the shape of the May asteroid.

00:37It's called Didymos A and it's moon, Didymos B.

00:41What DART will do is DART will hit the secondary.

00:46When it hits the moon it will change the orbit period.

00:49And when it changes the orbit period it affects the timing of when the moon moves in front of or behind the primary.

00:59Mostly what we're looking to do is change the speed of the incoming object by maybe a centimeter per second or so.

01:06That's not very fast but if you do it enough seconds in advance you can cause it to miss the Earth entirely.

01:12DART is a part of a larger collaboration called AIDA which pulls in all the experts of the world who can help their governments predict

01:23and understand what it is that they can do and should do in the event that there was an incoming threat.

01:30The DART mission that APL is pulling together will be the first mission in that flight line.

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