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.
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 to 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 main 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 and 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.
