DART Explained: First Asteroid Crash Images
DART Explained: First Asteroid Crash Images
8:14

DART Explained: First Asteroid Crash Images

Space
Speaker 1: NASA just crashed a 300 million spacecraft into an asteroid. Why? To save this from the apocalypse. Haven't you seen Armageddon? Speaker 2: It's the size of Texas. Mr. President, Speaker 3: We didn't see this thing coming. Speaker 1: All right. No full disclosure. This asteroid wasn't on its way to obliterate Earth. It's still 11 million kilometers away, and there was no risk of it running into our planet. But this collision was part of a mission called [00:00:30] the Double A Redirection Test, and the goal was to help test out our planetary defense systems to see whether we could knock an asteroid off its trajectory if it was hurtling towards Earth, and it worked. Aside from getting some amazing live streamed footage, NASA also got a lot of great scientific data on how to protect our planet so that if we ever find a killer asteroid set to collide with Earth, we [00:01:00] know how to stop it or at least nudge it out of the way. We might have just found our get out of Apocalypse free card. Speaker 1: NASA describes the DART mission as a test of quote, Kinetic impacted technology, but it's essentially the Hulk Smash of space science. On one side you have the DART spacecraft, which is about the size of a small [00:01:30] golf cart or a vending machine. On the other side is the target, a little asteroid moonlet called Dimorphic. It's 160 meters or 520 feet in diameter, and it orbits around a larger asteroid called Dimus. Both of them forming a binary asteroid system, a little dancing pair that orbits around the sun. Every two years, they go from being out past Mars to coming relatively close to earth. Well close in space terms. It [00:02:00] might look like a close shave with our planet, but when Dart made Impact, Dimorphic was still 11 million kilometers or just under 7 million miles away from Earth. But even though this impact happened a long way away, we still got to see it all go down on a live stream. Speaker 4: We're seeing Dimorphic so wonderful, wonderful. Speaker 1: That point of light that's slowly getting bigger is the binary asteroid system. As we got closer to impact, we started to [00:02:30] see more details of the asteroids come into focus. Those images came thanks to the single instrument on board. Dart the Draco camera that stands for Dimus reconnaissance and asteroid camera for optical navigation. NASA and its names Draco helped navigate DART towards its target, taking high resolution images of the asteroid. On the way. In the final moments before impact, those images beamed back to us, showing amazing detail on these ancient rocks. Then [00:03:00] at 7:14 PM Eastern Time in the US here on Earth, we got confirmation of impact. Speaker 5: Oh, wow. We're awaiting visual confirmation. And we have First Humanity game, the name of planetary defense. Woo. Fantastic. Speaker 6: It was incredible to see how so many years of hard work and creativity [00:03:30] resulted in a direct hit of Dimorphic was just an adrenaline rush. Um, I'll add that. Uh, I've been at the lab now for quite a few years, and I've been involved in a lot of missions and achievements, and never before have I been so excited to see a signal go away. Samantha and a image to stop Speaker 1: The final image was taken just one second before impact. Six [00:04:00] kilometers above the surface of Dimorphic DART crashed while the image was being transmitted. So that's why most of it is blacked out. NASA later released a sped up video stitching together the final images from Draco. Scientists expect Dior orbit will change by about 1% after the impact, but telescopes on Earth will measure that change exactly over a number of weeks. In fact, the Atlas Project in Hawaii has already used its telescopes to capture [00:04:30] images of the dart impact and the resulting debris Speaker 1: Timing. This whole thing was a complex game of orbital physics. And if you came to know more about the planning and the background to the mission, I actually interviewed the DART coordination lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory for another video. I'll link to that in the description below, so you can check it out after this. Oh, and while we're at it, just to answer one of the big questions and comments that I got on that video, no, NASA didn't [00:05:00] knock the asteroid out of orbit and into a collision course with Earth. That would've been really dumb. NASA and the Johns Hopkins team spent a lot of time with their protractors and rulers and calculators making sure that that didn't happen. But you know what? If our planet explodes in a week, I owe you a Coke. But back to the impact. I know what you're thinking. If the space probe crashed into the asteroid, those instruments are cactus, right? We won't get any more visuals or data. DART was our last hope, right? [00:05:30] No, there is another Speaker 1: 15 days before DART crashed. It deployed a small cube set made by the Italian Space Agency ASI called Cube, about the size of a toaster. Liter cube was sent up to take images of the DART impact After the crash. Its job was to use an onboard RGB camera to study the ejector cloud and the impact crater from the crash. Because Lit Cube doesn't have a large antenna, those images [00:06:00] need to be downlink to earth one by one over a number of weeks. They want as much detail as possible. After all, how many times do you get to play demolition derby up in space? And these images are actually set to provide a lot of valuable data to scientists about the A and the impact. DART didn't exactly blow the A to smither Rains. Remember, DART is about the size of a small golf cart, and the asteroid is the size of one of the great pyramids. But still, [00:06:30] it was traveling at more than 22,000 kilometers or roughly 14,000 miles an hour before impact when it hit in the vacuum of space. That was enough to knock the asteroid off course. Speaker 1: So if Dior didn't pose a threat, then why spend $300 million to crash into a harmless asteroid? Well, because the not so harmless asteroids could still be out there. According to the mission team [00:07:00] at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory, we found 90% of the asteroids near us that are a kilometer or larger in size. Scientists are tracking those, but the smaller asteroids, a few hundred meters across like the size of Dimorphic, we found less than half of those, and they could cause enough damage to wipe out whole towns or cities if they impacted Earth. Thanks to this mission, we now know a lot more about what it takes to target these kinds of asteroids and [00:07:30] protect our planet. So I guess I'm crossing asteroids off my deadly fears list for now. Thanks, Vanessa. All right. That's it for me for now. But if you wanna check out more on the DART mission, be sure to check out my previous video where I speak with the mission lead and dig into the science of space physics. Or for another big mission explainer. Why not take a look at my behind the scenes visit to the NASA factory where they built the Artemis rocket? That was a lot of fun. And while you're here, chuck us [00:08:00] alike. Why don't you? And remember to subscribe for more Space News as it happens. I'm Claire Riley official smashing into Space Rocks Reporter for cnet.

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