I'm Nancy Szabo.
I'm a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab,
and I'm the coordination lead on the DART mission.
This mission is about NASA's purposely crashing a spacecraft
into an asteroid as the first planetary defense test mission.
That mission is DART, the double asteroid redirection test.
T stands for test. That's very important here.
This is not a threat to the earth.
This asteroid is not a threat to the earth.
And the DART test won't make it a threat to the earth.
But we want to take the steps to develop technologies to potentially prevent
asteroids from hitting the earth in the future if we needed to.
So the DART spacecraft is going to come speeding in,
hit this asteroid, and it's going to change that motion of that
asteroid ever so slightly in space changing its future path.
This is one technique that you might use to change the path of an asteroid
if one was ever found to be a threat to the earth in the future.
And we're doing this test now before we need it.
This asteroid
is the ideal target for this first planetary defense test mission.
And because it's to asteroids
like the name of the mission says, it's a double asteroid out there.
There's a larger asteroid titmouse and there's the little moonlit asteroid.
The folks that goes around it.
So Dart is going to slam into that small asteroid to more focus
and measure asteroid deflection within this asteroid system.
This makes it a really safe
way to do this test where we're just deflecting
how a small moon asteroid goes around a larger asteroid
with no measurable change about how this asteroid goes around the sun.
But it also lets us use telescopes here on the earth
in order to measure that deflection.
So it allows the DART spacecraft to be very focused,
but then use these telescopes that discover this asteroid system
and have been studying it for years to figure out how much we moved it.
So the asteroid that it's colliding with the DART
spacecraft will collide with the Morpho is about 160 meters in diameter.
It's a less than two football fields in length,
and it goes around one that's about half a mile in diameter.
But really, asteroids that are the size of dynamos
we found the large majority of that population, and none of those
asteroids at that larger size are a threat to the Earth for the foreseeable future.
Now, there are no known asteroid threats that are a threat to the Earth
for the foreseeable future.
But the size of the more folks,
we actually have found less than 50% of that asteroid population.
And so along with finding all of these asteroids, figuring out where they are
and keeping track of them, we want to take steps to be ready in case
we need to in case we need to protect the earth
from an asteroid, impact the size of something like tomatoes.
And so this target asteroid is really the ideal way
to do this first test,
the way that you would use technology like this in the future, if you needed to
if you needed to deflect an asteroid that was on the course with the Earth
is not the Hollywood blockbuster last minute kind of scenario.
It's something that you need to do years in advance.
And so you would do this five, ten, 15, 20 years in advance.
A small nudge adds up to a big change in position over that time.
And that's why you need this warning time, which is why DART is just
one part of a larger planetary defense strategy.
Planetary defense is not just about deflecting asteroids.
You can't do anything about the asteroids if you don't know where they are.
So Planetary Defense, really Key Foundation is finding the asteroids,
characterizing them, assessing them, and then taking steps to potentially
prevent these natural disasters in the future.
I am excited about everything about this mission.
We've been working on this here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
since 2015, and literally thousands of people
have contributed to this to get us to this moment.
From the people who developed and designed it, built the spacecraft.
Our partners across the country,
those who have been operating the spacecraft
for the last ten months in space, over 200,000 images
taken already to calibrate that spacecraft know what's going to happen.
Telescopes around the world on all seven continents
and in space, everybody's ready for this moment.
And I'm excited about it finally being here.
Well, certainly before the collision, actually, we're going to get
some spectacular extreme close ups of the asteroid to our foes.
And I'm really looking forward to this moment personally
where we'll see what this asteroid looks like for the first time.
So these images will be taken by the DART spacecraft every second
as that spacecraft streams towards this asteroid
at 14,000 miles per hour.
These images will come back here to Earth.
And when they make it to the mission operations center here at the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, they'll be broadcast live on NASA TV,
where the whole world can see this data at the same time that the team is.
And so this will be really spectacular
and tell the final moments and the story of the DART spacecraft.
But this obviously won't tell us how much we deflected the asteroid
because the DART spacecraft will be totally destroyed at this point.
We're going to use the telescopes here on the earth in order to do that.
And telescopes across the across the world on all seven continents
and in space are being used to help characterize and make this measurement.
This will take a few days and weeks in order to really come up with that.
But we're ready to have this next stage of the mission begin.
So Dart's companion, CubeSat is called the Feature Cube.
It's the light Italian CubeSat for imaging of asteroids.
It's contributed by the Italian space agency, and it has two cameras on it.
And so what this CubeSat is going to do, it was actually deployed an ejected
successfully from the DART spacecraft about two weeks ago
and it's been operating on its own in space ever since then.
It's going to take direct images of Dart's collision into the asteroid
and then fly by that asteroid its closest 3 minutes after Dart's collision.
Taking even more images.
Now, it'll store all those images on board and then send it back after its
flyby is over.
So we'll have to wait days to see what it finds.
But we're so excited to have this international collaboration on DART
for this first planetary defense test mission, because planetary defense
is really an international issue.
Well, here at APL, like you might imagine,
there's a lot of excitement building and there's a lot of activities going on.
The Mission Operations Center is extremely busy
and so they will all be there.
And one of the main challenges actually for this mission is hitting
a small asteroid in space that you have limited information about at high speed.
In order to do that, the spacecraft actually will autonomously
guide itself during the last 4 hours of the mission.
And so that's all getting prepared, prepared for that,
where we have to make sure
the spacecraft is where it needs to be and then put on this autopilot and it will
distinguish between these asteroids and bring itself in.
We're really welcoming people in order to focus guests here at APL.
But really the world to join and watch this event live
when it's shown on NASA TV.
So in order to figure out
asteroid deflection, how much Dart's collision deflected the asteroid.
We have telescopes across the planet and in space.
This includes
Hubble, this includes GWC, and it includes the Lucy spacecraft as well.
They're going to be looking
not just for how much deflection, but how much ejecta is thrown up.
So when dart collides with this rocky asteroid, it's
going to pulverize a bunch of rock and material
and it's going to throw it up away from the asteroid.
And this will result in the system getting a little brighter.
And the telescopes
are going to be looking, trying to capture that, characterize that.
And it's really so great to have all of these facilities coming together
to maximize what we learn from this first planetary defense test mission.
Will So we
know from other asteroids that have been visited by other missions
that these are complicated things that are not just giant shards of rock out there
in space.
Those cirrus MCs Rex mission found that it was a pile of gravel
loosely bound together in this very low gravity environment.
And when they went to sample it, it went further into the asteroid
than maybe people were initially expecting.
We've never seen two more folks before.
And in fact, it's going to be the smallest asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft.
What is it, its internal structure? How strong is it?
These are important components for planetary defense.
If you wanted to protect the earth from an asteroid like this.
And that's also why we need to do dart doing this full scale
asteroid deflection test on an asteroid of the relevant size
to see how that asteroid reacts to this kinetic impactor collision.
So we've learned a lot from those other asteroid missions,
and we're going to learn even more from DART.