This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batch with David Livingston, my colleague in co-pilot

of Hotel Mars and we're very pleased to have Andy Rivkin of the double asteroid redirection

test, the Dart mission from NASA. Now underway. Dart is headed to rendezvous with DITIMO,

the asteroid, the binary asteroid in the September 2022. Andy's lead investigator. However,

he also studies asteroids as a day job and a night job all the time. He has the joy of asteroids,

asteroids with water ice asteroids, maybe with liquid ice, asteroids and all flavors. However,

the larger story is why do we want to ram the little buddy of a binary asteroid? What do we want to

learn about this redirection? Is that real or is that Hollywood? Andy, my understanding is that

this is about near-Earth objects and planetary defense. It sounds like a science fiction movie,

but if I read the statistics on the site and translate from meters to English feet,

there are lots of asteroids out there that are smaller than 140 meters that are 140 feet,

140 meters and we've only tracked about 40 percent of them. Where are the others, Andy? And what

are we going to do about them? Because that would be a very bad day in Paris.

Yeah. So the Earth is hit by material all the time. At any time you go out in your backyard and

you see a shooting star, that's really a little bit of an asteroid or a comet that's hitting the

Earth. It's only about the size of a sand grain. Those happen all the time. Things the size of

five or six miles across, that's the size that wiped out the dinosaurs. When that impacted,

we know where all of those are. On average, those only hit every 100 million years or so.

So we're good. As you get smaller from that five or six mile range, you start to get to,

we know where fewer and fewer of them are. So like you said, at about 140 meters, so 500 and

something feet, 500, 600 feet, we only know where half or fewer are. And that's a size where, if

one were to hit, it would not be a good day. But Darch, which is part of a kind of a national and

...