DART: The Impacts Of Slamming A Spacecraft Into An Asteroid

Short Wave

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🗓️ 9 December 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

If an asteroid were hurling through space, making a beeline straight to Earth, how would humans prevent it from doing what it did to the dinosaurs? Would we bomb it? Would we shoot lasers at it like a scene from Hollywood's latest sci-fi flick? Well, the folks at NASA have designed and tested a theory.

"The DART mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, is essentially our first test of a kinetic impact for planetary defense." says Cristina Thomas, assistant professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at Northern Arizona University.

Put simply, scientists at NASA took a spacecraft and crashed it into an asteroid — hoping the little nudge, like bumper cars, would be enough to push the asteroid off course.

Today on the show, Short Wave's scientist-in-residence Regina G. Barber talks to Cristina Thomas about what it was like watching the success of the DART mission and what this means for science and planetary defense.

Email Short Wave at [email protected]. Or, follow us on Twitter at @NPRShortWave.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:06.2	When they first told us that they were approving this mission and we were going to fly and
0:09.3	impact this asteroid, you know, I almost did a double take.
0:11.8	I was kind of like, there's no way they're going to let us do this.
0:14.5	This sounds too fun.
0:15.5	That's Christina Thomas, Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at Northern
0:19.9	Arizona University.
0:21.8	She leads the observations working group for the Dart mission.
0:25.3	They're studying how the asteroids' movements will change after impact.
0:29.3	NASA sent a spacecraft to slam into an asteroid millions of miles away at a breezy speed of
0:35.4	14,000 miles per hour.
0:40.4	The goal was to see if humans could do this and whether it could successfully change
0:44.6	the orbit of this smaller asteroid or Moonlit as it rotated around the larger asteroid.
0:51.5	We did this, like this worked.
0:57.0	No world where giant asteroids changed the fate of Earth.
1:01.2	All right, that's enough of that.
1:03.3	But Christina knows all about these deep impacts.
1:06.6	I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself.
1:09.6	So what happened to dinosaurs is about 65 million years ago, a very large object, you know,
1:15.4	came in and impacted the planet and the crater is actually just around at the Yucatan Peninsula
1:21.8	in Mexico.
1:23.1	So if an object that size were to come towards Earth now, is NASA's Dart technology enough
	...

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