I'm John Batcher, Bob Zimmerman, he keeps the website behind the back.

We're going exploring.

You will recall there was a mission called Dart to a binary asteroid that is orbiting

the sun.

The results are not illogical, but important for the day that Paris is going to have a

bad afternoon and an asteroid is headed in, a binary asteroid. Bob, what is a

binary asteroid? Well, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's two asteroids that are

orbiting each other, like the moon orbits the sun, the earth. It's an asteroid that has its own

little moon. And it's a binary system. They sometimes can be almost the same size, but in this case, we have Didimos,

is the main asteroid, and a smaller satellite called dimorphus.

And the Dart mission in 22 was specifically designed to go to this asteroid and impact

the smaller of the two, dimorphis.

They picked this asteroid because there's no threat it's going to hit the Earth.

And what they wanted to test, they said this publicly.

Their reason for testing is to see if an impact of an asteroid could change its orbit,

and therefore could this be a way to protect the Earth.

That's what everyone sells it, John.

But the truth is, they were really studying asteroids and the science of asteroids

and the makeup of asteroids when they did this.

But it does have the back story of giving us some information about a method for possibly

changing the orbits of asteroids.

And so Dart hit dimorphus.

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