This is John Batchel, a conversation with a planetary defense researcher, Rahil Makadilla.

Planetary defense is in its beginning stages, but it's got two telescopes in particular

searching, one searching the southern night sky, another in orbit.

These are the early days of planetary defense.

There are lots of asteroids that have our

name on it. It's normal in a solar system swimming with detritus of the planetary formation and the

asteroid belt. Someone's coming for us and what can we do about it? The DART mission that

Rahil participated in is the first step in learning how

to defend Earth from something that could come immediately or in a hundred years. Maybe we can

expand the ability to see farther into the future and have more time to prepare. Here,

Rahil Makadilla understands the telescopes that we have on defense now.

We need more.

More of this tonight with David Livingston on Hotel Mars.

Yeah, exactly.

So like I was mentioning, the Vera Rubin Observatory, that's a new ground-based

observatory that went online in Chile recently.

And so that's going to, you know, cover the entire

southern sky every few nights, I think, and to help us discover a lot of these undiscovered objects.

The annual surveyor mission I was mentioning will be a space-based telescopes that will discover

asteroids in the infrared. So some of these asteroids that might be harder to spot in the optical spectrum,

we can go ahead and try and find them in the infrared.

And so these two missions will really be key in improving our discovery numbers in the next couple of years.

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