I'm John Batchel with my colleague and friend David Livingston, Dr. Space, of the space show,

and we're imagining the world beyond our mortality, where an asteroid is due in.

Possible contact, something called the keyhole.

If it goes through that keyhole, you have to worry about the next time around an asteroid hitting Earth.

It's happened before. It'll happen again. I understand this. These are odds. Big asteroids, small asteroids, and therefore,

we give Rahil an unlimited budget and tell him, nothing headed in right now, but tomorrow's

another day. What do you want to do with it, Rahil? Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, yeah, I want to emphasize the fact that Dart was literally a smashing success for us, and we were able to get a lot of key science out of it so far, but we're not done with it yet.

The European Space Agency has a spacecraft called Hera that is currently on its way to Didimo's system

to study the after effects of Dart in detail.

So the spacecraft won't be hitting any of the asteroids.

It's just there to study the asteroid pair in detail to see what the after effects of

dart were.

And not only on the dark front, you know, we have new telescopes that have been coming online

and are planning on coming online in the next couple of years.

The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile has started taking observations and discovering new

asteroids.

And NASA's annual surveyor mission is currently being built and is slated for launch in the next couple of years or so.

So we're trying to cover all their bases with both being able to discover asteroids and coming up with formulations to deflect them away from the earth.

Does that include ground-based or orbital telescopes to pick up what you haven't seen yet?

Yeah, exactly.

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

that went online in Chile recently.

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