[Music]
Hello and welcome to NASA Science Live. I'm Stephanie Smith from the NASA headquarters
social media team, and we are coming to you live from sunny central California, Vandenberg Space
Force base to be precise, where hours from now Dart that's the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, will
be lifting off. There's tons of activity going on inside the NASA hangar so come with me. We're
going to take you inside. You're going to meet scientists, you're going to meet engineers, and
by the way we're taking your questions. Just go ahead and use the hashtag asknasa or if the
feed you're watching has a comment box, pop your questions in there. Moderators are standing by
while we take you behind the scenes. Heck we've even got the shipping container DART came
in from the Applied Physics Lab and this is the hanger where the launch commentary will be tonight.
As we get ready to blast off for a date with an asteroid, you might be wondering
does that asteroid pose a threat to us now or after the test and the short answer is no
it doesn't. In fact, there are no known asteroid threats to earth for the next
hundred years but it doesn't mean that we're not keeping our eyes on the skies. We'll get
into all of that and more on NASA Science Live but first let's do a deep dive on DART.
in case there was an asteroid coming towards earth and you're there you can actually stop it
i mean that's kind of fantastic nasa is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid what you think science
fiction but this is real never in my life would i have thought i would take a couple hundred million
dollar spacecraft and crash it into an asteroid my name is michelle chen i'm layna adams my name is
kelly fast i'm andy rifkind i'm justina sorobiats and i help tell the story of the dart mission
i'm a planetary defender and i study how the orbits of asteroids change after we hit them the
spacecraft my job is primarily to make sure all the systems on the spacecraft work together the
dart mission is nasa's first test of a planetary defense technique called kinetic impactor
dart is the double asteroid redirection test it's just a spacecraft that is going to go and smack
an asteroid the moonlit dimorphose which orbits the asteroid dynamos and see if we can change its
trajectory just a little bit in order to show that we can deflect incoming asteroids if we need to
dart will only be changing the period of the orbit of dimorphose by a tiny amount but in space just
a little bit is just enough to make an asteroid actually miss us in the event that an asteroid
is discovered well ahead of time before it might impact earth behind me you see the spacecraft it's
really cool to see it coming together in real life it is fantastic to see it in real life to see it
turn from ideas into real pieces that are going to go into space the solar arrays will actually roll
out to 28 feet in length once the solar rates are deployed it's going to be the size of a school bus
as the solar array opens out it's going to swing out in this direction the asteroids only two
football fields inside we're flying at over six kilometers a second 30 days out we see one pixel
on our field of view you can see the dynamos and demorphos is one point of light about four hours
out our spacecraft becomes autonomous and then that's where everything gets really exciting you
actually are seeing impact we're super excited and nervous as well i feel really honored and humbled
to be working in an area of science that has such a broader impact figuratively and literally
so dark the dinosaurs are made completely extinct by an asteroid impact so many years ago
here we are we can actually do something about it i think this is just wonderful
well now that you've had a chance to see what dart aims to do we know you've got questions let's go
ahead and meet the folks who've got answers joining me now are dr lori glaze the director
of planetary science at nasa headquarters lisa wu mechanical engineer at johns hopkins university
applied physics laboratory or apl for short and then also from apl dr nancy chabot the dart
coordination lead all right well thanks so much for being here how are you feeling on launch day
amazing exhilarated i mean i just can't even believe this day's here
so excited so excited got to go out and look at the rocket this morning and it's on the pad
and we are so ready to go it is just so amazing we are on the pad we're going to launch tonight
and it's beautiful here it is in california yeah vandenberg air force base space force base man old
habits die hard can have some really really thick marine layer and clouds but the skies are clear
and let's let's hope let's hope for a good lift off but also clear skies and good visibility
okay so this show is all about questions i'm going to start with a few of mine and then we'll get to
yours okay so lori the big question why is the dart mission important why do we have to do this
great question this is a really really important mission because it is humanities first ever
mission to try and deflect an asteroid to help us prepare for a potential danger in the future
so what we're going to try and do is is move this asteroid just change its orbit a little bit
and demonstrate that we can actually do this this is really really important that we do this now
when we are in a point where we don't know of any asteroids that are potentially dangerous right now
that are significant threat i should say those are a significant threat over the next hundred years
but we want to test this technique so that if and when we discover an asteroid that might be
a potential threat we have this tool in our belt and we're ready to go luck favors the prepared
so we want to test the technology before we need it absolutely okay all right now lisa
on on the engineering side of things you have been with this mission since it was a new baby
cat drawing and now and now it's a full-fledged spacecraft sitting on top of its falcon 9 rocket
oh man can you tell us more about this amazing machine how it works what are its parts how is it
going to do do the job it's it's made to do sure of course so part of the dart spacecraft we have
this instrument called draco and it's basically a camera the eye of the spacecraft if you will on
board we also have this algorithm called smart nav built at apl and together these two things work as
the eye and the brain and that is how we will go and get to our target and then on the spacecraft
of course because our number one mission is to impact this asteroid that means you know we can
do a few more technology demonstrations so we have some really cool technologies like the rosas the
rollout solar arrays those are really cool because they literally roll out like a yoga mat and those
are our solar arrays we have our nexi ion engine and that's going to test out the ion engine um
we also have our high gain antenna that uses a radial line slot array so like these there's
so many cool technologies on this mission and i'm just so excited to have been part of it you you're
like a like a glowing proud parent over there are you basically are you sure you're gonna be okay
when you destroy your spacecraft by slamming it into an asteroid you know i worked really hard on
spacecraft but this is for the science so i'm okay with it smashing it okay for the greater good yes
for the greater good but one follow-up question on that if you destroy the spacecraft which is
what you intend to do on a successful day uh how will you know how will you see it so when we're
approaching this asteroid draco will be sending all these images back to earth
until it doesn't and then 10 days before we actually impact we will be deploying a cubesat
and that cubesat will be taking pictures of the entire impact so we will also be getting all of
that really cool pictures so stay tuned all right okay from engineering over to science
nancy this is the first time that we're doing a test of a kinetic impactor
what are you most looking forward to about this test well i'm most looking forward to how much we
actually deflect this asteroid right i mean this is a test and you know these asteroids aren't a
threat to the earth like we were talking about but we want to do this test before we need to
to be ready um and we're not really sure exactly how much we're going to deflect it
we know it's a double asteroid system because telescopes all right yeah we've got we've got a
handy dandy is that yeah we know it's a dynamos right didymus is the man and not not did a moon
but dimorphous amorphous okay that's a smaller one and it goes around like clockwork every 11
hours and 55 minutes like uh so we're just we're coming around sure just like going around every 11
hours and 55 minutes and telescopes on the earth discovered that this was a double asteroid system
and know this and that's why they've gotten this down really precisely and so what's going to
happen it's going around okay we're coming around and then coming around spacecraft's going to come
and slam into it head on oh thank you laurie that's perfect and there we go dart spacecraft
totally destroyed how are we gonna know how much we deflected it dart spacecraft is not gonna tell
us the italian lychee cube cubesat is is long gone after some spectacular images telescopes on the
ground again are key to this mission and we think we're going to change it by maybe about 10 minutes
so the clock will be more like 11 hours and 45 minutes going forward but we're not really sure
could be less could be more and that's what i'm most excited about learning and because
this is bigger than dart dart is just the start we're doing this first test but we want to
understand this to potentially protect the earth in the future so i think that also makes this
really exciting that it's not just this one test but how are we going to apply it going forward
fantastic okay so those are some of my questions what are your questions remember you can use
the hashtag asknasa if you are on twitter or instagram if you've got a live chat like on
youtube or facebook just pop your questions right there and the moderators will get those over to me
and as they do that and we begin to ponder your questions here's one more uh for you to ponder how
will dart deflect an asteroid in space we asked astronauts shane kimbrough and tomah pasquet to
demonstrate in microgravity hi everyone i'm tomate and i'm with my favorite national shane kimbrough
up here on the space station today we're going to talk about a very cool new nasa mission it's
called dart can you tell us and tell me a little bit more about what is nasa's dart mission and
what does nasa dart mission stand for okay yeah so dart is nasa's first planetary defense test um
so we're gonna we're gonna try to do something we've never done before uh with a spacecraft
uh dart stands for double asteroid redirection test so a nice acronym nasa does like acronyms
dart is another one and now the purpose of this spacecraft in this mission it has one purpose
that's to crash itself into an asteroid and try to redirect it or try to move it into a different
orbit so today shane uh we're gonna demonstrate some of those principles that you laid out before
but can you tell us exactly how we're gonna do that i can try we're gonna it's the first time
for us but we're gonna try to demonstrate this this asteroid kinetic deflection method uh which
is really the moment that that that spacecraft crashes into the asteroid so we're gonna use
microgravity up here because we have that all the time we're going to try to show you kind
of how this is going to work when the asteroid is hit by this spacecraft called dart so here we go
so what i'll do shannon's going to be the asteroid
and i'm going to be the nasa dark mission well this ctb more exactly is going to be a spacecraft
i'm gonna try to throw it and we look at the effect of that mass coming at him in
the kinetic energy transfer from the ctb to shane shane will be perfectly stable
it's not an easy task you ready all right here it comes
i've redirected shane successfully
pretty good
a while ago we we got out the door and we got some new solar arrays here on space station and so the
same technology we have here now on the space station is going to be used to power the dart
mission on its way to this asteroid irosa um in case you didn't know but you knew it stands for
isis rolled out solar rays so we got a chance to go outside and install the very first two
of these new irosas or roll out solar rays on the very end of the space station out on the port side
these are different because for one they're much lighter and smaller they're to me they look very
fragile when we were picking them up and moving them but they're rolled up so they when they
launch they're kind of rolled up into a compact cylinder which is great for launch conditions
um and then once they get up on the space station or in space for a satellite or something they can
then roll these things out to be useful and so the same technology we have here now on the space
station is going to be used to power the dart mission on its way to crashing into an asteroid
and that's the kind of successful deflection that we're looking for okay we're back with lori lisa
and nancy to answer your questions remember ask nasa or just pop them right in the stream wherever
you are watching okay first question and this one has lots of likes joseph forbes on facebook
asks what if the law of unintended consequences is it outside the realm of possibility that a nudge
might change an orbit from an innocuous one to one that does put it on a collision course with earth
yeah and that's a really really important question and it's important to understand that
we chose this system here didimos and dimorphis specifically because it really provides the
perfect test case for this experiment where we have no chance of that unintended consequence
and the way i like to think about this is the little moon here dimorphous if you could imagine
um a high school football stadium that's full of rocks that's about the size of that little moon
so you imagine that big football stadium that's full of rocks and then you take a refrigerator
and you ram that refrigerator into that big pile of rocks so it's going to make a little bit of a
little tiny change in the speed of that little moon but not very much just a tiny bit but over
time it's going to it's going to go around deimos and it'll we're hoping to slow it down nancy can
talk about that a little more how we slow it down and it goes around but overall this whole system
the denemos is like a half a mile across it's big compared to the dimensions so when we make this
little change to dimorphous the overall momentum of this system is pretty much going to be the same
it will not even be detectable what we've done so it really is exactly why we chose this kind of
a binary asteroid system for this kind of experiment that's one of the reasons why
it provides such a good example that we really it is no risk physically and physically impossible
we're not going to set off a billiard ball reaction exactly okay so everybody rest
easy okay moving right along okay well maybe not keith keith taylor asks i've heard some scientists
say that if an earthkiller asteroid was headed our way you'd need five years to spot it get to
it bombard it giving deflected shards enough time to deviate their path and miss us is that true
yeah warning time is really what you want and this is really why it's important to understand
that planetary defense is much more than just deflecting asteroids you need to be finding all
of the asteroids this is key to planetary defense knowing where the asteroids are characterizing
them tracking them assessing collaborating internationally because it's a global concern
we're all on this planet together and then mitigating doing something about it if you
need it to and that's where dart comes into this one larger strategy and so really you want to give
yourself this warning time because something like this is just a small nudge which adds up to a big
position change over time so the asteroid in the earth theoretically wouldn't be on a path to hit
in the future on a collision course and this is why you need this warning time and you have to
do so much more to find the asteroids and there's actually a lot that we need to do on that still
i guess maybe you want to pick it up there lori yeah i do i want to add just a little bit to
that because what nancy said is so correct that it's critically important that we identify the
asteroids and then characterize them so we know their orbits and so right now we have ground-based
telescopes that are observing the night sky every night looking and searching for these
asteroids we actually also have a space-based telescope called neo-wise which was a repurposed
astrophysics mission that was originally called wise and it's out there also looking for asteroids
but we we're still we know there's still many of these smaller asteroids out there that we haven't
discovered yet so we actually have a new mission that we just started called neo surveyor the near
earth object surveyor mission and it's just getting underway now and that's going to be
a really powerful mission when it gets launched a few years from now that its sole purpose is
to really uh every every day and every night to be searching the skies looking for these these
asteroids essentially the same size as dimorphous helping us better understand what the potential
threats are that are out there always keeping those eyes on the skies right okay so back to
little dimorphis here for a second um what's gonna happen to the debris from the asteroid
well the debris is actually we think going to be an important part of the experiment
so we think dart's going to come well dart will come speeding in at 15 000 miles per hour and
it's going to crash into demorphos right but we think that ejecta is going to go off in the
other direction and actually give it even an extra push like a little jet engine that shoots out from
it right the rocks shoot out from it in the other way and uh but how much of that happens is one of
the reasons that we want to do this test on a real asteroid too because real asteroids have different
shapes and different sizes and boulders and how are they put together and what is the strength
so then these this debris though is very very small it'll stay with the system
and again no threat to the earth whatsoever exactly all right so let's go over back to
uh engineering um yadi on twitter wants to know how do you know if it worked well you see we have
this camera um draco as i mentioned before and that's going to be sending pictures back to earth
and about four hours out that is when smart nav the brain of dart actually will start taking over
so we'll not be joysticking the spacecraft from earth it's fully autonomous four hours out and
then at one hour is when we actually will start seeing the smaller asteroid and smart nav will
start firing off thrusters getting it closer and closer to its target until you know we will hit it
okay so question for the entire panel here logan on youtube wants to know how long have you been
working on dart oh i'm gonna let i think lisa should start on this one okay because i think
we've got we've got you know you're coming at this from a lot of different angles correct from from
sort of the nasa science and business side right engineering building and then the science the
science that really starts with uh you know with that impact yeah so i've been on dart for five
years about when i started enjoying the dart team so nasa started initial development phase of dart
in 2015 and i started shortly after that on the project as well and it's just been a joy to join
this team one of the things that i love about being on a team like this is it takes so much
different expertise to all come together in order to accomplish something that's so much bigger
than any one person can do on their own and dart obviously is a key example of that and you know
i'm just overjoyed to be a part of this mission yeah so i've been on dart for three years this is
my very first spacecraft so i'm super excited for launch and the fact i was a part of building the
spacecraft like how many people get to say that i built this spacecraft like wow um i'm just a few
years out of college so like to everyone out there this is so cool now you got your foot in the door
at apl yes and you did a rotation there yeah that landed you yes so right out of undergrad i went to
apl and i was in a rotation program where i went to all different types of groups at the lab um one
of them one of my projects will start and you know i i really liked it so here i am three years later
that is so cool that's so cool did you did you greenlight this thing
do we have you to thank for this mission lori well i've been paying for this mission
thank you very much but so i i joined nasa headquarters about three and a half years ago and
uh prior to that i was a scientist and and doing my my research at nasa's goddard space flight
center and of course i knew about dart but i was not specifically involved with dart but when i
came to headquarters in my current role dart is a part of my overall portfolio for planetary science
and when i look across our entire portfolio i was so excited to to actually have dart be a part of
this when i came in because we have a lot of great science missions but we only have one planetary
defense mission or we did at the time and now we have two but at that time there was only one
and dart i thought you know we have an amazing opportunity with this mission to uh to tell the
world about how important it is that we defend our planet and and get more planetary defenders out
there and so it's been a really really important part of what we do in planetary science okay so
all right from the personal stories back to the science nancy uh jake smith 9287 wants to know
could asteroids be the reason water came to earth oh that's a great question yeah i mean asteroids
are fascinating objects they're the relics of the early solar system they were the building
blocks of the planets and so they really did bring a lot of important stuff to the planets
water might have been one of them along with other materials that's really an active area
of science that's that's fascinating and we have some other missions that nasa is doing that are
really in a position to address that specifically like the osiris-rex mission so maybe lori you
want to say a few words i'll say a few words we're here to talk about dart today but i will
give a quick shout out to the osiris-rex mission which collected a sample um a year ago in october
and is now on its way back to earth to bring that back and that's a particularly special asteroid
because we do think not only did it have water bearing minerals on it but also organic molecules
so not just delivering water to earth and other planets but also the building blocks for life and
as nancy says these are are fantastic relics of the early solar system that each tell us
different parts of the story of how our solar system formed and evolved i think that's what's
neat about asteroids too is that you kind of can look in the past right you know these things that
are before the earth right that we can look back to see how they did but we're really talking here
about the present right you know with what the current threat to the earth might be from these
and then preparing for the future where we can be ready to do something about this if we needed
to so it sort of spans this whole thing with asteroids yeah well osiris-rex is on the minds
of others too astro balrog on twitter wants to know does the dart mission have a volunteer
ambassador team like osiris-rex did and if so he wants in or she or they but astro balrog wants in
okay planetary defenders with that military defenders i think that's the the best way to go
there um and you maybe have the url there for the military defenders stay tuned you have to you have
to wait a little later in the show but we'll tell you how to be a planetary defender and i will say
on the dart website we recently posted some great outreach materials so you can go under outreach on
the dart website and there's a kit where you can build the dart spacecraft out of blocks
yeah i saw that the other night it's awesome um there's a virtual spacecraft that you can
kind of go like pokemon go and like put it out there and take your you know see it in your scene
and some other fun things so uh definitely there's a lot of stuff ramping up and check that out
okay so back to our system seth on youtube asks how close or did the most endomorphos
to each other if you were standing on one would you be able to see the other
yeah that model is to scale and so this is a this is the right scale for how it should be
so i don't know if people are familiar with the washington dc area but this is the analog that
i have in my mind okay the whole system didimos and dimorphos would fit between the u.s capitol
building and the washington monument so you can absolutely see the washington monument
from the capitol building right and you would see dimorphous from diddymos there we go okay so um
nancy lily hall on twitter wants to know how long ago did you identify the target asteroid
well there was the uh 1990s that this was discovered to be a binary asteroid system a double
asteroid system was the first time that that was seen i mean so uh but you know dart mission didn't
exist then so you know it was sort of uh talked about in some science conferences and planetary
defense conferences this whole idea of a double asteroid system actually one of my colleagues andy
chang at apl was one of the ones who originated he likes to tell this story where he was
exercising in his basement and they just sort of came to him and uh anyways then he sort of shared
it with colleagues who have been thinking about planetary defense and dynamos is just the ideal
target because of this double asteroid nature nancy do you want to talk for just a minute about
how we know it's a binary asteroid and how we know what the orbit is of dimorphous around data
yeah what's really interesting right i mean and even if you look at the model like those two are
pretty close to each other and from earth it just looks like a single point of light you can't see
that there's two asteroids especially especially if it's bad okay so yeah so when it's behind like
that right what you only see the big one so it's less bright but when it comes out to the side
there it's brighter because you're getting the light from both of those objects in the
same frame and then it's darker and then it goes around and so that you just map out the brightness
versus time brightness versus time take lots of measurements and over this 11 hours and 55 minutes
this brightness versus time changes and that's a really a great way and that's the same technique
that's going to be used to figure out how much we deflected the asteroids so it's a great story
okay we're getting lots and lots of questions about asteroids what we know what we don't
so we asked a nasa scientist does nasa know about all the asteroids
does nasa know about all the asteroids
well no but the good news is we know where most of the really big ones are
they get closest to the earth we found more than 90 percent of these that's
the great news but there are a lot more smaller pieces that are still out there
that we haven't found it's really challenging to find asteroids and comets simply because
even though some of them are as big as mountains space is incredibly huge and these things can be
really far away in fact we want to find them when they're very far away from the earth so we have
lots of time to take action if we ever find one that's really headed in our direction
asteroids are both a source of fascination but sometimes fear because we wonder can they hit
the earth it's really incredibly unlikely that a significant asteroid impact is going to occur
in our lifetimes however that said if even one happens it could be really bad and that's why
we want to go out and look for these objects and make sure that the earth and an asteroid
never get too close for comfort so does nasa know about all the asteroids well no but we know
what we have to do and we're on the job and we're really glad to be part of team planetary defense
so as you can see nasa has an entire team of planetary defenders working to keep our planet
safe and we want you that's right you can become a planetary defender today by visiting bitly.com
planetary defender and test your knowledge if you do well enough on the quiz you will be able to get
a special badge that you can share on social media planetary defender so we can see it over on the
social media team here at nasa and with that we're gonna go back to questions okay next one up is
from matthew cummins how do you determine what weight the spacecraft should be at its speed in
relation to the weight and speed of the asteroid in order to change the asteroid's trajectory
all right physics question coming at you engineer momentum physics
so as we all know the asteroid is quite large and dart is quite small we're about the size of a
smart car and we weigh roughly like 13 60 pounds so you know compared to how big the asteroid is
which as you said it's like a football stadium filled with rocks we're like really really small
but we are going super super fast we're going 15 000 miles per hour which for scale is like four
miles per second so try going that fast that's a really fast um and with that and you know momentum
you hit something transfer momentum that's how we're doing it the good old f equals m a yes
all right my favorite my favorite equation yeah do do you have favorite equations or is that just me
okay just just me i guess it's just you okay
don't leave me hanging internet if you have a favorite equation please post it in the chat
and i will go back and i will like it later okay um yeah calencini uh craig mcguire how long is
it gonna take dart to get to this asteroid nancy how long do you have to wait to start your science
well once we launch tonight and then it'll be 10 months so uh late september of 2022 is going to
be the smashing event if you will and uh so yeah thank you very much i know it's there's a lot of
bad puns out there so i just embraced them um but yeah then we'll use uh the telescopes on the earth
um we'll actually continue observing until around march of 2023 even because we're timing this in
2022 such that the distance between dynamos and earth is still large totally safe but is minimized
and so the telescopes on earth are going to get the most precise data that they possibly can
they'll be able to observe for months in order to really get a measure of how much
we deflected this asteroid so and at this point in the day it's still fall 2022. late september
early october but how soon are you going to know when you have your date with destiny at uh 10 22.
when we launch it 10
set 201 date for darts collision with demorphos so awesome and then we can we can send out a save
the date so that you can all join us back um yeah what do you say do you want to do you want to do
do another we'll do another live show you'll be there lori all right absolutely okay okay
um slice fire on youtube what are your future plans i'm gonna give this one to you lori what
are your future plans for the use of this new technology that dart's going to give us
great great question so the first step of course as nancy has said is that we need to assess the
data we really need to learn from this experiment we need to learn and understand number one how
well the smart nav system works how well we're able to target the asteroid um and and impact
it um and then we need to understand how well that momentum transfer actually happens you know
we don't know necessarily if the rock is solid rock or whether it's just a collection of rubble
and that's going to make a difference on how effective we can transfer the the momentum
so we need to really assess that data and understand how well did this technique work
we also have some other techniques that we've been studying and thinking about for asteroid
deflection that we may want to think about perhaps for a future test or for comparison
with how the connecticut is other than connecticut yeah so there's a couple other ideas that are out
there that have also been explored and have been investigated one is something called a gravity
tractor um which to me sounds like uh science fiction but it is actually for real right that
you can by adjusting the mass of an object by maybe taking off some mass or putting some mass
onto it you can change its gravity field and so it's possible to actually change that a little bit
another thought that's been out there is to potentially take a nuclear device and detonate it
not detonate the asteroid i'll make that clear you want to detonate it near the asteroid
to give it a bit of a push a bit of a big force um and just for the record we don't want to blow
up an asteroid nor do we want to hire a ragtag group of drillers to go out there and places
i think i saw that one okay yeah i just want to explain though why you don't want to ex you know
explode an asteroid because a lot of people say well i've seen it in the movies don't
you want to just explode the asteroid and the problem with that idea is that if the
asteroid is on a collision course with earth and you blow it up you then not just have
one rock coming towards earth you now have thousands of rocks now we have new problems
and then we have new problems so we really don't want to blow it up okay um so so those are things
that we're thinking about for the future i already mentioned the neo surveyor mission
which is another thing we have in our in our pocket for the future a really important part as
i said to make sure we find all of the asteroids and then we know which ones are potential threat
right now we know all of the asteroids we think we know almost all the ones that are really big
the ones that could like wipe out the dinosaurs that kind of size but the smaller ones like
dimorphous and larger we still know there's a lot out there we haven't discovered and obviously yeah
we're really excited about the hera mission too so yeah i mean so the european space agency in
uh is going to rendezvous with the dittomosta morpho system with the hera mission in 2026
which is going to be great they'll be able to see the crater made by dart they'll be able to
get the mass of demorphos and really characterize the system every more so along with all of
everything that lori said to we have to figure out from dart and we're really working collaboratively
with these two teams as is important for planetary defense international issue
absolutely okay um so obviously uh earth we're all very very invested in uh in watching out for
asteroids on a collision course with earth origami masters on twitter wants to know
how often are there asteroid impacts um with other planets in our solar system oh regularly all the
time in fact we've even seen some of them from earth we've actually saw an asteroid for example
that went into jupiter's atmosphere several years back that was kind of cool
on mars where we've been having spacecraft that orbited mars
for decades now we can see new craters all the time that are being created by
asteroids that impact on mars so we know this is a process that's happening all over the solar system
at earth objects are entering earth's atmosphere all the time very small ones we actually get
reasonable size meteorites that that fall all the way to the surface and don't burn up for
on a regular basis so they're they're pretty common out there but hopefully you know the
ones that are the bigger ones are are not quite as common okay so we uh we have teacher and and
her students all the way from hawaii hawaiian disney mama on youtube asks aloha my students
want to know if the asteroid didn't hit earth back in the day and wipe out all the dinosaurs
would dinosaurs still be alive today we're going to test the breadth of yours science that is
speculation that is a really hypothetical question because there's so many variables at play there
okay so many different things that have happened um since that time it was quite a long time ago of
course um fair but you know the one thing we like to say is that you know the dinosaurs didn't have
the planetary defense coordination office they didn't have a planetary defender
to help them save the day so right they didn't have risa to build the spacecraft to go out there
and save them all okay but thank you and we hope that you'll be watching yes okay um on
to shannon wayne bowman on facebook will we get to see it crash live and would we be able to
see it with the naked eye by looking up so the images are going to come stream back from draco
once every second and we will be sure to get those images back before the dart collision happens so
they'll be sent and on their way streaming back every one for a second and that's going to be
information that we'll have here on the earth the lychee cube images will get transmitted back
a few weeks later and it'll take them a little bit longer so they'll capture them and store
them on board and then send them back after the fact you're not really going to be able to look
up and see anything with the naked eye again this is like a tiny little nudge we're changing it so
you're not even being able to see it on that scale model over there so it's uh it's not gonna be the
sort of thing that you can look up and see but the images coming back will be spectacular and correct
me if i'm wrong nancy but i believe what the time of the impact um and lisa that the the uh dynamos
and dimorphos will be about six and a half million miles away from earth so it's a long way away
very far it's long but it's not as long as a lot of things it's actually pretty close in the things
but very safe you won't be able to see it you need some powerful telescopes to even be able
to see how the brightness changes with time okay okay so this is not something that the
home astronomer is going to be able to to point their their telescope at and find in the night sky
no no that's not the best we've got plenty of other stuff we'll tell you just stay tuned okay um
now for those of you who are just joining us again get your questions in use the hashtag asknasa you
can also pop stuff right in the stream in the chat wherever you are watching and because some folks
are just tuning in um we are getting a lot of some of the questions that you've handled uh one that i
think we have got like a a public responsibility to touch on again is um donna donna we hear you
donna k bradshaw on facebook wants to know what if this puts the asteroid in a chaotic rotation that
causes a horrible chain reaction and it becomes a threat to earth lori sure yeah and again i'm
happy to answer this question as many times as you ask it because it's really an important question
and we really we chose this particular um double asteroid system this binary asteroid system
precisely because it does not pose a threat there is zero risk of that kind of unintended
consequence um the uh the impact that we are are going to have on the small moon on dimorphous
um bring it on over it's very very tiny thank you yes we'll impact here but
that little impact is really not going to change at all it has no chance of changing the overall
system of how fast the overall system is going or its path so nothing will change
in the whole ditty most system it's going to stay exactly on the same trajectory
where it is now which is of no threat to earth it's not coming anywhere near earth
um anytime in uh you know at least 100 years and probably longer than that so okay so rest easy
and enjoy the show too right this is this is exciting um chris bettencourt on facebook
wants to know what kind of systems do we have in place to to monitor potentially dangerous
asteroids we've talked about the ones that we know how are we keeping our eyes on the skies
yeah it's a great question and we have many ground based telescopes that are searching the
night skies every single night looking for potentially hazardous asteroids and comets
and we also have a space-based telescope which i think i mentioned earlier called neo wise which
is an old astrophysics telescope that we we took over uh for planetary defense purposes
um it also is out looking uh for uh looking for asteroids but also characterizing them and then we
have this new mission the neo surveyor near earth object surveyor mission which we hope to launch
um perhaps the next five years or so um that will be dedicated to searching for those new astronauts
and you do work in conjunction with the amateur astronomy community right good point yes we work
with the amateur astronomy community and it's a global network right this is planetary defense
is not something that's unique to united states or any particular country this is a global issue
and there are many space agencies and others around the world that all work together
uh to coordinate the observations someone detects an asteroid and they send a signal out
to everybody that says hey i found this asteroid and everybody points their telescope and says
let me follow up so we can better constrain just where that asteroid what its orbit is and
and where it is and what uh what it looks like and characterize it its size um so it's it was really
an international collaboration and as a follow-up to that uh mark new on facebook wants to know
what are the benefits of global creativity and global cooperation in such an important mission
well i think the the global cooperation is absolutely critical if if there ever were
actually a real threat we are all going to have to come together as a global community um to
to help put all our resources together whether it is to make sure we better define the threat
to put together whatever the mitigation plans are to help protect ourselves from a potential threat
so it is ab this is an absolutely critical um international cooperation and lenin on youtube
wants to know is there any other country openly working on planetary defense or is it just nasa
no they're i think nancy just mentioned a couple of minutes ago the hera mission that's being built
by the european space agency i mean we've got lithia cube right so italian space agency already
actively contributed we're already hera from the european space agency and so it really is uh
people around the world and agencies around the world working together cooperatively for this i
mean the database that you're referring to is all publicly available right i mean you put it all
into the same database it's constantly monitored updated real time and you know you can go check it
out at the nasa website yeah so to get a sense of scope how many people have been involved in
this mission maybe we can kind of tote it up from from the different parts of nasa even just
represented by the three of you i'll pass it over to you guys let's see yeah what's the size
of your uh your team there my engineering team so mechanical engineering we have about one say like
a handful ten but like there's so many people we have our int folks our electrical folks we have
people who make our blankets former seamstresses we have our truck drivers who have to drive this
spacecraft across the country like there's a lot of people and i also want to know that like
we're i've been working with like roughly 50 women and that is so rare in an engineering field so
i'm so thankful to be working on a project where i have so many role models it's super cool
great and yeah but definitely the team if you have to do it you should guess in the thousands right
i mean hundreds is too loud once you get to the other day i mean you know i mean like the creating
the dart logo right what you were talking about is so cool i mean it's just it goes takes people we
have a i mean we have apl right and then there's nasa we have scientists across the country we
have scientists actually around the world on this team um and you know we have a lot of different
partners and really uh thousands is going to be the right order of magnitude to get there okay
okay so uh earlier lisa you talked a little bit about some of the technologies that are on dart
um just you know tween us on the internet uh natocha on youtube wants to know does dart
carry any explosive devices no i did not put any explosive devices on the spacecraft and lisa would
know one of the last people to see the spacecraft i was one of the last people to see the spacecraft
before we encapsulated i know this thing inside out so no explosives fantastic okay on to facebook
marcel on facebook asks why crash the spacecraft and not try a soft landing and then use the engine
of the spacecraft to push the asteroid goes back to momentum transfer doesn't it yeah do you want
to you know we are hitting this asteroid really really fast the amount of thrust we'll need if we
per se like landed on the asteroid and try to like push ourselves it's way way like a lot it's much
easier just to use the momentum or r we already have 15 000 miles per hour to hit the asteroid
yeah but i think laurie's point is good too right i mean that this is just one technology
right it's the most mature it's the one that's ready to test now maybe in the future we'll want
to have other tools in our toolkit and people have talked about the idea engine specifically
the ion engines but you have to have it burn for a really long time right i mean as compared to
like this instantaneous event it would be you would have to operate the spacecraft and that's
challenging in its own right right you know to have that sort of fidelity and asteroids are
not round you know they have all sorts of complications with them and landing is its
own complications so but dart really is just the start it's just the first test of one technique
that you might use and it'll be interesting to see what else we might develop in the future and you
gotta walk before you run right it is a technical challenge in and of itself just to make contact
with this okay so uh lori and that is another sort of between us questions boo on facebook
who's watching from canada's east coast wants to know if an asteroid was headed straight for earth
would you inform the public absolutely also i don't even have to think about that one we have
um before you get to the rest of the question yeah yeah um we actually have um not just a
a group that is collaborating and cooperating amongst multiple federal agencies in the united
states but working with other agencies around the world we meet regularly there are conferences
every year to bring all of these various entities together and talk about what are we going to do
and how are we going to communicate this if we ever had a potential threat so absolutely the the
public would be told we would provide the best information that we have available and we would
start developing uh what the mitigation plans are and um also any kind of protection plans that we
need for people so there's there's no doubt and also we couldn't hide it no no you can't like any
look up those amateur astronomers that we depend on so much to help give us more observations
everyone would see it as as nancy said when we look at these data and we calculate the
trajectories and their orbits this isn't a public database anybody has access to that so there's as
soon as an asteroid's discovered you can know about it too right i mean it's out there so
maybe you took the planetary defender quiz it wet your appetite and then you want to join us
we'd be happy to have you you bet okay so uh nancy um are you know talking about our little asteroid
here our little football stadium full of rocks uh james taylor on youtube wants to know do you know
the composition of these two asteroids especially the one targeted for impact yeah that's a great
question so what we do know from ground-based observations again is the larger one didamos is a
this is actually the most common type of material that falls to the earth
we haven't actually directly measured demorphos but the way that we think that binary asteroids
form these double asteroids form it's going to have a similar composition to the main one so
a good likelihood that it's going to be made of this ordinary chondrite material which ordinary
chondrites are mixtures of rock and metal mixed together they're 4.5 billion years old they
predate the planets they're fascinating just from the science that you get from them as well but
it also makes it really relevant because it's the most common type of thing to hit the earth
so that makes this a great test and a very appropriate test for this for dart okay so jay
has very practical question um on facebook for someone who's interested in entering uh
a field like the three of yours science or engineering what basic courses do you suggest um
you know to set you up for a career involved with the nasa mission that's a great question i'll give
some of mine and then we can all jump in here um for me i got started doing uh math and physics
um and i think that's probably fundamental for a lot of things but uh i would definitely encourage
math and physics for sure yeah same i love math and physics that's something i really enjoyed
in high school so i decided to keep going with it engineering sounded cool you're solving problems
building things so that's what i went with yeah i have a phd in planetary science i was just
fascinated by planets i i blame star wars which i love from an early early age but i guess also one
thing i want to stress is that you should do what you're passionate about and that it really does
take all types to do this nasa missions i mean if you could look around where i am right now
you would see people with lots of different skills and i mean communicating is an important part of
this as well if somebody had told me when i was 17 years old that science communication was a job
i would not have taken the sort of circuitous path that i did i'm glad that i did though because lots
of different skills go into this and when i was in school social media wasn't even a field right
well nancy makes a great point it's something when i give public talks especially to kids try
to always emphasize that you know people say i want to work for nasa but i'm not good at math
or science or i don't want to be a scientist or an engineer so well we have lawyers we have financial
people that do our budgets we have communications people we have artists we have animators we have
policy people that help us deal and work with congress you know we have so many different skills
that are really required and we can't do a mission like dart or any of our missions without all of
those skill sets so you're absolutely right yeah i mean and if you think about planetary defense like
everything we were talking about right i mean this has a lot of implications beyond just you know
the science and the engineering to make it come together and then what that is going forward and
i think that's one of the things i really love about working at apl and on missions and with
nasa missions and this sort of thing just so many different people coming together with a common
goal okay well you are all smiles and i've got the warm fuzzies about collaboration and village
coming together um this could be our final question kivo bologne on youtube wants to know
what's been everyone's favorite moment or part of the work that you have done on this mission
i think my favorite moment is going to happen tonight so
so i'm gonna go with that i'm uh i'm i'm really i'm just so looking forward to the launch tonight
yeah so one of my favorite moments was i mean i was with this spacecraft from its youth until
its adulthood and part of integration and testing was testing it so after this was a bare structure
we put it all together and then we put it on a vibration table and seeing that spacecraft shaking
on a vibration table it was crazy i thought we were going to break it but of course analysis
we did not break it and it survived which means it will survive launch loads so like that was really
cool to like go through the whole testing process and just see the spacecraft grow up that's so cool
there's been a lot of amazing moments so far but i am going to say that my favorite moment is still
to come for sure so i'm looking forward to dart getting off the planet and going over to devorfos
all right well i know that you are all very busy and everyone here myself included is all a twitter
about this launch tonight so thank you so much lori lisa nancy will it and to all of you
thank you for joining us this show nasa science live is nothing without you you are part of the
conversation and we're so so happy to have you so thank you and know that you can learn more about
dart by visiting nasa.gov dart mission and join the conversation on twitter and instagram by using
dart mission launch is literally hours away and we do not want you to miss it so you can set your
reminders set your alarms and know we're streaming live on nasa.gov live, NASA television, the NASA app,
youtube, facebook, twitch, dailymotion, twitter, wherever you get your socials, we're going to
be there and we want to hear from you. DART is set to lift off at from Vandenberg Space Force Base
at exactly 10:21 PM Pacific Time. It's an instantaneous launch window so we we
launch tonight at that second, or we try again tomorrow or the next day. We hope that you'll
be watching wherever you are. Thanks for making some space for us and we will see you online.
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