so one of them comes near enough to earth to do this redirect experiment. otherwise, you waste a lot of energy going so far out in the solar system. yeah, good. this is it. the next one, we ll see what that is. the dark mission. this is what they found. they identified this. and why are you so appreciative of what they found here as a model for this experiment? that s a great question. if you try to deflect a random asteroid. there s so many things that affect the asteroid. soiler heating on one side. you think of the earth and the moon, this is a binary asteroid. there s a big one and a little one. we have the orbital parameters
and that s what nasa one of the missions of the director for planetary defense is to actually identify all of these things. so there s we think there is probably 27,000 near earth aft recognized that will pose a potential danger to us. the first thing you have to do is find them. which is hard because 150 meters across, that is about a football field size or so. 5 million miles away. good luck finding that. so step one, find them all. step two, characterize their or bits, figure out which ones that are going to target the earth. and then you ve got to get out there and do this gaffe taeugzal tweaking, orbit tweaking long beforehand. you ve got to send something all the way out there. then it will take a while to detect whether you really change the orbit. it is a bill kwrapbt thing they are doing here, using a binary asteroid, two aft recognized
asteroid could look like. that wasn t the scene of it saving it right there. and this wednesday, nasa plans to test it out in real life, launching a spacecraft on a 16,000-mile-an-hour collision course with a nearby asteroid to rye to nudge it just a little bit off-course. but it raises the question, whose job is it to prevent an armageddon? joining us right now is brian bender, a senior national political correspondent at politico, whose new article explores exactly that. i love that their bosses came to you and said, hey, i ve got a big scoop that i need you to work on. it s about this asteroid. brian, this is a first-ever planetary defense test mission. what s it how is it going to play out? this is called the double asteroid re-direction test. the acronym is d.a.r.t. and basically, what nasa is going to try to do is send a spacecraft millions of miles away to this binary asteroid, it s two of them, actually,
this is a computer simulation of dart, the double asteroid redirection test, which could be our first line of defence if one of those lumps of rock comes heading our way. nature has given us a setup where we have an asteroid, a binary asteroid, that s approaching close to earth so that we can observe from earth based observatories, but this is a test. and this is how the test will work. astronomers have long been aware of a pair of asteroids called didymos and dimorphous. sometime later next year, dart will target then, smash into them, trying to alter their course. these asteroids are no danger to us, but others might well be. if there was an asteroid that was a threat to the earth, what you d want to do, this technique with would, be many years in advance, decades in advance, such that you would just give this asteroid a small nudge
Massive asteroid danger to Earth: NASA to strike Didymos asteroid with a rocket - The mission is called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) and its target is hazardous near-earth binary asteroid Didymos.