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>> and im natalie morales >> and this is "dateline". >> marie was a very loving person she had a heart of gold. what happened to this woman? my job is to be a truth teller and seek out the truth i wanted to solve it >> her case was a mystery fo years. the mom with a tender heart an tough as nails career. >> she was part of the sheriff s department. her ultimate goal was to try t get into the fbi >> she found a new sense o purpose in the church. her pastor and his wife, lik family >> th...

Its the stuff of hollywood blockbusters — a mission into space, to try to stop an asteroid hitting the earth. but thats what nasa is actually testing this week, with the launch of its dart mission. the agency is firing a spacecraft at a huge lump of rock in space, to see if it can be tipped in another direction. the aim is to develop technology that could stop any dangerous asteroid in the future smashing into earth. 0ur science correspondent rebecca morelle has more. until now, its been the s...

We are going to explore some new world, but in this case we are literally going to crash a spaceship into an asteroid and change the direction and speed at which it moves through space, and we are doing that to basically test the technique to save the planet if there was ever a killer asteroid coming towards earth. nasa is targeting a small asteroid called dimorphos, which is orbiting around a larger space rock. the spacecraft travelling at around 13,000 mph will fly into into the small asteroid...

Science fiction, doesnt it — but how important is this mission? it does sound like science fiction, and i think thats why its so cool. so this is humanitys first attempt to change or redirect the path of another object in its solar system. and its very important — we have a lot of theories about how we might deflect an asteroid from crossing paths with our own planet, but so far these are just ideas. so the dart mission will provide the first actual testing of one of these theories. its a to...

They hit a populated area, they can cause a lot of devastation also and those are a lot more common than, for example, ten km across asteroids, which are, you know, an asteroids, which are, you know, an asteroid which likely caused the extinction of the dinosaurs was about that size. so again, it depends what you mean by serious damage — there is a range of possibilities depending on the size of the object. but objects in the hundred meter or so rains are a lot more common than the larger obje...