Dart mission. I heard there is an asteroid or comet or something that you dont like the looks of. Tell me about it. You have 20 minutes. 20 minutes . Go. A comet that we estimate came from a cloud, and using a method of orbital determination and the average uncertainty of. 0 4 whoa. That is a lot of words. Just tell us what it is. What the doctor is trying to say is there is a, headed directly towards earth. It would be far more catastrophic. Mile high tsunamis. How certain is it . There is a 100 certainty of impact. Please dont say 100 . Can we just call it a potentially significant event. But is it potentially going to happen . 99. 7 to be exact. Ok, 70 . Call it 70 and its just move on. Host that is a clip from the trailer of the current hit movie on netflix titled dont look up, one over long series of hollywood disaster films centered around asteroids or meteors striking the earth. But now, science is catching up with art, and you are involved in a project called dart that revolves around this. Tell me about it. Guest it is every direction test mission, a nasa mission to demonstrate technology to deflect an asteroid. So maybe we could prevent this from happening to earth in the future. Host how serious is the threat of an asteroid striking earth . Guest earth has been hit by asteroids for thousands of years. It has happened in the past and it will happen in the future. That said, there is no known threat for the earth right now from asteroids. We are tracking things, there is nothing on course to hit the earth. That said, we have not found all the asteroids yet, so this is an important part of the nativity defense of Planetary Defense. We need to take the first steps to be ready in case you needed to, before you need it. That is where dart comes in. Host we have seen news reports in the past about meteors striking the earth. What is the difference between an asteroid and a meteor . Guest they kind of refer to the phenomenon when they get bright in the atmosphere and they are burning up in the atmosphere so you can look up and see them coming in. Some of them make meteorites which are the rocks that survive here in the planet. It really depends on the size when you talk about these objects. A lot of time people think about the dinosaur killers or these columnar sized objects. Those are the ones that would cause extinction events, a kilometer or larger permit of that size, we have found more than 90 of the population and none of them is a threat to earth. We are complain about those that are a few hundred meters or so. 140 meters in diameter. It was modeled by a lot of experts to be something that would cause regional devastation. It would wipe out cities, a small state, tensed to hundreds of kilometers damaged, very devastating. These are rare events, but they are things that could happen and these few hundred meters, less than half of them have been found currently. It is very important to be fighting these asteroids and then also taking steps to be ready in case we need to. Host how much notice would earth inhabitants have if there was a dangerous asteroid heading our way . Guest that is a really important theme, warning time is an important factor. You dont want these things sneaking up on new which is the premise of a hollywood blockbuster, which is why it is so important to be taking the steps to find these asteroids. The idea would Something Like dart is the deflection where you are not disrupting the asteroid or blowing it up, you are just giving it a soft nudge. You would need decades in advance. To be able to do that you would need to find the asteroid. That is what we are actively working with the Planetary Defense on as well. Host how many years in the making was this . Guest so, dart began nasa funding in 2015. It will go through 2023 for the final data analysis. Before that it was sort of a spark in somebodys eye. One of my colleagues came up with the idea while exercising in his basement. It is a good story that i just love because the story shows how things go from being ideas to reality. That was before 2015. It was talked about and then in 2015, nasa started investing in the mission. Host what did he envision he was exercising at home . Guest i guess he thinks about how to protect the world from asteroids in the future. But it was really the binary asteroid system. The redirection test, this is a doubleasteroid system. There are two asteroids. Why that is so important for the dart mission is that we are hitting a smaller asteroid which goes around the larger asteroid every 11 hours and 55 minutes. We will just reflect the smaller asteroid around the larger one ever so slightly. So the deflection is within the asteroid system. That makes it a safe way to do the test. Also, it is something we can measure with telescopes that already exist here on earth. That is where the engineers comes in. Telescopes from the earth that discovered the system in 1996. For decades we have been watching it. We know that this other moon goes around every 11 hours 55 minutes. We will change that they may be minutes, maybe 20. It will not be made by the spacecraft. The job of the spacecraft is to deflect that thing ever so slightly. That is where the ingenious idea came in to use this double asteroid for the Technology Demonstration of how you can prevent the asteroid from hitting earth in the future. Host were there any other asteroids under consideration, overstates the obvious one . Guest it really is the ideal target, the dimorphos and to most system it is about one third of all the asteroids out there. There are other ones but there are two important components. One is that as viewed from earth, sometimes the moon passes in front of and sometimes behind the other one. The brightness of the system changes with time. You nate to see it from earth. The second important part is that in 2022, the distance from these asteroids and the earth will be minimized. Both the did do mouse and the didymos and the dimorphos asteroid systems. That distance will be minimized. Still about one million kilometers so nobody should be worried, as far as telescopes are concerned, they will get the most precise data they have gotten. Host would you explain the role nasa has in this mission and the role of your organization at Johns Hopkins . Guest so dart is built and managed at the Johns Hopkins applied physics lab where i work for the nasa Planetary Defense coordination office. It is owned and managed and operated here at apl. Along with them we have other partner institutions across the country and we actually have a large number of International Team members contributing to this as well. This Planetary Defense is an International Issue that is one of the pillars of the national Planetary Defense strategy, is international corporation. Host this is nasas first defensive mission which makes it historic, was the newly formed space force agency involved at all from the Defense Department . Guest this has been a nasa mission. Nasa is the one tasked with doing Planetary Defense missions. There is a National Plan that was developed in 2018 that involved multiple agencies of which nasa is one. It lays out that missions like this are firmly in nasas purview and control. Host tell me about your particular role in this project. Guest i am the coordination lead for dart. It is sort of a new mission, because this mission is a little different than some of the Science Missions nasa traditionally runs, being the first one out of nasas Planetary Defense coordination office. My role is to help organize and coordinate our very Large InternationalInvestigation Team which will carry at the Planetary Defense investigation and also worked with our Engineering Team at apl, which is leading the mission and operations to ensure everything comes together to meet the requirements and our measurements that we want to accomplish for Planetary Defense for dart to be a success. But it is important because dart is just the first, the first Planetary Defense mission for nasa. But it will not be the last. We want to get information in the way that we can build on it going forward. Host tell me about the dart spacecraft itself, what is unique about it at where it was built. Guest the dart spacecraft was built in laurel, maryland. It is about two meters on the main cube. The main body of the spacecraft, where most of the mass is, it is sort of the size of a golf cart or vending machine, sometimes we say. One of the distinguishing features if you look at dart now is that it has the rollout solar arrays, rosas. They were wrapped up in aluminum file would it is launched. When they go out in space they go out. The spacecraft looks much larger, that they are very lightweight, they dont have a lot of mass. As far as the deflecting the asteroid part goes, they dont matter very much, is the main body of the spacecraft we worry about. Dart has one instrument on it, a camera. It was also built and developed at apl, and it has heritage from the camera that flew on the Horizon Mission that captured the spectacular images of pluto that i think we all remember from a few years ago. Using that design, it was modified in order to go onto the dart spacecraft. That payload is important because it will give us images of what the asteroid looks like, dimorphos, which would have never seen before. From earth you cannot separate didymos from dimorphos. So this will ensure that we hit dimorphos, which is a challenge in itself. Host is the Autonomous Navigation Technology . Guest the autonomous navigation, satnav, is one of the challenges and the new technologies for this mission. We are targeting an asteroid that is 140 meters in diameter. This will be the smallest object nasa has sent a spacecraft to. To quote for khader mattars, it is going around didymos to complicate matters, it is going around didymos. 14,000 miles an hour. The camera images will not be able to distinguish these two objects from each other until the last hour of the mission. Until then, they just look like before that, they just looked like a single point of light. So you need to have your spacecraft smart enough to use those images and target dimorphos and hit dimorphos as close as possible. That is where this Smart Technology comes in. It is a really Good Technology for Planetary Defense, for targeting these objects. We dont know what dimorphos looks like, we dont know its shape. From other asteroids we have been to, we know they have a hole variety of shapes. There is extensive testing that has gone on in order to meet this challenge, and we are looking forward to the demonstration. Host give me a sense of all the years of development and the teams involved once the idea was that we were going to try and affect the trajectory of this asteroid, what kind of craft would be capable of doing that question mark how did the process evolve . Guest there is a lot of paths that dont work out. All ideas are on the table at the early stages. First and foremost, dart is a very focused missions and that was very important to this whole discussion. A lot of times when you get the opportunity to fly in space, you want to be able to do all sorts of things because there is some much of still remains to be done. But dart has one purpose, and that is to hit dimorphos and deflect how it goes around to didymos. You have to use the best technology so you can situate on new challenges like the satnav navigation in order to autonomously target the asteroid in the last hours of the mission. So in a lot of ways, it was meant to be robust and focused. This is what you would want if you are potentially having to deflect an asteroid in the future. You want something that is as simple as possible in order to enable the mission to succeed. Host how fast will it be traveling when it hits the target . Guest it will be going at 6. 1 kilometers a second, or 14,000 mile per hour. That is the basis about how this much smaller spacecraft, like i said, the size of a golf cart, can deflect something that is the size of a sports stadium or the great pyramid. It is about 100 times smaller. So it is remarkable that it is able to deflect this much larger object at all. There really is only about a 1 deflection, but coming in very fast, 14,000 mo is key to enable that. Host where were you at liftoff when the spacecraft went into space . Guest i was out in a dark field in california at vending port Space Force Base looking out with everybody. It was a great night. People had warned me that there was fog and things, but we didnt have anything like that, it was a beautiful and clear night, you could see very clearly the excitement and the tears. A lot of my colleagues were working hard on operations to watch it live. Everything went flawlessly. And everybody was very pleased with the launch. Host where are the possible points of failure for this mission along the way . Where will you be holding your breath . Obviously, liftoff was one of them. It made liftoff. After that, where will you be watching to see that, yes, this Technology Performs as expected . Guest after liftoff we had a 30 day commissioning period where you turn everything on in space one at a time. You rollout of the solar arrays you practice using the propulsion engine, and other new technology. You opened the door for draco and take your first images of stars. Those days of commissioning went fabulously from another big mouth store to get through. Now the spacecraft is cruising its way to the didymos system and we are planning a lot of rehearsals for executing the commands and sequences that will be done. There is a lot of testing we can do during this crude period to ensure that we dont have any issue during the last few days. That said, it is nasas first Planetary Defense mission. Anytime you do something for the first time, it is because it hasnt been done before. And part of that challenge is part of the reason you need to do this test. If we were confident this would work, we would need to be doing dart. Dart needs to see what it is like to target a small asteroid that you have never seen before autonomously, and how much do you deflect it . This is a big unknown because the dart spacecraft will be at this massive velocity. We know that, but what we dont know is how much eject will come out. We think this will actually increase the amount of push that you get, the amount that you deflect the asteroid. It is sort of like that little jet engine that adds to deflect an asteroid even more. We have done models and tests, but it really depends on the structure of the asteroid, what it is made of, the boulders, how sandy, how strong it is. All of those are factors of doing this realworld test on a realworld asteroid in space, of this size. There is a concern of potentially hitting. In the future. It makes dart really well set up for this Planetary Defense devastation. Host what price tag is nasa using for this overall project. Guest starting in 20 through 2023,. Eight years, it is 330 million including the launch vehicle and the operations and development. Host and when is the exact date of impact plant . Guest september 26 later this year, 2022. Nominally, at 7 14 p. M. Eastern daylight time. That might change by a few minutes, but it is about 7 p. M. On the east coast, is what we are looking at. It will be an exciting time, a spectacular time as the draco camera images are used autonomously to target the asteroids, they will also be streaming back to earth, one per second. At first it will just be a dot of light, but the last images in the last minutes and seconds where we really get to see this asteroid for the first time, will be spectacular to be shared. Host how soon after the impact will you know that the intended goal was successful . Guest we will know pretty soon because one of the main goals is impacting the asteroid, so these images will come streaming back in the asteroid will get bigger and bigger in the field of view, and then the signal will stop and the dart spacecraft will have done its purpose. That really is the fundamental goal of the mission. Now, how much do we deflect the asteroid is the most important measurement. The telescopes on the earth will have to weigh in on this. I should mention, dart also carries a cubesat, printer. By the Italian Space agency. It will get incredible images. But it just goes speeding by the system so it will not be able to measure how much we deflect the system, but it will get images back a few weeks or months after darts impact with dimorphos. The telescopes on earth will get to work right away, but because you are measuring something which is a really fine signal, it used to be 11 hours and 55 minutes, now maybe it will be 11 hours and 45 minutes. We could get data for weeks or months. Because we are targeting the time where the distance between earth and the didymos system is, that telescopes will be able to get a really great data for three months after darts impact. The images will be refined throughout all of 2022. Host you mentioned the italians. I also read that the European Space agency is doing a followup mission. Can you explain their role . Guest the European Space agency has a mission called hera. It is going to rendezvous with the didymos and dimorphos system in 2026. By rendezvous, i mean orbit. It will stay in the system for, months so it will be able to take some detailed measurements that will really complement darts mission. For one, it will be able to see the crater that was made by the asteroid impact into dimorphos. We will be able to measure how strong it really was, by the after effects that were left by dart on the surface. It will be able to get the mass of dimorphos which is a tricky measurement we will not be able to get from dart. From dart, we will get the shape of the asteroid, and we will make some assumptions of what it is made of, based on other s