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Around the main asteroid. so when you slam into the moon and you slightly change its orbit, we know the orbit so well now, we'll be able detect what kind of change happened to it afterwards. >> so the amazing thing is this thing was launched overnight. it's going to smash into this asteroid in october of next year. you have to be pretty good at math, right, to make that work? >> yeah. it's a bad ass move. here we are on earth, on a platform, you are aiming this space probe to a point in space ten months from now where the binary asteroid will be. and you will hit the moon that's going around i...

Math, right, to make that work? >> yeah. it's a bad ass move. here we are on earth, on a platform, you are aiming this space probe to a point in space ten months from now where the binary asteroid will be. and you will hit the moon that's going around it. and so this, yes, there is not enough praise given to the orbital dynamicists who figured this out. the craft weighs about 1,000 pound, much less than the mass of the moon, itself. but just enough to push it and change its orbital speed by one-half a millimeter a second. you say that's nothing. well, it adds up. say to yourself, if we find an...

One. so this did the most binary asteroid, did almost in die morph us if you are in to have been aiming. isn't asteroid where you have a wide center, like this double strawberry. and then you have another asteroid going around it like the blueberry. so if you can hit the blueberry with a spacecraft, like the strawberry leaves, then you can slow the smaller asteroid down. ever so slightly. and then one an object is closer to the larger object it will go run faster. that is why, for example mercury goes around the sun much faster than earth us. and we will be able to detect this tiny change in t...

Objects. today, they started the mission that could help us avoid a cataclysmic scenario. the mission is called the double asteroid redirection test. or dark. early this morning, they launched a space craft. that spacecraft is going to be on a ten month journey towards a binary asteroid. which is basically to asteroids which orbit a common center. 6 million miles away from earth where, luckily, they caused no danger to us. if all goes according to plan. the spacecraft will smash into the smaller of the two asteroids at 15,000 miles per hour. giving it enough of a nudge to kick it off course an...

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...