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I'm Nancy Szabo.

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I'm a planetary scientist at the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Lab,

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and I'm the coordination lead on the DART
mission.

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This mission is about NASA's
purposely crashing a spacecraft

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into an asteroid as the first planetary
defense test mission.

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That mission is DART,
the double asteroid redirection test.

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T stands for test.
That's very important here.

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This is not a threat to the earth.

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This asteroid is not a threat
to the earth.

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And the DART test
won't make it a threat to the earth.

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But we want to take the steps to develop
technologies to potentially prevent

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asteroids from hitting the earth
in the future if we needed to.

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So the DART spacecraft
is going to come speeding in,

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hit this asteroid, and it's
going to change that motion of that

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asteroid ever so slightly in space
changing its future path.

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This is one technique that you might use
to change the path of an asteroid

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if one was ever found to be a threat
to the earth in the future.

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And we're doing this
test now before we need it.

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This asteroid

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is the ideal target for this
first planetary defense test mission.

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And because it's to asteroids

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like the name of the mission
says, it's a double asteroid out there.

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There's a larger asteroid titmouse
and there's the little moonlit asteroid.

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The folks that goes around it.

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So Dart is going to slam into that small
asteroid to more focus

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and measure asteroid deflection
within this asteroid system.

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This makes it a really safe

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way to do this test
where we're just deflecting

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how a small moon asteroid
goes around a larger asteroid

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with no measurable change about how
this asteroid goes around the sun.

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But it also lets us
use telescopes here on the earth

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in order to measure that deflection.

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So it allows the DART spacecraft
to be very focused,

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but then use these telescopes
that discover this asteroid system

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and have been studying it for years
to figure out how much we moved it.

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So the asteroid that it's colliding
with the DART

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spacecraft will collide with the Morpho
is about 160 meters in diameter.

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It's a less than two
football fields in length,

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and it goes around one
that's about half a mile in diameter.

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But really, asteroids
that are the size of dynamos

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we found the large majority
of that population, and none of those

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asteroids at that larger size are a threat
to the Earth for the foreseeable future.

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Now, there are no known asteroid threats
that are a threat to the Earth

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for the foreseeable future.

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But the size of the more folks,

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we actually have found less than 50%
of that asteroid population.

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And so along with finding all of these
asteroids, figuring out where they are

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and keeping track of them,
we want to take steps to be ready in case

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we need to in case
we need to protect the earth

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from an asteroid, impact
the size of something like tomatoes.

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And so this target asteroid
is really the ideal way

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to do this first test,

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the way that you would use technology
like this in the future, if you needed to

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if you needed to deflect an asteroid
that was on the course with the Earth

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is not the Hollywood blockbuster
last minute kind of scenario.

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It's something that you need
to do years in advance.

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And so you would do this
five, ten, 15, 20 years in advance.

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A small nudge adds up to a big change
in position over that time.

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And that's why you need this warning time,
which is why DART is just

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one part of a larger planetary
defense strategy.

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Planetary defense
is not just about deflecting asteroids.

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You can't do anything about the asteroids
if you don't know where they are.

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So Planetary Defense, really Key
Foundation is finding the asteroids,

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characterizing them, assessing them,
and then taking steps to potentially

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prevent
these natural disasters in the future.

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I am excited about everything about this
mission.

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We've been working on this here
at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

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since 2015,
and literally thousands of people

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have contributed to this
to get us to this moment.

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From the people who developed
and designed it, built the spacecraft.

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Our partners across the country,

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those who have been operating
the spacecraft

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for the last ten months in space, over
200,000 images

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taken already to calibrate that spacecraft
know what's going to happen.

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Telescopes
around the world on all seven continents

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and in space,
everybody's ready for this moment.

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And I'm excited about it
finally being here.

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Well, certainly before the collision,
actually, we're going to get

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some spectacular extreme
close ups of the asteroid to our foes.

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And I'm really looking forward
to this moment personally

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where we'll see what this asteroid
looks like for the first time.

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So these images will be taken
by the DART spacecraft every second

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as that spacecraft
streams towards this asteroid

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at 14,000 miles per hour.

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These images will come back here to Earth.

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And when they make it to the mission
operations center here at the Johns

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Hopkins Applied Physics Lab,
they'll be broadcast live on NASA TV,

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where the whole world can see this data
at the same time that the team is.

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And so this will be really spectacular

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and tell the final moments
and the story of the DART spacecraft.

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But this obviously won't tell us
how much we deflected the asteroid

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because the DART spacecraft
will be totally destroyed at this point.

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We're going to use the telescopes
here on the earth in order to do that.

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And telescopes across the across
the world on all seven continents

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and in space are being used to help
characterize and make this measurement.

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This will take a few days and weeks
in order to really come up with that.

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But we're ready to have this next
stage of the mission begin.

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So Dart's companion, CubeSat is called
the Feature Cube.

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It's the light Italian CubeSat
for imaging of asteroids.

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It's contributed by the Italian space
agency, and it has two cameras on it.

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And so what this CubeSat is going to do,
it was actually deployed an ejected

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successfully from the DART spacecraft
about two weeks ago

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and it's been operating
on its own in space ever since then.

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It's going to take direct images
of Dart's collision into the asteroid

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and then fly by that asteroid its closest
3 minutes after Dart's collision.

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Taking even more images.

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Now, it'll store all those images on board
and then send it back after its

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flyby is over.

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So we'll have to wait days
to see what it finds.

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But we're so excited to have
this international collaboration on DART

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for this first planetary defense
test mission, because planetary defense

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is really an international issue.

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Well, here at APL, like you might imagine,

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there's a lot of excitement building
and there's a lot of activities going on.

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The Mission Operations Center
is extremely busy

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and so they will all be there.

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And one of the main challenges
actually for this mission is hitting

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a small asteroid in space that you have
limited information about at high speed.

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In order to do that,
the spacecraft actually will autonomously

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guide itself
during the last 4 hours of the mission.

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And so that's all getting prepared,
prepared for that,

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where we have to make sure

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the spacecraft is where it needs to be
and then put on this autopilot and it will

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distinguish between these asteroids
and bring itself in.

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We're really welcoming people
in order to focus guests here at APL.

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But really the world to join
and watch this event live

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when it's shown on NASA TV.

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So in order to figure out

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asteroid deflection, how much Dart's
collision deflected the asteroid.

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We have telescopes across the planet
and in space.

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This includes

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Hubble, this includes GWC, and it includes
the Lucy spacecraft as well.

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They're going to be looking

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not just for how much deflection,
but how much ejecta is thrown up.

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So when dart collides
with this rocky asteroid, it's

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going to pulverize
a bunch of rock and material

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and it's going to throw it up away
from the asteroid.

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And this will result in the system
getting a little brighter.

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And the telescopes

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are going to be looking,
trying to capture that, characterize that.

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And it's really so great to have
all of these facilities coming together

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to maximize what we learn from this
first planetary defense test mission.

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Will So we

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know from other asteroids
that have been visited by other missions

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that these are complicated things that are
not just giant shards of rock out there

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in space.

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Those cirrus MCs Rex mission
found that it was a pile of gravel

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loosely bound together
in this very low gravity environment.

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And when they went to sample it,
it went further into the asteroid

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than maybe
people were initially expecting.

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We've never seen two more folks before.

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And in fact, it's going to be the smallest
asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft.

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What is it, its internal structure?
How strong is it?

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These are important components
for planetary defense.

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If you wanted to protect the earth
from an asteroid like this.

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And that's also why we need to do dart
doing this full scale

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asteroid deflection
test on an asteroid of the relevant size

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to see how that asteroid reacts
to this kinetic impactor collision.

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So we've learned a lot
from those other asteroid missions,

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and we're going
to learn even more from DART.