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Until it hits. Impacts are still happening in the solar system. The threat posed by Earth orbit crossing asteroids and comets has long been a concern of mine and of the committee. NASA has confirmed a so-called city killer asteroid narrowly missed hitting Earth.
The dedicated researchers who find and track asteroids across the solar system are members of an elite squad known as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. Finding asteroids before they find us, and then maybe getting them before they get us. But how does one get an asteroid? It's applied planetary science. Planetary Defense set their sights on the little asteroid moonlet, Dimorphos, with one mission in mind.
Give it a little boop, you know, like boop. Humanity's first ever attempt to boop an asteroid. Can we reach into the cosmos and defend the planet? Boop. This is Unexplainable. I'm Brian Resnick.
And last year, I talked to Robin George-Andrews. He's a science journalist, and he's been doing a lot of work on a book about asteroids and how maybe one could hit the Earth one day and what we should do to stop it. Most importantly, that part of what to do to stop it. And in that episode last year, Robin and I talked about what we called the asteroid problem.
So the huge asteroids that could potentially destroy all life on Earth, we actually got them pretty much cataloged. Like, we know where they are. We know they're not a threat. But asteroids don't need to be enormous to cause problems. So in 2013, there was a meteor that exploded over a city in Russia and it exploded with more power than a nuclear weapon.
It's the biggest meteor in more than a century to hit the planet. A thousand people were injured from shards of flying glass and debris. And that meteor was ultimately pretty small. There are even bigger ones, which are sometimes called city killers, that while they're not big enough to destroy a whole planet, they're definitely big enough to destroy cities, countries, and just cause widespread mayhem.
And scientists think we've only discovered maybe half of these city killer asteroids in our solar system. The big question is, is like, what if we look up and see one of these heading towards Earth? Could we maybe even just, boop, knock it out of the way?
So NASA decided it was time to do some target practice to see if this was possible. The spacecraft is NASA's double asteroid redirection test spacecraft. That's a lot. Call it DART. The target? An asteroid called Dimorphos. This is an asteroid that actually poses no threat to Earth, so it's actually kind of innocent here. The goal was to hit Dimorphos hard enough with a spacecraft to change its orbit. And the idea is, if this works...
this technique could be used to deflect city killer asteroids in the future, maybe prevent a huge devastating disaster. Robin actually got special access to the mission control room when the big boop happened. He saw what the spaceship's camera saw in near real time. I just wanted to know, I wanted to ask him, how did it go? Are we safe from city killer asteroids now? Can we defend our planet?
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So, Robin George-Angers, hello. Hello. That's your name, correct? I got it right? It is my name, yeah, that's the one. How are you? I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I feel like the Earth is a little safer than it was a year ago. Yes, yes. I am actually so excited to talk to you. You know, the last time we talked, we talked about this DART mission, this kind of
kind of very Hollywood-style, let's see what happens when we smash something into an asteroid. And I'm so excited to talk to you now because there is some new science, new data, and my caveman brain is like, ooh, something went smash, and I want to hear about it. Yeah, but something that seems as straightforward as something smashed into something else in space is probably the most exciting and optimistic thing
genuinely feel-good story I'll ever work on. After a 10-month, 470-million-mile journey, DART is just minutes away from making history. Witness the big moment live from space.
I understand you were at the mission control when this was happening, right? Yeah, so on the day of the impact, I snuck off to the part of campus where all the scientists and engineers were because I really wanted to see what it was like when their spacecraft actually obliterated itself. Tell me about the scene. What was the atmosphere like? What were people like? What do you remember from that day? Oh man, it was kind of breathtaking, really. I mean, normally, if you've seen footage of what it's like when
you know, NASA is landing a rover on Mars or something. There's always this tension, especially when it's like going through the atmosphere and they're hoping that it doesn't die. Whereas this mission, I've never seen 2000 people more excited to see a spacecraft die. 30 seconds before impact, basically Dimorphos, the target was like properly in view. You could see individual like boulders on its surface. Oh my goodness. Look at that.
People were just so like genuinely in awe of seeing this. There was this like, this tension of just like waiting for this like epic beat to drop or something. Like everyone knew it was coming. Oh my goodness. You know, people started counting down. Three, two, one. There was like a murmur of noise and then... People started screaming and screeching and jumping up and down and fist pumping the air.
And we have impact. People were crying, people high-fived me, someone like jumped on my back briefly, like didn't even care while I was there. Did you know that person? Nope. Fantastic. It hit it like basically if you could draw an X on Dimorphos, like where they exactly wanted to hit, it basically went without a hitch. And in the future, this technique could be used to genuinely save millions of lives. Now is when the science starts.
What what happened when it hit like physically do we know this now? Oh, and it was it was Dart didn't just hit it. It really hit it like it really rung its bell. I mean people were
stunned by just how much material had come off the asteroid. Did we destroy it? No, no, no. So there was some concern that they may have disrupted it or broken too much off because that's not the point of this technique. Is that a problem? That sounds good. Yeah, it would be a problem because imagine if you have an asteroid coming to Earth that's that size, right? And instead of deflecting it,
You disrupt it, as it's called, and you break it into like five different pieces. So yes, you may have saved one part of Earth from having like a regional, like really serious impact, but then you've given five other parts of the planet still pretty terrible damage. It actually could cause more deaths than just one impact kind of thing. So you don't want to turn a cannonball into a shotgun, basically. So there was worry that they had accidentally disrupted it for about a day.
But then observations kept coming in and people were like, "Oh, it's still there. Thank God. It's still there." So we just blew off a chunk of it or something? Yeah, yeah. Like millions and millions of kilograms of it. Like quite a lot, actually. Wow.
We didn't blast it to smithereens, but the real goal here was to nudge it, to change the orbit. And the last time we talked, you said the goal for success was to change the orbit of this little asteroid
by a little over a minute. So did we do that? Did we change the orbit? Yeah, and they changed its orbit by 32 minutes. Wow. And they're like, how did we do that? And so the recent stuff that came out was a number called Beta. And Beta is just, how much punch did Dark give? How much momentum did the spacecraft transfer
To the asteroid. Like, how hard did our cue ball of a spacecraft hit the 8-ball of the asteroid? Right. So, for some reason, when Dart punched this asteroid,
it was almost like three and a half darts had punched it for some reason. Because the impact was so successful, it carved off a lot of the asteroid's own material. And when that material was blasted off in the impact, it acted like a brief rocket booster to the asteroid. Yeah, it was like a rocket booster, basically. So it gave a lot more punch than it was designed to. And the idea behind that is, if you...
Over egg that you may accidentally just destroy an asteroid. Whoops So that could be a problem. Yeah, but it also means if you have a bigger asteroid You don't need quite as big a spacecraft to deflect it because if you knock off its material That means that it the asteroid is doing some of the work for you. That's good news. It is good So overall, it's good news. You don't need quite as big Suicidal spacecraft as you needed. So yeah, yeah
So what are the most concrete things we've learned from this? So takeaway number one is that you can deflect an asteroid by hitting it with a spacecraft. Nice. And a relatively small spacecraft, like DARPA, the size of a car, and it had basically one camera, that can be used to deflect an asteroid of the size that would cause...
city to country-sized devastation. That's great news. I mean, that's... We basically have the technology right now to save millions of lives from a threat that people, even just a few decades ago, would be doomed, basically. Yeah, go us. Yeah, go us. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's takeaway number one. Takeaway number two is every time a spacecraft visits an asteroid or a comet,
Scientists are surprised by what they find. So we also should be expected to be surprised by any asteroid that we'd want to deflect. You really need a recon mission beforehand. So you don't know what you're going to get when you get to the asteroid, and it might not behave the way you think when you boop it. Right, yeah. Like, space is just continuously, frustratingly surprising.
So that's like one like good news and then one like, well, we got to stay on our toes. Yes, yes. But the really big thing now is, okay, this works. Yeah. Are there any asteroids of that size that are going to hit us in the future? Coming up, are we safe now because of DART? What else do we have to do? Support for Unexplainable comes from Greenlight.
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We're back. And now that we know NASA can slam into an asteroid and deflect it, Robin says the next big step is to look for asteroids that could actually hit us. So the next big planetary defense effort where all the
funding the political clout, everything is going, is Neo Surveyor. Near Earth Object Surveyor. It's a telescope that's going to be deployed into space. It's an infrared telescope. And it's going to be called to like near absolute zero. Some really cool tech. And it's basically going to look for
these city killer sized asteroids, especially the ones that are like interior to Earth's orbit, which is where, you know, the Sun is. Because when you're looking with an optical telescope-- The Sun's in the way. The Sun is in the way, it's way too bright. So, Neo Surveyor, everyone is like, "It will work." If it launches, in 10 years it will find 90% of the asteroids that we're kind of missing, which is kind of an incredible thing. That's amazing, yeah.
So I get we gotta find more of these, but are there any more plans to do some more smashing? Not yet, because at the moment people were like, "Well that worked, so now we need to find them to see if we need to do any more testing." Like, everyone wants DART 2 to be a thing, because who doesn't want to see more things being smashed and out of space, and you know, especially when you can say it's for saving the planet, and everyone's like, "Cool."
What are the open questions still, you know, that we didn't learn from this or the questions that have been provoked because of it? So one of the big questions that's come up, and I think it's always been there, but it's kind of an uncomfortable question is,
What would happen in the event of an asteroid, a city killer-sized asteroid, that's either we don't have enough warning time to deflect it, or it's too big and we just don't have... Like, you physically could not deflect it with a dart-like mission. What would you do? Well, we have these rather powerful nuclear weapons that we don't really want to use on each other, hopefully.
But could you put a very powerful nuclear device on a spacecraft, launch it into deep space, detonate it, and cause lots of debris to fly off, which again acts as that rocket booster kind of effect on the asteroid? Could you deflect or destroy an asteroid that's small enough with nuclear weapons sort of thing? Everyone thinks it probably would work because the physics is quite straightforward. So I think that's one of the big unanswered questions is,
If you couldn't use a kinetic impactor... Like Dart. What choices do you have? Would you go the nuke way? Why not go the nuke way? It's just a matter of international law, or could you really do something horrible? Imagine a part of it broke off and was still heading towards Earth, or it just didn't work, or it fragmented it, it disrupted it into many, many pieces.
Basically, you've turned a threat, something that's going to hit Earth, into a radioactive asteroid, so you're just smacking the Earth with... It would be even worse. Would you do nothing and just take the hit? Would you just have to evacuate part of the planet to just take the hit? Because that's also an option. Yeah, that's really uncomfortable. Even though we are progressing toward a solution to the asteroid problem...
That doesn't mean the choices will be easy. Because, like you said, the asteroids can continue to confound us on a case-by-case basis. And there might be some really uncomfortable questions of, like, do we take the risk with a nuke? Or is it easier just to evacuate a place on Earth that's going to get hit? Evacuate a city? Which, I mean, to me, it feels like the nuke seems...
easier but you know but maybe not yeah it's just really complicated like what's the state of the world going to be when you need to do this which countries will be in power i mean often you don't even know exactly where like until radar locks on to like an asteroid which is often just a week before it hits you actually don't know exactly where it's going to hit so like the the uncomfortable stuff comes from like
What would you do if you didn't have enough time, basically? And how would the world react to it? Because the consequences of the world reacting to it may be worse and spiral out of control more than the impact, which is crazy. But no one knows. That's the ultimate unanswered question here, of less scientific and more...
And more political. Is that something that you've come to learn in reporting on this? Like, the science is easy, but this... The science, basically, the thing that... One of the key takeaways I'm coming from this is the science is relatively straightforward when it comes to planetary defense. Like, it really is. It's like, how do you find them? With these infrared things. Okay, right. How do you deal with them? If you have enough time, you deflect it. If it's too big, you'd have to use something else. But we have the technology to do it. Proof.
Pretty much. Like, if it's a gigantic comet, it's like, maybe we're just doomed. But, like, it's a... But, like, yeah, the real hard thing is, like, the political stuff. Like, it's just who gets to decide who runs this. Like, if you're absolutely sure the asteroid's going to hit America, then yeah, I'm sure it's NASA and FEMA. Yeah.
But if an asteroid was going to hit a state in the US, or somewhere in the US, how do you convince an entire US state to evacuate? There would be so much misinformation. How would you say we're the trusted source? Can you imagine what would go on on Twitter if this was actually going to happen? So all that is just...
so unknown, and the problem is you can practice this as much as you want, you can wargame it out as much as you want, until this actually happens for real, no one knows what the state of the world's going to be like, no one knows what's going to happen. Some things are always going to be unknown until it actually happens, which is kind of scary, but, you know, what else can you do? Okay, so you took me from feeling good to feeling a little bad again. It is still a feel-good story, because we do have the technology to do something about it.
We're building the technology that will close that observational gap to find these things. So within the next 20 years max, the whole world will know pretty much whether in the next century is anything going to hit Earth or not. Like, that's a really good position to be in. Like, that's...
You'll never be in a position where we're like, "Okay, we know exactly when every earthquake is going to happen and where it's going to happen at that exact moment. We know exactly when every hurricane is going to happen, every eruption." That's never going to happen, no matter how far you get ahead. There's too complex those systems. But an asteroid is just a thing moving through space that may smack a thing. So if you see them all and you plot them out, it's a problem that actually has a complete solution. You literally can stop this natural disaster
This episode was reported and produced by Brian Resnick and me, Meredith Hodnot. We had editing from Katherine Wells, sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld, fact checking from Zoe Mullock, and the incredible voiceover talents of the one, the only, Afim Shapiro. Manu Nguyen is finding the punchline. Neil Dinesh is finally emerging from a Bangalore traffic jam.
And Bert Pinkerton spun faster and faster until she let go of the penny. She flew backwards and the penny shot right into a slot in the opposite wall. Then she heard a hollow clink. If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please let us know. Email us at unexplainableatbox.com.
We'd also love it if you left us a review or rating or wrote us a song or drew us a picture. We love hearing from you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back next week.