This video is part of the OpenSciEd Science Curriculum. For more information and to find the entire curriculum, visit www.openscied.org.
Video footage from: NASA
Producer/Editor: Jessica Wilde
Producer: Scott Bednar
Videographers: James Lucas and Seth Robinson
In case there was an asteroid coming towards Earth and you’re there you can actually stop it I mean that’s kind of fantastic NASA is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid what you think science fiction but this is real never in my life would I have thought I would take a
Couple hundred million doll spacecraft and crash it into an asteroid my name is sh Chen I’m Lena Adams my name is Kelly fast I’m Andy riffkin I’m Justina sovet and I help tell the story of the dart Mission I’m a planetary Defender and I study how the orbits of asteroids change
After we hit them with spacecraft my job was primarily to make sure all the systems on the spacecraft work together the D mission is NASA’s first test of a planetary defense technique called kinetic impactor Dart is the double asteroid redirection test it’s just a spacecraft that is going to go and smack
An asteroid the moonlift dioros which orbits the asteroid dios and see if we can change its trajectory just a little bit in order to show that we can deflect incoming asteroids if we need to Dart will only be changing the period of the orbit of dioros via a tiny amount but in
Space just a little bit is just enough to make an asteroid actually miss us in the event that an asteroid is discovered well ahead of time before it might impact Earth behind me you see the spacecraft it’s really cool to see it coming together in real life it is
Fantastic to see it in real life to see it turn from ideas into real pieces that are going to go into space the solar arrays will actually roll out to 28 ft in length once the solar arrays I deployed it’s going to be the size of a
School bus as the solar array opens out it’s going to swing out in this direction the asteroids only two footb fields in size we’re flying at over 6 km a second 30 days out we see one pixel on our fild view you can see dios and
Dephos as one point of light about 4 hours out our spacecraft becomes autonomous and then that’s where everything gets really exciting you actually are seeing impact we’re super excited and nervous as well I feel really honored and humbled to be working in an area of science that has such a
Broader impact you know figuratively and literally so dark the dinosaurs are made completely extinct by an asteroid impact so many years ago here we are we can actually do something about it I think this is just Wonderful