A Feel-Good Story About the End of the World

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Speaker 1 February 15th, 2013 started like any other day for the 1.2 million people who live in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

Speaker 4 It was a crisp winter's day, pretty cold out, nice blue sky.

Speaker 1 Dr. Robin George Andrews is a trained scientist, turned author and science writer.

Speaker 4 Perfectly normal day. But then suddenly, an increasingly bright burning white light was like arcing across the sky, leaving this like vaporous trail.
It would have looked like a missile.

Speaker 1 Chelyabinsk is the sleepy administrative capital of a region in southwestern Russia.

Speaker 1 Until this moment, it was best known, if it was known at all, for being home to one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.

Speaker 1 Now, this light streaking across its sky was getting brighter and brighter.

Speaker 4 And then a large, deafening explosion.

Speaker 4 The ground lit up red and white. People were knocked off their feet.

Speaker 4 Eardrums would be ringing. It would have thudded on your chest like if you fell off a bridge into some water or something.

Speaker 4 Immediately terrifying.

Speaker 1 Residents in the streets shrieked with panic. At least one person screamed, it's the end of the earth.
Roofs collapsed, windows shattered in buildings in six different cities as far as 30 miles away.

Speaker 1 Over a thousand people were injured, and it made news all over the world.

Speaker 3 It looked like a scene from a movie, but it was all too real.

Speaker 5 A bright speck in the sky, and then all hell broke loose. Some thought it was a nuclear attack, some thought it was an alien invasion.

Speaker 4 It basically exploded with the force of like a non-radioactive nuclear weapon. It was a huge explosion.

Speaker 1 And what was it?

Speaker 4 It was a very tiny asteroid.

Speaker 1 Like how tiny?

Speaker 4 About the length of a bowling alley, like no bigger than 60 feet, which for space is very small.

Speaker 1 And we had no idea it was coming, right?

Speaker 4 Nope. No one saw it.
It was too small.

Speaker 1 This small asteroid was nevertheless the most destructive one to hit the planet in over a century. And it was almost much worse.

Speaker 1 We were lucky the asteroid exploded in the sky before it hit the ground. We were also lucky it wasn't the length of two bowling alleys.

Speaker 4 Like if Charlie Vincent asteroid was twice as big and it hit that city, that city would be in pieces.

Speaker 1 And you said like it's a tiny asteroid? Like what's a normal sized asteroid and what do they do?

Speaker 4 A normal kind of asteroid, you know, a football stadium. That's a normal size.
That's a pretty normal asteroid. If it hit near or a populated area, it would cause the worst disaster in human history.

Speaker 1 And how many people, like, if it hit a city, would they be estimated to kill?

Speaker 4 Hundreds of thousands to tens tens of millions, depending on where it hits, yeah.

Speaker 4 And, like, immediately, it would be coming in so fast and it'd be so massive that if it hit a city, there would be a city 10 seconds before, and then afterwards, there would not be a city.

Speaker 4 It would eviscerate it. So, these asteroids are appropriately known as city killers.

Speaker 1 And they're normal.

Speaker 4 That's normal.

Speaker 1 These normal size city killers are hard to see too. And there are way more of them floating around there than anyone could like.

Speaker 4 There's like a few tens of thousands of them orbiting near Earth.

Speaker 4 If you live to 100 years old, there's like a one in 200 chance of a city killer hitting somewhere random on Earth during your lifetime. Now,

Speaker 4 that's not that high.

Speaker 1 It's not that low, man.

Speaker 4 That's not that low. That's not that low.

Speaker 1 So, like, how worried about this should I be? I'm getting worried about this, just talking to you about it.

Speaker 4 It's a problem that exists, but unlike any other natural disaster, this is actually the one that you can completely prevent from happening. The world could be saved.

Speaker 1 This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin.

Speaker 1 Sometimes what's going on in the world can be so bad that it feels like we're plunging off a cliff, or we're trapped on a runaway train, or we're about to be pancaked by a giant asteroid.

Speaker 1 But funnily enough, actually being pancaked by a giant asteroid? Not something you need to spend a whole lot of time worrying about.

Speaker 1 And that's because a bunch of experts and scientists are already worried about it for us. A couple of years ago, Dr.

Speaker 1 Robin George Andrews began following exactly these people as they attempted to do the unheard of. physically alter outer space.

Speaker 1 Robin's a trained volcanologist, someone who studies volcanoes, but he could not resist the allure of this story, which he turned into his new book, How to Kill an Asteroid, and which he's going to tell us all about right now.

Speaker 1 So, today on Decodering, if an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth,

Speaker 1 what are we going to do about it?

Speaker 1 Hey, Dakota Ring listeners, you know how much I love a good deep dive. And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too.

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Speaker 1 They can use it for research apps on the App Store, documentaries on the Apple TV app, or even ad-free podcasts. It's the perfect present for the curious mind.

Speaker 1 Visit applegiftcard.apple.com to learn more and gift one today.

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Speaker 1 The fear that the Earth could be rocked by a giant space rock is an anxiety that pops up all the time in fiction and that's grounded in fact.

Speaker 1 It's in action movies and sci-fi novels, in science classes and geology lessons. But before we could be scared of asteroids, we had to learn what they are.

Speaker 1 What is an asteroid?

Speaker 4 An asteroid is basically the trash left over from the birth of the solar system. It's just the crap that didn't get put into something.
They're kind of a mixture of the building blocks of planets.

Speaker 4 There are millions of them between Mars and Jupiter. That's where most of the asteroids hang out.
It's just the ones that don't hang out there that are the problem.

Speaker 1 Sometimes one of these rocky metal icy clumps moving at speeds of tens of thousands of miles per hour leaves the so-called asteroid belt and heads towards us.

Speaker 4 Earth is at the end of a shooting gallery, so Earth gets hit all the time by tiny rocks that are like, you know, you could fit them in the palm of your hand kind of thing.

Speaker 4 If you look up on a dark, clear night, you can often see a shooting star. That's an asteroid, basically.

Speaker 1 So when did we put together that those things we've been seeing in the sky for millennia were actually asteroids?

Speaker 4 So the first asteroid was discovered only about 200 years ago, so in 1801. Surprisingly recent.
Yeah. Compared to things like planets and moons, they are just so much harder to see.

Speaker 4 They don't stay in the same part of space often, and they're just smaller.

Speaker 1 It took another century and a half for scientists to realize that asteroids could do a lot of damage. At that point, they were starting to think about the moon and about how we might get there.

Speaker 1 They noticed that the moon was seriously pockmarked, like a major crater face. And they began to put together that asteroids might be to blame.

Speaker 4 Scientists started to really get an idea that, like, okay,

Speaker 4 things in space can crash into other things really fast, and we're in space, so yikes.

Speaker 1 So, like, this is when we started to worry about asteroids for real?

Speaker 4 I think, honestly, even then, it was still like fantastical.

Speaker 8 That is our target, the asteroid's weakest point.

Speaker 1 Asteroids became the stuff of science fiction, like this 1968 episode of Star Trek, in which the crew tries to stop one from slamming into an alien planet.

Speaker 8 If we don't get to that deflection point in time, everyone on this planet will die.

Speaker 1 Star Trek was not alone in imagining this kind of planetary destruction. There were short stories in sci-fi magazines and a 1979 Sean Connery TV movie called Meteor.

Speaker 1 That meteor is five miles wide and it's definitely going to hit us.

Speaker 1 So when do we realize asteroids aren't just like a version of the Death Star or like something preposterous, but something we actually have to worry about?

Speaker 4 As far as I can tell, it was only until the 80s when people started to go like, where did the dinosaurs go? Like, oh, these big beasts that seem to be everywhere just stopped at some point.

Speaker 4 So that was weird. Where did they go?

Speaker 1 Today, most people agree that a giant asteroid did the dinosaurs in, but that idea wasn't articulated until 1980.

Speaker 1 That year, scientists published a paper about an element called iridium that they'd found all over the world in exactly the same sediment layer that corresponded with the dinosaur's disappearance.

Speaker 4 Iridium is like a weird element that you get on Earth, but you really

Speaker 4 you get it from asteroids, basically. So they were like, yes, probably an asteroid killed them.
But obviously, if you make a claim like that, you have to find the impact crater.

Speaker 4 Like it would have to be massive.

Speaker 1 And it turned out someone had already done that.

Speaker 4 they just didn't realize what it was this petrochemical company found it by mistake by accident uh off the coast of mexico they found this giant structure like 110 miles wide but they weren't interested in it they weren't looking for oil so they were like whatever

Speaker 4 you know whatever and it took another 10 years for scientists to come across that and go whoa whoa whoa whoa what is that like what's that giant hole in the in the ground and so when the dots were connected it was like the late 80s early 90s that people are like okay, we're 90% sure that an asteroid six miles wide crashed into the ground, created a firestorm, created earthquakes for days, burnt the skies, blacked down out the skies, caused this mass extinction kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Once the evidence came out that an asteroid had killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, an officer in the Air Force grew very perturbed.

Speaker 1 In the early 90s, he proposed that the military invest in protecting the globe from asteroids. But even then, the very idea was laughed out of the room.

Speaker 4 Literally, no one thought it was a good idea. Like, why would you, this is ridiculous.
This is like, this is sci-fi, literally, you know. So for a couple of years, no one listened to him.

Speaker 1 And then what happened?

Speaker 4 And then a comet big enough to kill everyone on the planet many times overcrashed into Jupiter.

Speaker 1 In 1993, three astronomers taking photographs of the solar system discovered a smudge on their images that looked like a string of pearls against the black of space.

Speaker 1 When they examined the images more closely, they realized what they were seeing was a giant comet orbiting Jupiter that had broken apart into 21 very large pieces.

Speaker 9 Each fragment punched a hole deep into Jupiter's clouds.

Speaker 4 Any of those pieces, if they hit Earth, it was so massive and so fast, it would have killed everyone on the planet.

Speaker 10 When it crashed back down, it left a bruise the size of the Earth.

Speaker 4 It really like became an old crap moment sort of thing, like really demonstrating that if anything like that happened to Earth, like we'd all die. Like maybe we shouldn't just chill.

Speaker 4 Maybe we should look out for these things.

Speaker 1 As scientists started to sort out in earnest what that might entail and how to fund it, the public learned about another giant asteroid that lent quite a bit of urgency to the scientists' efforts.

Speaker 11 What is this thing?

Speaker 6 It's what we call a global killer. The end of mankind.
Nothing would survive, not even bacteria.

Speaker 2 My God.

Speaker 1 The star of Michael Bay's 1998 disaster movie, Armageddon, is a freakishly large asteroid.

Speaker 6 How big are we talking?

Speaker 12 Sir, our best estimate is 97.6 billion.

Speaker 5 It's the size of Texas, Mr. President.

Speaker 4 I I love that it's the size of Texas, like one of the biggest asteroids ever discovered, only 18 days before it's going to hit the planet.

Speaker 4 Embarrassingly short notice.

Speaker 1 The film also features Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, and Bruce Willis, who plays a third-generation oil driller tapped to save the world by drilling holes for nuclear bombs on that Texas-sized asteroid.

Speaker 6 All they got to do is drill. That's it.

Speaker 5 No spacewalking, no crazy astronaut stuff.

Speaker 6 Just drill.

Speaker 1 The movie grossed over $550 million, and a song from its soundtrack, Aerosmith's Don't Want to Miss a Thing, debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

Speaker 2 I could stay awake

Speaker 1 just to hear you breathing.

Speaker 1 That same summer, another blockbuster called Deep Impact also opened in theaters with its own giant rock threatening a world where Morgan Freeman is the U.S. president.

Speaker 12 Now, we we get hit all the time by rocks and meteors, some of them the size of cars, some no bigger than your hand.

Speaker 12 This comet is larger than Mount Everest.

Speaker 1 These twin movies, goofy as they are, are kind of beloved by scientists because they did a huge amount to publicize the potential danger of asteroids.

Speaker 4 It was a weird time where politicians became very aware of the problem and the public became very aware of the problem, albeit in a slightly like melodramatic way.

Speaker 4 So, at that point, the astronomy community and Congress were like,

Speaker 4 could that happen to Earth? And everyone said, yep, that could if we just wait and do nothing.

Speaker 1 So then what happened?

Speaker 4 In 1998, Congress legally required NASA to find 90% or more of what they would call planet killers. Find all of them and make sure they're not heading towards us.

Speaker 1 Planet killers, as their name suggests, are bigger and more dangerous than city killers, but they're also easier easier to see.

Speaker 1 In asking NASA to locate them, Congress was mandating planetary defense, that's what it's called, for the first time. But this is also all the planetary defense Congress funded.

Speaker 1 NASA's only task when it came to asteroids was finding the very biggest ones.

Speaker 4 You know, for a good decade, that's all they did. And then you use computers to trace up where it's going.
You tell us where it's going.

Speaker 1 Did they do it?

Speaker 4 They did. Basically, they have now found 90% of all of the planet killers.

Speaker 1 And they might be resting on their laurels right now, if not for something we've already told you about.

Speaker 4 I actually took Chelyabinsk happening in 2013. That was the thing that really did it.
That was like a, we didn't see that coming. It could have killed people.

Speaker 1 After Chelyabinsk, NASA and its European and Japanese counterparts started to take planetary defense more seriously. NASA got a bigger budget for it.

Speaker 1 And while they kept looking for asteroids on a collision course with Earth, they also started to ask a much more difficult question:

Speaker 1 What do we do if we find one?

Speaker 4 The logical next step is: if you see one coming towards us, you basically need to knock it out of the way or completely destroy it. We need to rearrange the cosmos to make it more habitable.

Speaker 4 No biggie.

Speaker 1 That's when we come back.

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Speaker 1 If a dangerous asteroid is barreling towards Earth, it would be really helpful if we could move it out of the way.

Speaker 1 So in 2016, just a few years after that asteroid hit Chelyabinsk, NASA decided that was what it was going to try and do. It officially inaugurated the Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

Speaker 1 But how exactly do you change an asteroid's trajectory?

Speaker 1 Armageddon offered one solution.

Speaker 6 Why don't we just send up 150 nuclear warheads and blast that rock apart? Terrible idea. Was I talking to you?

Speaker 1 The popular thing of what to do with an asteroid is that you would blow it up, right? Like that's...

Speaker 1 But is that what we want to do?

Speaker 4 So it turns out that parts of Armageddon aren't inaccurate.

Speaker 4 You basically have two choices. If an asteroid is coming towards you, you blow it up or you deflect it.
And in both cases...

Speaker 4 you could use a nuclear weapon. It would be a really horrifically powerful one.
but that's probably what you would use if you were if you were desperate. This is like a Hail Mary situation.

Speaker 1 And you'd have to be desperate because though there is some poetry in using the most destructive weapons we've ever created to save humanity, nuclear bombs come with extraordinary geopolitical complications and risk.

Speaker 1 For starters to get them into space, we have to get them off Earth.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no one wants a nuclear weapon to blow up in the sky. That would be bad.
I mean, the least bad version of it blows up on the launch pad. Again, not great.

Speaker 4 You don't want to like accidentally create like a dirty bomb on the launch pad.

Speaker 4 And honestly, a concern is if you try and destroy or deflect the asteroid with a nuclear weapon and it doesn't work, you've turned an asteroid into a radioactive asteroid.

Speaker 4 So like, I cannot think of a worse like screw-up in the history of humanity than turning an asteroid into a radioactive asteroid. That's plan like D, I'd say.

Speaker 1 So what is plan A through C then?

Speaker 4 There's a lot of of weird things in plan C.

Speaker 1 Tell me about like the paint.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I love this idea. I love how like it sounds so stupid, right? If you paint one side of an asteroid like in silvery white paint, it would reflect more sunlight.

Speaker 4 And because sunlight does give an asteroid a gentle nudge, you would be able to like push an asteroid off course. But this is, you'd need decades of time for this.

Speaker 1 And what are some of the other weird ones?

Speaker 4 One I quite like is basically the equivalent of, you know, know, like if there's a car chase and the police put out these like spiky

Speaker 4 like tire exploding things. It's kind of like that.
There's an idea that you would send a rocket out to meet the asteroid, but not get to it.

Speaker 4 You'd stop way in front of it.

Speaker 4 You'd drop these sort of roadblocks in a way, these big like tungsten rods to just set up this like roadblock and the asteroid would run into it and it would basically be cheese grated into pieces before it ever gets close to Earth.

Speaker 1 So we could nuke nuke an asteroid. We could give an asteroid a fresh coat of paint.
We could break an asteroid into pieces with metal roadblocks.

Speaker 1 But the best option of all is to punch an asteroid in the face with a spaceship.

Speaker 4 Plan A is always if you can, you would deflect it. That's what you want to do.
You basically ram into it. Not hard enough that it breaks.

Speaker 4 You don't want it to break into multiple city crushing size pieces. You don't want to turn a cannonball into a shotgun, basically.
That's that bad.

Speaker 4 You want to hit it just hard enough that you do push it back.

Speaker 1 And that's basically what they decided to test, right? Yeah.

Speaker 4 NASA reasonably decided, if we're going to do one planetary defense experiment first, let's go with this RAM a spacecraft into it and try and deflect it.

Speaker 4 The technology exists. Let's go for it.

Speaker 1 And so in 2017, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office announced this would be its first ever mission.

Speaker 1 It would identify an appropriately sized asteroid, build a spaceship, and then send it on a kamikaze mission to said asteroid to see if smashing into that asteroid might not just move it over a little bit.

Speaker 1 Basically, smash one thing into another and see what happens. It sounds straightforward, but this is literally rocket science.
And so it was not.

Speaker 4 NASA are very good at landing on things or orbiting things. You know what they've never tried to do? Smash a spacecraft right in the middle of an object that's tiny.

Speaker 4 I think someone said it's like if you're in JFK airport and you want to throw a dart to hit the center of a dartboard in Texas somewhere and you're blindfolded and you've never seen the target before and you throw it and it has to hit the bullseye.

Speaker 4 It's like it's like that.

Speaker 1 All moving at like hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.

Speaker 4 All moving

Speaker 4 tens of thousands of miles an hour. Yeah, yeah.
So like this is this is hard stuff.

Speaker 1 Fittingly, NASA named the mission DART. It is also a backronym that stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

Speaker 1 Double, because they decided the best way to accomplish the mission would be to target not one asteroid, but two.

Speaker 4 There are these asteroids called binaries. It operates the same way as the moon orbits in the Earth.

Speaker 4 You have a bigger asteroid that's kind of like Earth, and a smaller asteroid that's kind of like the moon.

Speaker 1 The virtue of using these binaries, as opposed to just one asteroid, is that if you hit the smaller one, there's no risk of you accidentally sending it flying towards Earth, because it's still bound to the bigger asteroid.

Speaker 1 And it's easy to measure how its orbit changes because you can just compare it to the bigger asteroid instead of something much further away in space.

Speaker 4 So they were looking for a binary asteroid system and they found a perfect one that they named Diddy Muss and Dimorphos. They both basically mean twin.
The bigger asteroid is like...

Speaker 4 It could destroy a large country if it hit Earth, sort of thing. It's quite big.
And the smaller asteroid, Dimorphos, that is like football stadium size, a bit bigger than that.

Speaker 4 It's exactly the size of asteroid you want to test to see if you can hit. So they were like, we're going to punch Dimorphos in the face really hard and see what happens.

Speaker 1 These twinned asteroids were never going to collide with Earth, but they were the exact right size for a productive dress rehearsal.

Speaker 1 And so NASA began working to get this asteroid punching mission off the ground.

Speaker 4 They had like

Speaker 4 maybe like five years to like come up with a concept of this, get all the parts, put it together, make sure it could launch on time, get the right target, you know, convince everyone it's still a good idea.

Speaker 1 How much did it cost?

Speaker 4 Yeah, so it cost $314 million, which sounds like a lot of money, but compared to almost any other mission that they've developed, it's nothing. It had to do a lot with very little.

Speaker 1 Ultimately, thousands of scientists and engineers got to work building a 1,200-pound vending machine-sized spacecraft that was going to have to fly about 7 million miles from Earth at roughly 14,000 miles per hour, all to hit a target just 530 feet in diameter.

Speaker 1 The craft had to essentially be able to fly itself because at the end of its journey, it would be so far from Earth there would be a 30-second lag time between it and mission control.

Speaker 1 And it was going to have to do something very hard at the end of its journey. Recognize an asteroid that scientists had never seen in detail themselves.

Speaker 4 The only reason they knew Dimorphos existed was because it was seen as like a tiny speck of light, a little smudge.

Speaker 4 Maybe it was bigger than they thought. They didn't know what shape it could be.

Speaker 1 NASA was programming the spacecraft to smash directly into the center of the asteroid.

Speaker 1 But in reality, so little was known about Dimorphos that the NASA team joked nervously about it being shaped like a doughnut. One dart would fly right through the middle of.

Speaker 1 And there would be no way to know if this was the case until the mission was all but over.

Speaker 4 It had to hit exactly perfectly on a bullseye, score a perfect 10 first time, and no one had ever attempted this in the history of humanity. So, yeah, there was a lot of pressure on it working.

Speaker 1 In the days leading up to the launch, the team watched a double feature of Armageddon and Deep Impact to prepare for a mission that to this point had only been attempted in the movies.

Speaker 1 And NASA itself embraced the drama on NASA TV.

Speaker 11 In a galaxy where asteroids have hummeled planets for billions of years,

Speaker 11 now one planet strikes back.

Speaker 1 November 24th, 2021 was DART launch day, with the ship taking off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California.

Speaker 15 Overnight tonight, NASA is going to launch the double asteroid redirection test.

Speaker 16 It's the first time scientists are attempting such an experiment.

Speaker 1 In addition to being covered in the news, the launch was also broadcast live.

Speaker 17 At the moment, everything is still go for launch, no red flags, everything looking right on course.

Speaker 2 NASA C is go.

Speaker 11 SMA?

Speaker 18 SMA is go.

Speaker 1 The DART scientists and engineers knew that this was their opportunity to prove the value of investing in planetary defense.

Speaker 1 If the mission failed, it was likely the whole thing would be considered a waste of resources, not to be attempted again anytime soon.

Speaker 7 T minus 20 seconds.

Speaker 12 T minus 15.

Speaker 4 Like, this could just miss. Like, if this doesn't work, are people going to believe that this is worth doing?

Speaker 4 And to some extent, the future safety of the planet rested on this mission, so they were nervous.

Speaker 1 At 10:21 p.m. Pacific time,

Speaker 1 DART launched on the back of a rocket. One.

Speaker 17 And lift off of the Falcon 9 and DART on NASA's first planetary defense test to intentionally crash into an asteroid.

Speaker 4 A lot of these scientists and engineers were just whooping and cheering and then suddenly realizing that they had no control over it anymore.

Speaker 1 For the next 10 months, the DART team could do little more than watch and wait.

Speaker 4 So, you know, it wasn't a science mission. It was a test of can we save the planet?

Speaker 1 Can we?

Speaker 1 After the break.

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Speaker 1 On September 26th, 2022, 10 months after it had launched, the DART spacecraft was finally closing in on its destination.

Speaker 17 We are monitoring a live situation right now. NASA is about to intentionally crash a spacecraft into an asteroid.

Speaker 4 DART was due to die at 7 p.m. ish.

Speaker 1 That day, Rob and George Andrews arrived at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, the site of mission control.

Speaker 1 There were hundreds of people gathered in auditoriums there, friends and family of NASA scientists and engineers.

Speaker 1 Bill Nye, the science guy, was also there, And one of those slightly terrifying robot dogs, too.

Speaker 4 It was like a festival atmosphere. They were like not 100% sure it was going to hit, but they were like ready to celebrate.
There was a mission control room where everyone looked really nervous.

Speaker 1 What does it physically look like? I mean, does it look like, like, I'm literally just imagining, we've all seen like Apollo 13 and like its mission control. What did it actually look like?

Speaker 4 Yeah, so the mission control, the central room of mission control, like honestly, it really looked a lot like the dashboard of an X-Wing in Star Wars.

Speaker 4 Like all these like weird retro graphics, things bleeping. There's just like numbers everywhere.
That's what it looks like.

Speaker 1 All the bleeps and beeps and lights and graphics and numbers were giving the team information about Dart, but they couldn't actually control Dart. It was too far away.

Speaker 1 They were watching two, all of which was captured by NASA TV.

Speaker 17 And tonight, we're following the real-time journey of the DART spacecraft and its planned collision with asteroid dimorphos.

Speaker 4 The atmosphere kept veering from like really excitable to really tense when they had to announce like a key milestone.

Speaker 21 You could hear a pin drop right now as we're coming up on the critical 20-minute mark from impact. The team is hyper-focused.

Speaker 17 Keep an eye on the Dart cam in the lower left-hand corner of your screen.

Speaker 1 The Dart cam was a live stream from the Dart spacecraft's own camera. At first, all it showed was the big black of the universe with just one tiny speck in the middle.

Speaker 4 For a while, like people couldn't tell if a speck of dust was on the screen or or if it was dimorphos because it was so tiny, you know.

Speaker 4 And because these things are moving so quickly, this small asteroid, the target, went from a silvery speck to like a complete world in like minutes.

Speaker 22 Starting to see dimorphos start to come into view there. You can see it starting to take shape.

Speaker 4 It was this like silvery world of boulders and rocks. And it looked like...
the most space age potato i've ever seen it's amazing guys oh my goodness look at that.

Speaker 18 Unbelievable. Yeah.

Speaker 22 Looks to me like we're headed straight in.

Speaker 1 Yeah, were you worried?

Speaker 4 I was really nervous. I was just watching the faces of the engineers like squeezing all the blood out of their limbs.
They were so nervous.

Speaker 22 Oh boy, we're getting close.

Speaker 4 I saw someone crush a coffee cup in their hands, like getting coffee all over them. I've never heard scientists swear more in my life.

Speaker 4 It was a crazy thing to see, honestly, right up until the very last seconds. You just think, maybe it'll miss.

Speaker 18 Oh my goodness, it's seven, six,

Speaker 4 all you could see was this asteroid bloom ever larger on the screen.

Speaker 21 What?

Speaker 4 And then the screen went bright red, which is a very jarring colour.

Speaker 3 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Aww,

Speaker 4 and people started cheering.

Speaker 18 And we have impact.

Speaker 4 after there was just this like increasing roar of people crying and high-fiving and people like I've never met just like fist bumping me.

Speaker 4 It was it honestly was it was one of the most moving things I've ever seen, not just in my career, but just in my whole life, genuinely. It was incredible.

Speaker 1 Robin even saw a number of scientists, their arms thrown around each other's shoulders, tipsily wandering out of a room, singing.

Speaker 4 And they were just, you know, don't you want to miss it.

Speaker 4 And it was just, I was like, yes.

Speaker 1 Shortly after, they got further confirmation that the mission had worked to at least some extent when they heard from astronomers in South Africa, the first to witness DART's impact by telescope.

Speaker 4 On their screens, there was this like bright light. It looked like an explosion, honestly, had happened.

Speaker 4 It was so clear that not only had they hit it, but the spacecraft had just been vaporized and debris of some sort was flying off the asteroid. So they're like, oh, we didn't just hit it.

Speaker 4 We hit it hard, like almost surprisingly hard. Like they were like, we've really rung its bells.

Speaker 1 It took a few weeks to collect and process additional observations. But when they did, it ultimately confirmed the best possible news.

Speaker 4 NASA's DART mission worked.

Speaker 1 It's the first time it's ever been done.

Speaker 5 Streaking toward its asteroid target, then impact.

Speaker 4 We showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of this planet. This is a watershed moment for humanity.

Speaker 4 They hit it

Speaker 4 perfectly exactly where they said they were going to within a meter or something, show-offs.

Speaker 4 And they had hit it so hard that its orbit shrank, which meant they knocked Dimorphos closer to the bigger asteroid Didymos.

Speaker 1 And that was the key thing. They hit an asteroid hard enough to change its orbit.
And that means faced with a dangerous asteroid, a city killer coming towards Earth, we could do it again.

Speaker 1 In the coming years, China is going to try their hand at this.

Speaker 1 And NASA is now launching a giant camera up into space to make sure we can see every last potential city killer and make sure they are not on target for Earth.

Speaker 4 By the 2040s, we'll know for a century if Earth's in danger of this sort of disaster or not. That's an amazing thing.
That's like...

Speaker 4 That is like magic to me. For the history of the entire planet and our species, this this has been a fundamental problem that we would never have any chance of knowing it was there or doing anything.

Speaker 4 And within

Speaker 4 like a few decades, they've identified the problem and would have managed to cancel it out. Like that, that will never happen with almost anything else.

Speaker 4 To remove one bit of existential dread completely from people's lives is incredible.

Speaker 1 There are a lot of scary problems out there, but today you can take heart at Houston. we won't have this problem anymore.

Speaker 1 Would you say it's, is it a feel-good story?

Speaker 4 It's absolutely a feel-good story.

Speaker 4 It's a feel-good story that always happens to be true.

Speaker 1 This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at sleep.com. This episode was written and produced by Sophie Codner.

Speaker 1 It was edited by me and Evan Chung. Decodering is produced by me, Evan, Max Friedman, and Katie Shepard with help from Sophie.
Derek John is executive producer.

Speaker 1 Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

Speaker 1 I want to tell you to go out and please buy Robin's very great book, How to Kill an Asteroid, which contains so much more fun and delightful and astounding information about the stuff going on in space and NASA than we possibly could have included here.

Speaker 1 And if you aren't already a Slate Plus member, I want to strongly encourage you to become one.

Speaker 1 You can subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or you can visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen.

Speaker 1 We're going to be releasing bonus episodes regularly, including answers to your mailbag questions. So please sign up now.

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Speaker 1 We'll see you in two weeks.

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