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Episode: Decoder Ring: A Feel-Good Story About the End of the World

Author: Slate Podcasts
Duration: 00:43:36

Episode Shownotes

The fear that the Earth could be destroyed by a killer asteroid is an anxiety that pops up all the time in fiction and is grounded in fact. But funnily enough—actually being pancaked by a giant space rock? Not something you need to spend a whole lot of time worrying

about! And that’s because a bunch of NASA scientists and engineers are already worried about it for us. In this episode, science journalist Dr. Robin George Andrews tells us the story of NASA’s first-ever mission to defend the planet, which is the subject of his new book, How to Kill an Asteroid. This episode was written and produced by Sofie Kodner. It was edited by Willa Paskin and Evan Chung. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Evan Chung, Max Freedman and Katie Shepherd, with help from Sofie Kodner. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected] Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In the episode titled 'A Feel-Good Story About the End of the World,' science journalist Dr. Robin George Andrews discusses NASA's ongoing mission to protect Earth from asteroid threats, which gained urgency after the Chelyabinsk event in 2013. He outlines the science behind asteroids, their potential for destruction, and the historical context that has shaped concerns about 'city killers.' The episode also details NASA's Strategic initiatives, including the Planetary Defense Coordination Office and the DART mission, which successfully demonstrated asteroid deflection by altering Dimorphos's orbit, highlighting humanity's capability to safeguard the planet against cosmic dangers.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Decoder Ring: A Feel-Good Story About the End of the World) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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00:00:47 Speaker_01
It was a crisp winter's day, pretty cold out, nice blue sky.

00:00:52 Speaker_10
Dr. Robin George Andrews is a trained scientist turned author and science writer.

00:00:56 Speaker_01
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.

00:01:07 Speaker_10
Chelyabinsk is the sleepy administrative capital of a region in southwestern Russia. 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.

00:01:20 Speaker_10
Now this light, streaking across its sky, was getting brighter and brighter.

00:01:25 Speaker_01
And then a large, deafening explosion. The ground lit up red and white. People were knocked off their feet. Eardrums would be ringing. It would have thudded on your chest like if you fell off a bridge into some water or something.

00:01:45 Speaker_01
Immediately terrifying.

00:01:47 Speaker_10
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. Over a thousand people were injured.

00:02:01 Speaker_10
And it made news all over the world.

00:02:04 Speaker_05
It looked like a scene from a movie, but it was all too real.

00:02:07 Speaker_14
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.

00:02:15 Speaker_01
It basically exploded with the force of like a non-radioactive nuclear weapon. It was a huge explosion.

00:02:21 Speaker_10
And what, what was it?

00:02:23 Speaker_01
It was a very tiny asteroid.

00:02:28 Speaker_10
Like how tiny?

00:02:30 Speaker_01
about the length of a bowling alley, like no bigger than 60 feet, which is space is very small.

00:02:37 Speaker_10
And we had no idea it was coming, right? Nope.

00:02:40 Speaker_01
No one saw it. It was too small.

00:02:43 Speaker_10
This small asteroid was nevertheless the most destructive one to hit the planet in over a century. And it was almost much worse. We were lucky the asteroid exploded in the sky before it hit the ground.

00:02:56 Speaker_10
We were also lucky it wasn't the length of two bowling alleys.

00:03:01 Speaker_01
Like, if Charlie Vincent's asteroid was twice as big, and it hit that city, that city would be in pieces.

00:03:06 Speaker_10
And you said, like, it's a tiny asteroid? Like, what's a normal-sized asteroid, and what do they do?

00:03:12 Speaker_01
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.

00:03:25 Speaker_10
And how many people, like, if it hit a city, would they be estimated to kill?

00:03:29 Speaker_01
Hundreds of thousands to tens of millions, depending on where it hits, yeah.

00:03:32 Speaker_01
And, like, immediately, it would be coming in so fast, and it would be so massive, that if it hit a city, there would be a city ten seconds before, and then afterwards, there would not be a city. It would eviscerate it.

00:03:44 Speaker_01
So, these asteroids are appropriately known as city killers.

00:03:50 Speaker_10
And they're normal.

00:03:51 Speaker_01
That's normal.

00:03:53 Speaker_10
These normal-sized city killers are hard to see, too. And there are way more of them floating around out there than anyone could like.

00:04:03 Speaker_01
There's like a few tens of thousands of them orbiting near Earth. If you live to 100 years old, there's like a 1 in 200 chance of a city killer hitting somewhere random on Earth during your lifetime. Now, that's not that high.

00:04:16 Speaker_11
That's not that low, man.

00:04:19 Speaker_01
That's not that low. That's not that low.

00:04:20 Speaker_11
So, like, how worried about this should I be? I'm getting worried about this, just talking to you about it.

00:04:24 Speaker_01
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.

00:04:42 Speaker_10
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. 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.

00:04:59 Speaker_10
But funnily enough, actually being pancaked by a giant asteroid? Not something you need to spend a whole lot of time worrying about. And that's because a bunch of experts and scientists are already worried about it for us.

00:05:14 Speaker_10
A couple of years ago, Dr. Robin George Andrews began following exactly these people as they attempted to do the unheard of, physically alter outer space.

00:05:26 Speaker_10
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.

00:05:41 Speaker_10
So today on Decoder Ring, if an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, what are we going to do about it? This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You choose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice.

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00:08:00 Speaker_10
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.

00:08:13 Speaker_11
What is an asteroid?

00:08:15 Speaker_01
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. There are millions of them between Mars and Jupiter.

00:08:27 Speaker_01
That's where most of the asteroids hang out. It's just the ones that don't hang out there that are the problem.

00:08:33 Speaker_10
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.

00:08:44 Speaker_01
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. If you look up on a dark, clear night, you can often see a shooting star.

00:08:55 Speaker_01
That's an asteroid, basically.

00:09:00 Speaker_10
So when do we put together that those things we've been seeing in the sky for millennia were actually asteroids?

00:09:06 Speaker_01
So the first asteroid was discovered only about 200 years ago, so in 1801. Surprisingly recent. Compared to things like planets and moons, they are just so much harder to see. They don't stay in the same part of space often, and they're just smaller.

00:09:21 Speaker_10
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.

00:09:31 Speaker_10
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.

00:09:42 Speaker_01
Scientists started to really get an idea that, like, OK, things in space can crash into other things really fast, and we're in space, so yikes.

00:09:52 Speaker_10
So, like, this is when we started to worry about asteroids for real?

00:09:56 Speaker_01
I think, honestly, even then, it was still, like, fantastical.

00:10:00 Speaker_03
That is our target, the asteroid's weakest point.

00:10:04 Speaker_10
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.

00:10:14 Speaker_04
If we don't get to that deflection point in time, everyone on this planet will die.

00:10:19 Speaker_10
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.

00:10:30 Speaker_15
That meteor is five miles wide and it's definitely going to hit us.

00:10:37 Speaker_10
So when did we realize asteroids aren't just like a version of the Death Star, like something preposterous, but something we actually have to worry about?

00:10:44 Speaker_01
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. So that was weird. Where did they go?

00:11:00 Speaker_10
Today, most people agree that a giant asteroid did the dinosaurs in, but that idea wasn't articulated until 1980.

00:11:07 Speaker_10
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 dinosaurs' disappearance.

00:11:21 Speaker_01
Iridium is like a weird element that you you get on Earth, but you really you get it from asteroids, basically. So they were like, there's probably an asteroid killed them.

00:11:31 Speaker_01
But obviously, if you make a claim like that, you have to find the impact crater like it would have to be massive.

00:11:35 Speaker_10
And it turned out someone had already done that. They just didn't realize what it was.

00:11:41 Speaker_01
This petrochemical company found it by mistake, by accident 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. You know, whatever.

00:11:55 Speaker_01
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 ground?

00:12:04 Speaker_01
And so when the dots were connected, it was like the late 80s, early 90s, that people are like, OK, we're 90% sure that an asteroid six miles wide crashed into the ground, created a firestorm, created earthquakes for days, burned the skies, blacked out the skies, caused this mass extinction kind of thing.

00:12:20 Speaker_10
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. In the early 90s, he proposed that the military invest in protecting the globe from asteroids.

00:12:35 Speaker_10
But even then, the very idea was laughed out of the room.

00:12:39 Speaker_01
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. And then what happened?

00:12:49 Speaker_01
And then a comet big enough to kill everyone on the planet many times over crashed into Jupiter.

00:12:56 Speaker_10
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.

00:13:07 Speaker_10
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.

00:13:21 Speaker_01
Each fragment punched a hole deep into Jupiter's clouds. Any of those pieces, if they hit Earth, it was so massive and so fast, it would have killed everyone on the planet. When it crashed back down, it left a bruise the size of the Earth.

00:13:41 Speaker_01
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. Maybe we should look out for these things.

00:13:56 Speaker_10
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.

00:14:11 Speaker_02
What is this thing? It's what we call a global killer. The end of mankind. Nothing would survive, not even bacteria.

00:14:22 Speaker_10
The star of Michael Bay's 1998 disaster movie Armageddon is a freakishly large asteroid.

00:14:31 Speaker_02
How big are we talking? Sir, our best estimate is 97.6 billion. It's the size of Texas, Mr. President.

00:14:37 Speaker_01
I love that it's the size of Texas. It's like one of the biggest asteroids ever discovered. Only 18 days before it's going to hit the planet. Embarrassingly short notice.

00:14:47 Speaker_10
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.

00:15:01 Speaker_04
All they gotta do is drill? That's it. No spacewalking, no crazy astronaut stuff? Just drill.

00:15:08 Speaker_10
The movie grossed over $550 million, and a song from its soundtrack, Aerosmith's Don't Wanna Miss a Thing, debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

00:15:26 Speaker_10
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.

00:15:37 Speaker_07
Now, we get hit all the time by rocks and meteors, some of them the size of cars, some no bigger than your hand. This comet is larger than Mount Everest.

00:15:48 Speaker_10
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.

00:15:57 Speaker_01
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. So at that point, the astronomy community and Congress were like,

00:16:13 Speaker_01
could that happen to Earth? And everyone said, yep, that could if we just wait and do nothing. So then what happened? In 1998, Congress legally required NASA to find 90% or more of what they would call planet killers.

00:16:28 Speaker_01
Find all of them and make sure they're not heading towards us.

00:16:31 Speaker_10
Planet killers, as their name suggests, are bigger and more dangerous than city killers. But they're also easier to see. In asking NASA to locate them, Congress was mandating planetary defense—that's what it's called—for the first time.

00:16:48 Speaker_10
But this is also all the planetary defense Congress funded. NASA's only task when it came to asteroids was finding the very biggest ones.

00:16:59 Speaker_01
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. Did they do it? They did. Basically, they have now found 90 percent of all of the planet killers.

00:17:11 Speaker_10
And they might be resting on their laurels right now, if not for something we've already told you about.

00:17:19 Speaker_01
It 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.

00:17:28 Speaker_10
After Chelyabinsk, NASA and its European and Japanese counterparts started to take planetary defense more seriously. NASA got a bigger budget for it.

00:17:38 Speaker_10
And while they kept looking for asteroids on a collision course with Earth, they also started to ask a much more difficult question. What do we do if we find one?

00:17:50 Speaker_01
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. No biggie.

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That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash decoder. If a dangerous asteroid is barreling towards Earth, it would be really helpful if we could move it out of the way.

00:21:09 Speaker_10
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. But how exactly do you change an asteroid's trajectory?

00:21:29 Speaker_10
Armageddon offered one solution.

00:21:31 Speaker_06
Why don't we just send up 150 nuclear warheads and blast that rock apart? Terrible idea. Was I talking to you?

00:21:39 Speaker_10
The popular thing of what to do with an asteroid is that you would blow it up, right? Yeah. But is that what we want to do?

00:21:48 Speaker_01
So it turns out that parts of Armageddon aren't inaccurate. You basically have two choices if an asteroid is coming towards you. You blow it up or you deflect it. And in both cases, you could use a nuclear weapon.

00:22:02 Speaker_01
It would be a really horrifically powerful one. But that's probably what you would use if you were desperate. This is like a Hail Mary situation.

00:22:11 Speaker_10
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.

00:22:26 Speaker_10
For starters, to get them into space, we have to get them off Earth.

00:22:31 Speaker_01
yeah no one wants a nuclear weapon to blow up in the sky that would be bad i mean but the least bad version it blows up on the launch pad again not great you don't want to like accidentally create like a dirty bomb on the launch pad 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 so like

00:22:54 Speaker_01
I cannot think of a worse screw-up in the history of humanity than turning an asteroid into a radioactive asteroid. That's plan D, I'd say.

00:23:03 Speaker_11
So what is plan A through C then?

00:23:05 Speaker_01
There's a lot of weird things in plan C. Tell me about, like, the paint. Yeah, I love this idea. I love how, like, it sounds so stupid, right?

00:23:13 Speaker_01
If you paint one side of an asteroid, like, in silvery white paint, it would reflect more sunlight, 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.

00:23:31 Speaker_01
And what are some of the other weird ones? One I quite like is basically the equivalent of, you know, like, if there's a car chase and the police put out these, like, spiky, like, tire-exploding things. It's kind of like that.

00:23:43 Speaker_01
There's an idea that you would send a rocket out to meet the asteroid, but not get to it. You'd stop way in front of it.

00:23:50 Speaker_01
You'd drop these sort of roadblocks in the 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.

00:24:05 Speaker_10
So we could nuke an asteroid. We could give an asteroid a fresh coat of paint. We could break an asteroid into pieces with metal roadblocks. But the best option of all is to punch an asteroid in the face with a spaceship.

00:24:19 Speaker_01
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. You don't want it to break into multiple city-crushing-sized pieces.

00:24:31 Speaker_01
You don't want to turn a cannonball into a shotgun, basically. That's bad. You want to hit it just hard enough that you do push it back.

00:24:38 Speaker_10
And that's basically what they decided to test, right?

00:24:41 Speaker_01
Yeah. NASA reasonably decided, if we're going to do one planetary defense experiment first, let's go with this ram of spacecraft into it and try and deflect it. The technology exists. Let's go for it.

00:24:53 Speaker_10
And so in 2017, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office announced this would be its first ever mission.

00:25:00 Speaker_10
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.

00:25:13 Speaker_10
Basically, smash one thing into another and see what happens. It sounds straightforward, but this is literally rocket science. And so it was not.

00:25:25 Speaker_01
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.

00:25:34 Speaker_01
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.

00:25:47 Speaker_01
It's like that.

00:25:48 Speaker_11
All moving at like hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.

00:25:50 Speaker_01
All moving at tens of thousands of miles an hour. Yeah, yeah. So this is hard stuff.

00:25:56 Speaker_10
Fittingly, NASA named the mission DART. It is also a backronym that stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Double because they decided the best way to accomplish the mission would be to target not one asteroid, but two.

00:26:15 Speaker_01
There are these asteroids called binaries. It operates the same way as the Moon orbits in the Earth. You have a bigger asteroid that's kind of like Earth and a smaller asteroid that's kind of like the Moon.

00:26:23 Speaker_10
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.

00:26:37 Speaker_10
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.

00:26:45 Speaker_01
So they were looking for a binary asteroid system, and they found a perfect one that they named Didymos and Dimorphos. They both basically mean twin. The bigger asteroid is like it could destroy a large country if it hit Earth sort of thing.

00:27:01 Speaker_01
It's quite big. And the smaller asteroid, Dimorphos, that is like football stadium size, a bit bigger than that. 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

00:27:13 Speaker_01
punch dimorphism in the face really hard and see what happens.

00:27:17 Speaker_10
These twinned asteroids were never going to collide with Earth, but they were the exact right size for a productive dress rehearsal. And so NASA began working to get this asteroid punching mission off the ground.

00:27:32 Speaker_01
They had like 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.

00:27:45 Speaker_11
How much did it cost?

00:27:46 Speaker_01
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.

00:27:59 Speaker_10
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.

00:28:20 Speaker_10
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.

00:28:32 Speaker_10
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.

00:28:41 Speaker_01
The only reason they knew Dimorphos existed was because it was seen as like a tiny speck of light, a little smudge. Maybe it was bigger than they thought. They didn't know what shape it could be.

00:28:52 Speaker_10
NASA was programming the spacecraft to smash directly into the center of the asteroid. But in reality, so little was known about Dimorphos that the NASA team joked nervously about it being shaped like a donut.

00:29:05 Speaker_10
One dart would fly right through the middle of. And there would be no way to know if this was the case until the mission was all but over.

00:29:13 Speaker_01
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.

00:29:27 Speaker_10
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. And NASA itself embraced the drama on NASA TV.

00:29:42 Speaker_14
In a galaxy where asteroids have pummeled planets for billions of years, now one planet strikes back.

00:29:53 Speaker_10
November 24th, 2021 was DART launch day, with the ship taking off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California.

00:30:03 Speaker_09
Overnight tonight, NASA is going to launch the double asteroid redirection test. A rare mission to crash into an asteroid.

00:30:11 Speaker_10
It's the first time scientists are attempting such an experiment. In addition to being covered in the news, the launch was also broadcast live. Well, at the moment, everything is still go for launch. No red flags, everything looking right on course.

00:30:25 Speaker_07
NASA CE is go. SMA?

00:30:28 Speaker_10
SMA is go. The DART scientists and engineers knew that this was their opportunity to prove the value of investing in planetary defense.

00:30:37 Speaker_10
If the mission failed, it was likely the whole thing would be considered a waste of resources, not to be attempted again anytime soon.

00:30:46 Speaker_00
T-minus 20 seconds.

00:30:51 Speaker_01
Like, this could just miss. Like, if this doesn't work, are people going to believe that this is worth doing? And to some extent, the future safety of the planet rested on this mission, so they were nervous.

00:31:04 Speaker_10
At 10.21 p.m. Pacific time, DART launched on the back of a rocket.

00:31:12 Speaker_08
And liftoff of the Falcon 9 and DART on NASA's first planetary defense test to intentionally crash into an asteroid.

00:31:22 Speaker_01
A lot of the scientists and engineers were just whooping and cheering and then suddenly realizing that they had no control over it anymore.

00:31:29 Speaker_10
For the next 10 months, the DART team could do little more than watch and wait.

00:31:34 Speaker_01
You know, it wasn't a science mission. It was a test of can we save the planet?

00:31:38 Speaker_10
Can we? After the break. Apple Card is the perfect card for your holiday shopping. You can apply on your iPhone in minutes and start using it right away.

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00:32:37 Speaker_10
That's what it feels like when you discover Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for $15 a month when you purchase a three-month plan. Slate's president, Charlie Kammerer, is using Mint Mobile, and he's on the $15-a-month deal.

00:32:51 Speaker_10
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00:33:30 Speaker_10
Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com slash decoder ring. $45 upfront payment required, which is equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on a limited plan.

00:33:49 Speaker_10
Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. On September 26th, 2022, 10 months after it had launched, the DART spacecraft was finally closing in on its destination.

00:34:11 Speaker_08
We are monitoring a live situation right now. NASA is about to intentionally crash a spacecraft into an asteroid.

00:34:18 Speaker_01
DART was due to die at 7 p.m. ish.

00:34:22 Speaker_10
That day, Rob and George Andrews arrived at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, the site of Mission Control. There were hundreds of people gathered in auditoriums there, friends and family of NASA scientists and engineers.

00:34:36 Speaker_10
Bill Nye, the science guy, was also there, and one of those slightly terrifying robot dogs, too.

00:34:42 Speaker_01
It was like a festival atmosphere. They were, like, not 100 percent sure it was going to hit, but they were, like, ready to celebrate. There was a Mission Control room where everyone looked really nervous.

00:34:51 Speaker_10
What does it physically look like? I'm literally just imagining we've all seen Apollo 13 and its mission control. What did it actually look like?

00:34:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, so the mission control, the central room of mission control, honestly, it really looked a lot like the dashboard of an X-Wing in Star Wars. All these weird retro graphics, things bleeping. There's just numbers everywhere.

00:35:13 Speaker_01
That's what it looks like.

00:35:15 Speaker_10
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. They were watching two, all of which was captured by NASA TV.

00:35:30 Speaker_09
And tonight we're following the real-time journey of the DART spacecraft and its planned collision with asteroid Dimorphos.

00:35:37 Speaker_01
The atmosphere kept veering from like really excitable to really tense when they had to announce like a key milestone.

00:35:44 Speaker_00
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.

00:35:50 Speaker_09
Keep an eye on the DART cam in the lower left-hand corner of your screen.

00:35:55 Speaker_10
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.

00:36:05 Speaker_01
For a while, people couldn't tell if a speck of dust was on the screen or if it was dimorphous because it was so tiny.

00:36:11 Speaker_01
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.

00:36:21 Speaker_05
Starting to see Dimorphis start to come into view there. You can see it starting to take shape.

00:36:25 Speaker_01
It was this, like, silvery world of boulders and rocks. And it looked like the most space-age potato I've ever seen.

00:36:35 Speaker_05
It's amazing, guys. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. Unbelievable. Yeah. Looks to me like we're headed straight in.

00:36:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, were you worried? 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. Boy, we're getting close.

00:36:58 Speaker_01
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. It was a crazy thing to see, honestly, right up until the very last second. You just think, maybe it'll miss.

00:37:13 Speaker_09
Oh my goodness.

00:37:19 Speaker_01
All you could see was this asteroid bloom ever larger on the screen. And then the screen went bright red, which is a very jarring colour.

00:37:29 Speaker_12
Oh, wow.

00:37:30 Speaker_01
Awaiting visual confirmation. And people started cheering.

00:37:34 Speaker_13
And we have impact.

00:37:38 Speaker_01
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.

00:37:48 Speaker_01
It was honestly 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.

00:37:57 Speaker_10
Robin even saw a number of scientists, their arms thrown around each other's shoulders, tipsily wandering out of a room, singing.

00:38:05 Speaker_00
And they were just, you know, don't wanna miss this. And it was just, I was like, yes!

00:38:16 Speaker_10
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.

00:38:27 Speaker_01
on their screens. There was this bright light. It looked like an explosion, honestly, had happened. 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.

00:38:42 Speaker_01
So they're like, oh, we didn't just hit it. We hit it hard, almost surprisingly hard. They were like, we've really rung its bell.

00:38:50 Speaker_10
It took a few weeks to collect and process additional observations. But when they did, it ultimately confirmed the best possible news.

00:38:58 Speaker_14
NASA's DART mission worked.

00:39:00 Speaker_00
It's the first time it's ever been done. Streaking toward its asteroid target, then impact.

00:39:05 Speaker_15
We showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of this planet. This is a watershed moment for humanity.

00:39:15 Speaker_01
They hit it. exactly where they said they were going to, within a meter or something, show offs. And they had hit it so hard that its orbit shrank, which meant they knocked Dimorphos closer to the bigger asteroid Didymos.

00:39:30 Speaker_10
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. In the coming years, China is going to try their hand at this.

00:39:45 Speaker_10
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.

00:39:56 Speaker_01
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. That is like magic to me.

00:40:05 Speaker_01
For the history of the entire planet and our species, this has been a fundamental problem that we would never have any chance of knowing it was there or doing anything.

00:40:13 Speaker_01
And within a few decades, they've identified the problem and would have managed to cancel it out. That will never happen with almost anything else. To remove one bit of existential dread completely from people's lives is incredible.

00:40:32 Speaker_10
There are a lot of scary problems out there. But today, you can take heart that Houston, we won't have this problem anymore. Would you say, is it a feel-good story?

00:40:44 Speaker_01
It's absolutely a feel-good story. It's a feel-good story that also happens to be true.

00:41:01 Speaker_10
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoderring at slate dot com. This episode was written and produced by Sophie Codner. It was edited by me and Evan Chung.

00:41:15 Speaker_10
Decoder Ring is produced by me, Evan, Max Friedman and Katie Shepard with help from Sophie. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

00:41:26 Speaker_10
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.

00:41:42 Speaker_10
And if you aren't already a Slate Plus member, I want to strongly encourage you to become one. You can subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page.

00:41:55 Speaker_10
Or you can visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen. We're going to be releasing bonus episodes regularly, including answers to your mailbag questions. So please sign up now.

00:42:10 Speaker_10
Slate Plus members also get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads, and you'll get unlimited access to Slate's website, too.

00:42:18 Speaker_10
Again, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to sign up.

00:42:28 Speaker_10
If you haven't yet, besides signing up for Slate Plus, I would also love you to please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. We'll see you in two weeks.