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I've always liked asteroids.

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There's so much we don't know about them that it's really exciting to me

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that we're finding out about the ways they've developed, the way they move, the way their orbits change.

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I'm Andy Rivkin and I study how the orbits of asteroids change after we hit them with spacecraft.

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NASA is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid.

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The DART mission is NASA's first test of a planetary defense technique called kinetic impactor.

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And it's going to smash itself into the moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits the asteroid Didymos,

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in order to change Dimorphos' orbit and show that we can deflect incoming asteroids if we need to.

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I lead a group of astronomers that are going to measure

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how much DART changed Dimorphos' orbit using ground-based telescopes all over the world.

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This is an animation.

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You can see Didymos and Dimorphos as one point of light.

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These curves show the brightness change due to Dimorphos moving in front of and behind Didymos.

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We can tell how quickly Dimorphos is moving around Didymos.

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We make these measurements before DART arrives

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and then this is the same technique that we'll use after the impact to determine how much we've changed the orbit by.

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I make music.

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A lot of it as you might imagine has nothing to do with science, but a lot of it does.

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You know I'm not immune to the charms of writing a gimmicky science song every once in a while.

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So um, I did write a song about DART.

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The mission goes by the name of DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

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And just one flick should do the trick.

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A lot of scientists definitely have a creative side.

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A lot of us write. A lot of us are in bands. There's a lot who paint.

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And I think having that creative part of your brain definitely helps in science just as much as it does in art.