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In case there was an asteroid coming towards Earth and you're there.

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You can actually stop it.

3
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I mean, that's kind of fantastic.

4
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NASA is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid.

5
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What? You think science fiction. But this is real.

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Never in my life would I have thought I would take a couple hundred million dollar spacecraft and crash it into an asteroid.

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My name is Michelle Chen.

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I'm Elena Adams.

9
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My name is Kelly Fast.

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I'm Andy Rivkin.

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I'm Justyna Surowiec and I help tell the story of the DART mission.

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I'm a planetary defender.

13
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And I study how the orbits of asteroids change after we hit them with spacecraft.

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My job is primarily to make sure all the systems on the spacecraft work together.

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

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DART is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

17
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It's just a spacecraft that is going to go and smack an asteroid,

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the moonlet Dimorphos which orbits the asteroid Didymos,

19
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and see if we can change its trajectory just a little bit.

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in order to show that we can deflect incoming asteroids if we need to.

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DART will only be changing the period of the orbit of Dimorphos by a tiny amount.

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But in space, just a little bit is just enough to make an asteroid actually miss us

23
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in the event that an asteroid is discovered well ahead of time before it might impact Earth.

24
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Behind me, you see the spacecraft.

25
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It's really cool to see it coming together in real life.

26
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It is fantastic to see it in real life.

27
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To see it turn from ideas into real pieces that are going to go into space.

28
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The solar arrays will actually roll out to 28 feet in length.

29
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Once the solar arrays are deployed, it's going to be the size of a school bus.

30
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As the solar array opens out, it's going to swing out in this direction.

31
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The asteroid's only two football fields in size.

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We're flying at over six kilometers a second.

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Thirty days out, we see one pixel on our field of view.

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

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About four hours out, our spacecraft becomes autonomous.

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And then that's where everything gets really exciting.

37
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And you actually are seeing impact.

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We're super excited and nervous as well.

39
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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.

40
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Go DART!

41
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The dinosaurs are made completely extinct by an asteroid impact so many years ago.