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

Summary

Podcast Summary: Slow Burn – Decoder Ring: A Feel-Good Story About the End of the World

Hosts: Willa Paskin & Dr. Robin George Andrews

In this compelling episode of Decoder Ring, hosts Willa Paskin and Dr. Robin George Andrews delve into the fascinating and often misunderstood topic of asteroid threats to Earth. Through detailed discussions and expert insights, they explore the history, science, and humanity behind planetary defense efforts, culminating in the groundbreaking DART mission.

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1. The Chelyabinsk Event: A Wake-Up Call

The episode opens with a vivid recounting of the Chelyabinsk meteor event that occurred on February 15, 2013. Dr. Robin George Andrews sets the scene:

"It was a crisp winter's day. Pretty cold out, nice blue sky." [01:18]

Suddenly, a bright white light streaks across the sky, resembling a missile, followed by a deafening explosion that wreaks havoc across Chelyabinsk and surrounding areas. Over a thousand people are injured, and the event garners global attention.

Residents panicked, fearing a nuclear attack or alien invasion, when in reality, it was a small asteroid—only about 60 feet in diameter—that exploded in the atmosphere. Dr. Andrews emphasizes the asteroid's destructive potential:

"It was a very tiny asteroid... the most destructive one to hit the planet in over a century." [03:11]

2. Understanding Asteroids: From Trash to Threats

Dr. Andrews explains that asteroids are remnants from the solar system's formation, primarily located between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt. However, some stray towards Earth, posing significant threats:

"Earth is at the end of a shooting gallery." [09:15]

Although most asteroids are small and often burn up upon entering Earth's atmosphere, larger ones—termed "city killers"—can cause catastrophic damage. The probability of such an impact is low but not insignificant, with a 1 in 200 chance during a typical human lifespan.

3. Historical Awakening: From Dinosaurs to Modern Awareness

The episode traces the growing awareness of asteroid threats from the late 20th century. In the 1980s, the link between asteroid impacts and mass extinctions, such as the demise of the dinosaurs, gains scientific traction. The discovery of a massive impact crater off the coast of Mexico in the late 1980s solidifies the theory that a six-mile-wide asteroid caused the mass extinction 66 million years ago.

Dr. Andrews recounts the initial skepticism within government circles:

"An officer in the Air Force grew very perturbed... the idea was laughed out of the room." [12:06]

This skepticism begins to shift following the 1993 comet impact on Jupiter, demonstrating the sheer destructive power of celestial objects.

4. Pop Culture Influences and Public Perception

The hosts discuss how Hollywood movies like "Armageddon" (1998) and "Deep Impact" (1998) play a dual role in both sensationalizing and raising awareness about asteroid threats. While these films are dramatized, scientists appreciate their contribution to public consciousness:

"These twin movies... are kind of beloved by scientists because they did a huge amount to publicize the potential danger of asteroids." [16:20]

5. NASA’s Planetary Defense: The DART Mission

In response to growing awareness and congressional mandate in 1998 to identify "planet killers," NASA establishes the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. Dr. Andrews highlights the significant effort to track and catalogue potentially hazardous asteroids.

The focus then shifts to NASA’s ambitious Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which aimed to test humanity's ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory. The mission cost approximately $314 million and involved sending a 1,200-pound spacecraft to collide with the smaller asteroid, Dimorphos, part of the binary system in Didymos.

6. The Launch and Impact: A High-Stakes Endeavor

On November 24, 2021, the DART spacecraft launches aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The journey involves traveling 7 million miles at 14,000 miles per hour to reach the asteroid. The spacecraft's autonomous navigation is critical, given the 30-second lag time in communication with mission control.

Dr. Andrews describes the intense preparation and uncertainty:

"It was like if you're in JFK airport and you want to throw a dart to hit the center of a dartboard in Texas..." [26:19]

The mission's climax occurs when DART successfully collides with Dimorphos, altering its orbit. Witnesses at mission control, including prominent figures like Bill Nye, experience a surge of emotion as the impact is confirmed:

"It was the first time scientists are attempting such an experiment." [30:13]

7. Success and Future Implications

The collision effectively demonstrated the feasibility of asteroid deflection, providing a practical solution to an existential threat. Dr. Andrews shares his awe and the profound relief felt by the team:

"This is a watershed moment for humanity... this is a feel good story that also happens to be true." [41:16]

With the success of DART, NASA and other space agencies, including China, are motivated to enhance planetary defense systems. Dr. Andrews envisions a future where continuous monitoring ensures Earth remains safeguarded from potential asteroid impacts:

"By the 2000 and 30s, we'll know for a century if Earth's in danger of this sort of disaster or not." [40:27]

8. Conclusion: A Triumph of Science and Collaboration

The episode concludes on an optimistic note, celebrating human ingenuity and the collaborative efforts to protect our planet. The successful DART mission not only validates current planetary defense strategies but also inspires continued investment and innovation in space exploration and asteroid deflection technologies.

"To remove one bit of existential dread completely from people's lives is incredible." [40:27]

Notable Quotes:

• "Some thought it was a nuclear attack. Some thought it was an alien invasion." [02:44]
• "This problem... this is actually the one that you can completely prevent from happening." [04:55]
• "If an asteroid's coming towards you, you blow it up or you deflect it." [22:07]
• "Plan A is always, if you can, you would deflect it." [24:04]
• "This is a watershed moment for humanity." [39:39]

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This episode of Decoder Ring masterfully intertwines scientific explanation with human stories, highlighting the importance of vigilance and innovation in the face of cosmic threats. It serves as both an educational resource and an inspiring testament to what humanity can achieve when faced with challenges that transcend our planet.

Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

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[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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[Willa Paskin]

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[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

It was a crisp winter's day. Pretty cold out, nice blue sky.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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. Immediately terrifying.

[Willa Paskin]

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 and it made news all over the world.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

It looked like a scene from a movie.

[Willa Paskin]

But it was all too real.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

A bright speck in the sky.

[Willa Paskin]

And then all hell broke loose. Some thought it was a nuclear attack.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Some thought it was an alien invasion. It basically exploded with the force of like a non radioactive nuclear weapon. It was a huge explosion.

[Willa Paskin]

And what, what was it?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

It was a very tiny asteroid.

[Willa Paskin]

Like how tiny?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

About the length of A of a bowling alley? Like, no, no. Bigger than 60ft, which a space is very small.

[Willa Paskin]

And we had no idea it was coming, right?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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. We were also lucky it wasn't the length of two bowling alleys.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

And you said like, it's a tiny asteroid. Like, what's a normal sized asteroid? And what do they do?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

A normal kind of asteroid, you know, a football stadium that's as 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Hundreds of thousands to tens of millions, depending on where it hits. Yeah. 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 or four, and then afterwards there would not be a city. It would eviscerate it. So these asteroids are appropriately known as city killers.

[Willa Paskin]

And they're normal.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

That's normal.

[Willa Paskin]

These normal sized city killers are hard to see too. And there are way more of them floating around out there than anyone could.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Like there's like a few tens of thousands of them orbiting near Earth. If you live to 100 years old, then 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.

[Willa Paskin]

Not that low, man.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

That's not that low. That's not that low.

[Willa Paskin]

So, like, how worried about this should I be? I'm getting worried about this. Just talking to you about.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

This is decodering. 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. 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. A couple of years ago, Dr. Robin George Andrews began following exactly these people as they attempted to do the unheard physically alter outer space. 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. So today on Decodering 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 Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with the rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This episode is brought to you by Saks.com there's joy in finding the perfect gift for the ones you love, but it can be a challenge. Saks.com's holiday gift guide makes it easy. Easy. Whether you're surprising your hard to shop for sister with a Chloe bracelet bag or gifting your partner a memorable scent From Gucci, at Saks.com there's holiday inspiration for every personality on your list. Sax.com does make it really easy to find inspiration. I was just on their site and like they say, it is organized like a gift guide. They have all sorts of fun categories like cozy weekend vibes and weekend uniforms, and kids pick that curate whole looks for you or your loved ones. Saks.com's handpicked guide can help take the stress out of the holidays. Add instant cheer to your home with some bright decor, or bundle up in a scarf coat from Totem to stay warm all season long. Find gifts guaranteed to bring joy to everyone this holiday [e-mail] that's saks.com for the ultimate holiday gift guide and all the shopping inspiration you need. 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. 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. What is an asteroid?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

An asteroid is basically the trash left over from the birth of the solar System is 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. That's where most of the asteroids hang out. It's just the ones that don't hang out there that are the problem.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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. That's an asteroid, basically.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

So the first asteroid was discovered only about 200 years ago. So in 1801. Surprisingly recent.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Compared to things like planets and moons, they are just so much harder to see. They don't stay stay in the same part of space often and they're just smaller.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Scientists started to really get an idea that like, okay, things in space can crash into other things really fast and we're in space, so yikes.

[Willa Paskin]

So like this is when we started to worry about asteroids for real.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

I think honestly even then it was still like fantastical.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

If we don't get to that deflection.

[Willa Paskin]

Point in time, everyone on this planet will die. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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, like, where did they go?

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Iridium is like a weird element that you get on Earth, but you really, you get it from asteroids, basically. So they were like, eh, it's probably an asteroid killed them. But obviously if you make a claim like that, you have to find the impact crater. Like it would have to be massive.

[Willa Paskin]

And it turned out someone had already done that. They just didn't realize what it was.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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, no 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 ground? And so when the dots were connected, it was like the late 80s, early 90s that people were 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 out the skies, caused this mass extinction kind of thing.

[Willa Paskin]

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. But even then, the very idea was laughed out of the room.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

And then what happened?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

And then a comet big enough to kill everyone on the planet many times over, crashed into Jupiter.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Each fragment punched a hole deep into Jupiter's clouds. Any of those pieces, if they, 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. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

What is this thing? It's what we call a global killer. The end of mankind.

[Willa Paskin]

Nothing would survive, not even bacteria. My God. The star of Michael Bay's 1998 disaster movie Armageddon is a freakishly large asteroid.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

How big are we talking, sir? Our best estimate is 97.6 billion.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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. Embarrassingly short notice.

[Willa Paskin]

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, all they gotta do is drill.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

That's it.

[Willa Paskin]

No spacewalking, no crazy astronaut stuff, just drill. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Stay awake just to hear you breathing.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

So then what happened?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

Did they do it?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

That's when we come back. Trust me, you don't want miss a thing. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped. AI is suddenly everywhere, from self driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or oci. OCI is a blazing, fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database and application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking, so you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to oci, including MGM Resorts, Specialized bikes and Fireworks AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends December 31, 2024. See if your company qualifies for this special [e-mail] decoder that's oracle.com decoder oracle.com decoder this show is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month is all about gratitude, but there's one person we don't thank enough ourselves. It's sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we're trying our best to make sense of everything. And in this world, that isn't easy. Practicing gratitude can improve your personal well being. And you might find it beneficial to learn gratitude building techniques from a therapist. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. BetterHelp can help you tackle life's challenges by providing accessible and affordable care. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. With better help, you can message a professional therapist anytime, anywhere. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with the licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If something's interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals, they may be able to help. So let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.comdecoder today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H E L P.com decoder if a dangerous asteroid is barreling towards Earth, it would be really helpful if we could move it out of the way. 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? Armageddon offered one solution.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Why don't we just send up 150.

[Willa Paskin]

Nuclear warheads and blast that rock apart?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Terrible idea.

[Willa Paskin]

Was I talking to you? The popular thing of what to do with an asteroid is that you would blow it up, right? Like, that's. Yeah, but is that what we want to do?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

So turns out that parts of Armageddon aren't inaccurate. You basically have two choices. If an asteroid's coming towards you, you blow it up or you deflect it. And in both cases, 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 desperate. This is like a Hail Mary situation.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Yeah. No one wants a nuclear weapon to blow up in the sky. That would be bad. I mean, 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, 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.

[Willa Paskin]

So what is plan A through C then?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

There's a lot of weird things in.

[Willa Paskin]

Plan C. Tell me about, like the paint.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

And what are some of the other weird ones?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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 crashing sized pieces. You don't want to turn a cannonball into a shotgun. Basically, that's. That's bad. You want to hit it just hard enough that you do push it back.

[Willa Paskin]

And that's basically what they decided to test, right?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Yeah. 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. It's the technology exists. Let's go for it.

[Willa Paskin]

And so in 2017, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office announced this would be its first ever mission. 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, basically smash one thing into another and see what happens. It sounds straightforward, but this is literally rocket science, and so it was not.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

All moving at like hundreds of thousands of miles.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

All moving tens of thousands of miles an hour. Yeah, yeah. So, like, this is. This is hard stuff.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

There are these asteroids called binaries. It operates the same way as the moon orbiting the Earth. You have a bigger asteroid that's kind of like Earth and a smaller asteroid that's kind of like the moon.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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. 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 punch Dimorphous in the face really hard and see what happens.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

How much did it cost?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

Ultimately, thousands of scientists and engineers got to work building a 1200 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 530ft in diameter. 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. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

It had to hit exactly perfectly on a bullseye it 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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 mov And NASA itself embraced the drama on NASA tv.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

In a galaxy where asteroids have pummeled planets for billions of years now one planet strikes back.

[Willa Paskin]

November 24, 2021 was dart launch day with the ship taking off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California overnight. Tonight, NASA is going to launch the double asteroid redirection test. A rare mission to crash into an asteroid.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

In addition to being covered in the news, the launch was also broadcast live. At the moment, everything is still go for launch. No red flags, everything looking right on course.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

NASA CES go sma SMA is gonna.

[Willa Paskin]

The Dart scientists and engineers knew that this was their opportunity to prove the value of investing in planetary defense. If the mission failed, it was likely the whole thing would be considered a waste of resources not to be attempted again anytime soon.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

T minus 20 seconds, T minus 15. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

At 10:21pm Pacific Time, Dart launched on the back of a rocket and liftoff of the Falcon 9 and dart on NASA's first planetary defense test to intentionally crash into an asteroid.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Do you know it wasn't a science mission, it was a test of can we save the planet?

[Willa Paskin]

Can we? After the break Apple Card is the perfect card for your holiday shopping when you use Apple Card on your iPhone, you'll earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase, including products at Apple like a new iPhone 16 or Apple Watch Ultra. Apply now in the Wallet app on your iPhone subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard.com youm know when you discover a new binge worthy show or song that you bump on, repeat and have to share with your friends? 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 Cameror is using Mint Mobile and He's on the $15 a month deal and is getting unlimited talk and text over their 5G network at literally a fraction of what he was paying with someone else. He thinks more people should be trying it out. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts to get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. Go to mintmobile.com decoderring that's mintmobile.com decoderring Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com decoderring $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. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply See Mint Mobile for details. On September 26, 2022, 10 months after it had launched, the Dart spacecraft was finally closing in on its destination. We are monitoring a live situation right now. NASA is about to intentionally crash a spacecraft into an asteroid.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Dart was due to die. At 7pm ish that day, Rob and.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

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. And tonight we're following the real time journey of the Dart spacecraft and its planned collision with asteroid Dimorphos.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

The atmosphere kept veering from like really excitable to really tense. When they had to announce like a key milestone. You could hear a pin drop right now as we're coming up on the.

[Willa Paskin]

Critical 20 minute mark from impact.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

The team is hyper focused.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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

[Willa Paskin]

Starting to see Dimorphos start to come into view there you can see it starting to take shape.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

It was this like silvery world of boulders and rocks and it looked like the most space age potato I've ever seen.

[Willa Paskin]

It's amazing, guys. Oh my goodness, look at that.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

Unbelievable.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah. Looks to me like we're headed straight in. Yeah. Were you worried?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

Oh boy, we're getting close.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

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 like very last second, you just think maybe, maybe it'll miss. Oh my goodness.

[Willa Paskin]

8, 7, 6.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

All you could see was this asteroid bloom ever larger on the screen.

[Willa Paskin]

What?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

And then the screen went bright red, just a very jarring color.

[Willa Paskin]

Oh, wow. Awaiting visual confirmation.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

And people started cheering and we have impact. After there was just this like increasing roar of people crying and high fiving and people like, like I'd never met, just like fist bumping me. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

And they were just, you know, don't wanna miss it. And it was just. I was like, yes.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

On their screens there was this like, bright light. It looked like an explosion, honestly, had happened. It was so clear that not only did 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, we hit it hard. Like almost surprisingly hard. Like they were like, we've really rung its bells.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

NASA's dart mission worked.

[Willa Paskin]

It's the first time it's ever been done, streaking toward its asteroid target than impact.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

We showed the world that NASA is.

[Willa Paskin]

Serious as a defender of this planet.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

This is a watershed moment for humanity. They hit it perfectly 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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.

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

By the 2000 and 30s, 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, that is like magic to me. 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. And within, within like a few decades with they've identified the problem and would have managed to cancel it out like that. That will never happen with almost anything else. To remove one bit of existential dread completely from people's lives is incredible.

[Willa Paskin]

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?

[Dr. Robin George Andrews]

It's absolutely a feel good. So it's, it's, it's a feel good story that also happens to be true.

[Willa Paskin]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email [e-mail] this episode was written and produced by Sophie Codner. 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. Merritt Jacob is senior Technical director. 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. And if you aren't already a Slate 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, or you can visit slate.comdecoder 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. 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. Again, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free or visit slate.comdecoder to sign up if you haven't yet. Besides signing up for Slate Plus, I would also love you to please subscribe and radar feed in Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. We'll see you in two weeks. Former President Donald Trump rewrote the rules of how the American justice system treats our nations most powerful people. Hello, it's Andrea Bernstein. I'm the host of the Law According to Trump, a special series from Slate Plus. Long before the Supreme Court granted presidential immunity, Donald Trump created a blueprint for shielding himself from legal accountability on everything from taxes to fraud to discrimination. Listen as we explore Trump's history of bending the law to his will. Check out the Law According to Trump wherever you get your podcasts.