ESA's Hera mission is designed to examine the Didymos system after DART's impact. Measurements of Dimorphos's mass, shape, and the altered surface will help researchers interpret the collision more precisely. That follow-up turns a successful deflection demonstration into a better-calibrated experiment for future planetary-defense planning.
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49:47answer when they all get around that round table and they have an extinction level event from a celestial or cosmic object headed to Earth. The NASA scientists have the math now. >> Exactly. Yeah. And one last thing that I want to highlight is that this is an international effort. Right. Planetary defense. We're on the same planet. The ESA has her which is arriving at Ditimus and Dorphis. It's actually going to map out the Dart impact crater >> and it's going to directly measure Dorphos's mass via radio tracking and really refine those values of delta V and then beta subsequently and so on and so forth. So it's it's really international effort that we've just
50:29sort of created a a a lab test bed in space right >> of Ddius and Dorphis this binary asteroid system. >> It's very cool. Look, any space story, you know, I'm in on. I I had I owned both Armageddon and Deep Impact on VHS when they both came out in whatever it was, 1997. Um, I still think it's hilarious to think that uh Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, who were a bunch of guys who worked on an oil rig, were the only people who could save Earth and had to learn how to become astronauts, right? And apparently it was easier to train people who worked in an oil rig to be astronauts than it was to train astronauts how to drill on this thing. >> Ben Affleck did it. And if you the one of the if you're a movie buff, I think
51:09in the the extra scenes, whatever the when we used to have the DVDs with the extra stuff, uh oh, the director like the director's cut where they would voice over while I was playing, >> he was just taking the piss about how ridiculous the plot was to the movie >> the whole time. >> That makes sense. >> Very, very cool story. Dart, our planetary defense story today. Um, and the key piece to this was >> the ability to calculate the heliocentric momentum change. >> It's really it's it's really a precision >> physics and precision astronomy story more than anything else, you know? >> Right. But in the media, we like to say planetary defense. >> Yeah. >> It's what is the how do we make this militarized?
51:49>> Yeah. But I just I just love that like you know for for astronomers like this kind of precision is like unprecedented,
AstrophysicsOrbital MechanicsPlanetary DefensePrecision Measurement