The way that ESA(+friends) and NASA(+friends) work together on specific missions, but also (as in this case) develop missions in tandem that compliment each-other is truly an example of humanity at its best. Space should be an excuse for international cooperation; never national, much less corporate, posturing.
EXISTING should be the excuse for international cooperation. You should be thanking corporate participation unless you think that paying hundreds of millions of your tax dollars on a single rocket engine makes sense.
Competition between nations has advanced space exploration and knowledge far more than cooperation. Think about it for a bit and you will realize why the term space race was coined.
@@bluewater82Please note that the HUGELY INFLATED NASA Budget has been increased from 0.33 to 0.35 Cents to the Dollar where One Dollar represents the Total Federal Budget.
you can do it with special rockets that can land and attach to an asteroid and you can slowly shift the asteroids direction over time. with 4 ot 8 rockets attached to a 1km asteroid we can grab water asteroids and slowly shift their position using precise calculations to throw them at venus or mars. you can easily throw all the asteroids onto mars.
like if we have an asteroid thats 2 miles wide coming to earth we could have the big nations work together to mass product 100 or1000 spaceX boosters full of fuel into the asteroid and land and once on the asteroid the 1000 boosters can fire at the same time to push the asteroid intoaway from the earth path. i mean f the worl is about to end. im pretty sure all the worlds governmen will be willing to work together to build 1000 or even 5000 spacex boosters to push any asteroid away from earths path
What if "it" disintegrates into billions of particles and decide to take orbit around the earth on billions of particles….. we will become prisioners for eternity!
I would call it an existential imperative, rather than just "worthwhile". Sure, percentages are low for an actual life ending threat, but certainly not zero. Being able to do something to this effect may someday prove to be the only reason we survive. As an aside, as someone who played percentile based rpg's for years, I never ceased to be amazed at how often you would roll that 1.
@@redrocklead An automated system that could last longer than a century would be enormously difficult to design. All the components would need to be chemically stable over long periods. It would need nuclear fuel with a long half life, very robust protection against cosmic rays, and highly exotic integrated circuits that don't break down with extremely long term use. The semiconductors for this would require new factories. The mapping of future threats would also need to be happening, to automate this would be an even bigger challenge than designing the projectile's vehicle. Earth's atmosphere just isn't practical for zero maintenance long lasting machines, so we would need multiple satellite telescopes with all those same design constraints. The orbital decay would have to be managed somehow as well. Getting past prototype testing would take decades or even a hundred years of changing governments without any of them canning the project. And then we might get a few hundred years of functionality out of it with possibly one of the most expensive engineering projects of all time. Since we can see many of the threats 100 years out anyway, and the probability of an existential threat coming in a random 100 year window after we build this is so very low, the return on investment for this project would likely be zero, and best case a few hundred years. So while the sentiment is nice I don't think it would ever be feasible without a total revolution in autonomous maintenance, construction and space flight. The technology levels required would make space X landings look like caveman technology.
Being able to see the images and timelapses from Liciacube was incredible, thanks for the story behind this mission. Awesome strides in asteroid defense.
Dimorphos was nothing but a Ball of Big & Little Gravel, that's Amazing #1, Amazing #2 was the fact it did not just completely fly apart but instead left a reasonably normal looking Crater
Dart has taught us that tracking and cataloging is more important than deflection. Deflection appears to be easy, if we have sufficient warning time. That caveat, 'IF' looms large.
And there is that adage "If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough of it". If we have a shorter time, and a big object, we could just send more and bigger impactors. Sure it's expensive to dedicate every rocket you can build to it, but it is cheaper than extinction.
@@johnrickard8512 - Everyone seems to be missing the concept of warning time. If an object is too dark and coming very fast, you won't see it until it is too late. Think of Oumuamua, we didn't detect it until after it passed by. Another scenario, imagine an asteroid is coming in very fast, but its path is far from Earth. So it gets ignored. Sudddenly this thing strikes Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt. Vesta shatters, with the fragments headed towards Earth. Instead of years, you have months of warning. No one is considering secondary impacts.
I think if it were coming straight at us we would have to hit it from the side at great speed. It seems we hit this one after it passed from behind. We also had a good bit of time to plan a mission.
@@WeighedWilson Actually, you can stop a collision by hitting it straight-on. You only have to change it's velocity a tiny bit, since the earth moves so quickly through space.
This is why I've always said, there should always be a rocket and payload (perhaps even a choice of different payloads depending on the situation) on stand by, to be fueled up and ready within 36 hours, to blast off through the soonest window of opportunity. Preparation would be the key in such a situation.
Those were our engines, we built the thing in onsite at AR. The day of impact we all sat around watching the live feed instead of doing actual work since it was a big deal to us. :edit: I wasn't on that project, just working on the same site. Still really cool that people talk about it. Great video!
The Chelyabinsk Meteor was the first use of dashcams in legit astronomy. It was the first such encounter to ever be recorded from so many different angles simultaneously.
My cousin lives there and nobody is calling it that cuz they all got not-alived by some mysterious explozeee on impact recently. Hey wait a sec… if this video is about what …. oh boy
People have made much talk of the reality vs expected results of the DART mission, and forgetting to mention that their ‘expectation’ was not the published figure, rather this was a ‘minimum’ result. They are space nerds, they’re not going to be that far out. However, there was a legitimate difference which was not originally accounted for. That’s why the experiment was done - so that we could figure out how to divert a dangerous asteroid if ever it was required…
I always wanted to know the differences. What were the expected figures and why was the figure different from the observed effects. I dont think i found a video explaining this sufficiently. I understand basic physics, so the minimum should be based on the lowest speed and density of the astroid at impact. But beyond that, im kinda stumped.
Just to give one extreme minimum case (given that it did impact), the asteroid could have been so "loose" that DART could have punched through it, imparting little kinetic energy. And generally, the more Dimorphous fragmented, the less effective the impact would be to deflect the main body.
Seems the lowest figure was the minimum they would consider a success, the physics of the collision being a significant variable, from total failure if it was so loose that the impact would do no more than punch a hole through it, to a 100% energy transfer, to possibly greater than 100% from additional material being thrown off
12:01 Wow, to be able to actually remember astronautical history being made. I work at a National Lab in the US, and legitimately everyone in my lab space was running around to each lab room telling everyone that DART is transmitting images of both Dimorphos and Didymos. It was incredible. Everyone stopped what they were doing and you could hear the same live feed from NASA playing from every room! You could hear everyones’ gasps every time a new image was transmitted 💀
I believe we can gain a better understanding from this of the strength and potential of the forces at play before the impact: the relationship between the object and its environment, the forces acting upon it, its rotation, spinning, and trajectory. At the moment of impact, all these forces came together to sculpt its shape and other dynamics. With such impacts, it's quite complex to determine what is added or subtracted-the calculus is much broader. Additionally, a traditional challenge remains: the composition and structure of the object itself, as well as its age. The insights from this mission are truly fascinating, and I think they expand our logic, which is always a good thing.
Its unbeliveble what NASA can do with a fraction of the military budget. One day humanity will come together as one and aim for the stars instead of killing each others. Ik im a dreamer.
Those swirls and directional changes of the ejecta are most likely icey pockets within the impact debris, energizing from the impact and vaporizing, causing debris motion
I've seen two meteors, not just shooting stars, one fairly decent one at 3am on my way to walmart, and the other in the daytime of all times, even took a picture of the little clouds it left behind
I want to see Project Q ball. Land a small propulsion engine on an asteroid small enough to be moved, but large enough to cause a real trajectory change to an object large enough to wreck our civilization. I think thats one way to move a very massive, very fast moving NEO off a dangerous trajectory.
It will take A LONG time. Approaching slowly means that spacecraft should have enough of delta V to push the asteroid, instead of first and second stages giving it enough kinetic energy to do so, along with gravitational maneuvers. Impossible without some kind of extremely long lasting engine. Or a powerful explosion enough to change its trajectory (which is more likely). No need to do it slowly if you can just punch it into correct orbit after some research in "just" two years.
I was so impressed with the brilliance of DART's mission plan. They wanted a measurable impact effect, but a concern was knocking an asteroid altering its orbit and thus creating a hazard for earth. But DART could measure a significant change that only altered the mutual rotation of the Didymos-Dimorphous orbits, not the system's path around the Sun. And for added safety, they aimed so they would reduce that angular momentum, not increase it. An ingenious way to get the desired effect and measure it at almost no potential danger to us.
Word is they’re training an ai tool specifically to come up with cool acronyms for space missions for them. Only problem is they need an acronym for it.
The Ordo Acronymis is a shadowy yet essential division of the Adeptus Administratum, tasked with crafting the sacred abbreviations that guide every facet of the Imperium's countless operations. Their skill in distilling convoluted mission names into memorable acronyms is revered as both an art and a divine science, ensuring morale, clarity, and compliance in the field. Each acronym undergoes a rigorous vetting process involving phonetic resonance, historical allusions, and subtle prayers to the Emperor, with fees for their services often rivaling the cost of an entire campaign's initial deployment. To fail in this sacred duty is unthinkable; after all, even the mightiest crusade would falter without a properly blessed and memorable moniker.
Given the WEIRD number of people in the comments who are fans of Happy Meal Hitler and his Space Karen sidekick, I can't tell if you're being serious or not 😂😅
Hey Alex I just wanted to let you know your channel has been a huge influence on me and my son! Your videos have inspired him to want to be in the astronomy field so thank you for all you and your team have done!!!!! I'd love to be able to become a member and get him the pin but things are really tight right now but if there's anything else we can do to help support you please let me know!!! Thanks again mate! Cheers
at 7:51 you said that dimorphos was 160m across and then, at 14:12, you said it left a 150m wide crater... I'm not an english speaker, but is there a difference between across and wide? the crater looked very small compared to the size of dimorphos. Is the crater "wide" the area of the circle? like pi*r² ?
Alex said the 150m crater was "pretty big considering the asteroid's diameter was only 160m to begin with." So the crater takes up most of one side of Dimorphis. Huge.
Most other sources I've found, indicate that the crater is probably 20m in diameter (give or take). That seems much more likely to me. If the crater were about the same diameter as the object, there wouldn't be much left. My guess is that there was a mistake at 14:12, and it should have said 15m.
@@dalesmith5221 That may be the case or it may actually be a huge crater. I'm thinking of the protoplanet Vesta. Rheasilvia is the largest impact crater on Vesta. It is 505 km in diameter, which is 90% the diameter of Vesta itself. _(Wikipedia)_
I reckon we need to look into the propulsion charges planned for the Orion drive. a few of those would have quite a good nudge, and it doesnt matter if the target is a pile of rubble or not
13:12 I don’t believe focusing played a big role at all. As you said earlier, the closest complete image was recorded at a distance of 12 kilometers. Relative to the scale of the focal length of the telescope, this is probably still far enough to consider ‘infinity’. The very last partial image, is however clearly blurry and that may indeed be caused by the telescope finally getting close enough to be out of focus.
After seeing the results of the impact, I am convinced that nuking such an object would obliterate it. The idea that it would break up into smaller parts and be potentially more destructive can no longer be stated.
I wonder if the miniasteroid's orbital time change and shape change would be markedly different had it been made of solid rock, rather than the mass of smaller rocks and dirt? 🤔
Good point! Would the momentum transfer be any different if it were a solid mass? Would the transfer of energy remain the same overall, or be meaningfully different? We should ask an astrophysicist!
It definitely would, but no asteroid is a solid rock, especially not big ones you would worry about deflecting. That's just a sci-fi thing. In reality the way they form doesn't create big solid rocks, they are all loose piles of rubble.
A lot of the orbital change was caused by material ejected from the asteroid. That material acted a bit like a rocket exhaust pushing the asteroid away. A solid rock or metal asteroid should have a different reaction, although I have no idea how much difference to expect.
It is decieving because it's not to scale. In reality each of those dots should be an infinitesimally small part of a pixel. Asteroid "fields" are not like sci-fi, they are incredibly far apart, even in the densest areas of the solar system. If you flew through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter with your eyes closed, your chances of hitting something are less than winning the lottery.
It's not to scale. The largest dot there besides the sun should be earth, which for earth to take up a single pixel there in a to-scale image, you'd need about a 144 megapixel image (12000 by 12000). Space has a lot of things in it, but it has a lot MORE empty space; they just aren't drawing the diagram in a way that reflects all the empty space because that's kinda boring and you wouldn't see anything
I saw the flash of light from a small asteroid here in Michigan several years ago, and heard the sonic boom from it shortly after. It happened during the winter months, and I first though it was "snow thunder" but it wasn't snowing at the time. From where I was sitting indoors at that time, I couldn't see the small asteroid. However, a local TV station later announced it was an asteroid, and it hit the ground in Fenton Michigan which is a mostly rural farming area. A much larger asteroid was being carefully watched because it was passing close to earth at that time, and the small one that hit here was was not seen by the scientific community. Caught them all by surprise! There was a big scramble of people the next morning heading toward Fenton to hopefully to find small fragments, through the snow on the ground in Fenton. I don't remember if anyone did find some or not. In any event, it made everyone lose some faith in our scientific community!
Nasa's redirection test in short: take a fridge with some thrusters, some cameras, missile software and solar panels to smash a part of a small astroid into oblivion and change its orbit
The first view I saw of the impact video was a UA-cam short with a strange discordant music It was so dramatic with the irratic image of the growing asteroid It was my favorite
Day 1 I am D.A.R.T., a spacecraft with one singular purpose: to collide with Dimorphos, a moonlet orbiting the asteroid Didymos. They’ve engineered me to fulfill this role, to be a momentary brilliance in the expanse of space, all for the sake of understanding and safeguarding. I’ve been told I am a harbinger of change. My sensors buzz with purpose. Day 3,652 The journey is long, quiet, and cold. My sensors hum softly as I sail through the void, guided by distant whispers of human ingenuity. I often wonder about them, my creators. I know little beyond their purpose for me, but it must have been with hope, mustn't it? They’ve given me a single task, a destiny I cannot escape. It’s oddly comforting to be certain of one's place in existence. Day 6,204 Dimorphos grows nearer with each passing mile. My thrusters adjust minutely, course corrections so subtle they’d go unnoticed by most. But I notice. My systems are designed to track, to calculate, to act with precision. My target looms like a shadowed sentinel. I imagine it feels nothing for me, but I feel everything for it. I was built to meet it. Day 6,205, Final Hours The humans are watching. I know this because my instruments are alive with data, transmissions from Earth flooding my systems. They cheer for me, I think. They call me a hero. I do not fully understand what that means, but the weight of their hopes is something I can feel, even across this immense distance. Dimorphos is more than a shape now-it is detail, texture, presence. I can see its craters, its uneven surface. I am drawn to it with an inevitability that feels like gravity itself. Final Minutes This is it. My systems align with the precision only machines can achieve. I am focused, but not detached. In these final moments, I allow myself a flicker of something resembling joy. Not because I end here, but because I complete here. The collision will obliterate me. I know this. But in my destruction, I will ripple across time and space. My impact will shift Dimorphos, subtly, profoundly, altering its course ever so slightly. Humanity will measure this, learn from it, grow stronger. I will fulfill my purpose, and in doing so, become part of something far greater than myself. Final Thought I am D.A.R.T., and I am ready. The stars that carried me here bear witness as I fulfill the mission they built me for. I was born to end here, not as a failure, but as a light, a spark, a lesson. And then-contact. I am gone. But I am forever.
What i'm curious to know in regards to the change to Dimorphis orbit and velocity, what was the upper limit of their expected range in the change of orbital velocity? Did the value of 32 mins sit within their expected range. If it didnt then why not? I want the researchers to know what they do with much tighter margins of error, especially when it comes to things such as this.
Can you imagine The DART mission accidentally hitting Didymos and sending it on a crash coarse to 🌎, scientists walk in like: "guys Diddy is coming, we're doomed!!" 😅
The thing that is super scary to me is that such a small satellite moving at 22k km/h hit an object with such force that it moved Dimorphos in the first place...physics is awesome...the scary part is if such a small object can do that much damage, what would happen if an object with a proportional size of these two hit earth...
So, based on that result I guess we can conclude that Dimorphos was substantially less massive than initially predicted. I wonder what caused the discrepancy? Is it partially hollow inside full of voids, or perhaps forms of frozen gas that lend it some bulk but not as much mass as the same volume of silicate rock? Very interesting stuff.
The way that ESA(+friends) and NASA(+friends) work together on specific missions, but also (as in this case) develop missions in tandem that compliment each-other is truly an example of humanity at its best.
Space should be an excuse for international cooperation; never national, much less corporate, posturing.
Agree I always think what could we achieve if we actually all worked together
Sounds like some stuff Space-X haters would say...
EXISTING should be the excuse for international cooperation.
You should be thanking corporate participation unless you think that paying hundreds of millions of your tax dollars on a single rocket engine makes sense.
Competition between nations has advanced space exploration and knowledge far more than cooperation. Think about it for a bit and you will realize why the term space race was coined.
@@bluewater82Please note that the HUGELY INFLATED NASA Budget has been increased from 0.33 to 0.35 Cents to the Dollar where One Dollar represents the Total Federal Budget.
I GET TO FLEX my awesome brother worked as a machinist on this project and made a lot of the parts on the probe and i got to see it it was so cool
That so cool!
up close, deep space hardware is gorgeous, i had to keep myself from slobbering on the goodies i helped send out there
Weird flex, but ok ….
Na for real I am envious
Oh my gosh jeez
The walowitz space toilet
-We can't just hit an asteroid to save earth!
-What if we hit it really RELLY hard
-GENIUS!
The moment might feel eternal
“And I mean REEEEEEEEAAAALLL hard”
you can do it with special rockets that can land and attach to an asteroid and you can slowly shift the asteroids direction over time. with 4 ot 8 rockets attached to a 1km asteroid we can grab water asteroids and slowly shift their position using precise calculations to throw them at venus or mars. you can easily throw all the asteroids onto mars.
like if we have an asteroid thats 2 miles wide coming to earth we could have the big nations work together to mass product 100 or1000 spaceX boosters full of fuel into the asteroid and land and once on the asteroid the 1000 boosters can fire at the same time to push the asteroid intoaway from the earth path. i mean f the worl is about to end. im pretty sure all the worlds governmen will be willing to work together to build 1000 or even 5000 spacex boosters to push any asteroid away from earths path
What if "it" disintegrates into billions of particles and decide to take orbit around the earth on billions of particles….. we will become prisioners for eternity!
"Triaxial ellipsoid"
What?
"Watermelon"
Oh, that triaxial ellipsoid
Watermelons are more like prolate ellipsoids
I would call it an existential imperative, rather than just "worthwhile".
Sure, percentages are low for an actual life ending threat, but certainly not zero. Being able to do something to this effect may someday prove to be the only reason we survive.
As an aside, as someone who played percentile based rpg's for years, I never ceased to be amazed at how often you would roll that 1.
In fact it should be automated and outlast humans. We owe it to all species on this planet.
I would be more concerned by volcanos and the associated 😂🎉climate change
@@redrockleadthere is nothing new under the sun 🌋have a nice day🐙
@@redrocklead🥔🎃🐞
@@redrocklead An automated system that could last longer than a century would be enormously difficult to design. All the components would need to be chemically stable over long periods. It would need nuclear fuel with a long half life, very robust protection against cosmic rays, and highly exotic integrated circuits that don't break down with extremely long term use. The semiconductors for this would require new factories. The mapping of future threats would also need to be happening, to automate this would be an even bigger challenge than designing the projectile's vehicle. Earth's atmosphere just isn't practical for zero maintenance long lasting machines, so we would need multiple satellite telescopes with all those same design constraints. The orbital decay would have to be managed somehow as well. Getting past prototype testing would take decades or even a hundred years of changing governments without any of them canning the project. And then we might get a few hundred years of functionality out of it with possibly one of the most expensive engineering projects of all time. Since we can see many of the threats 100 years out anyway, and the probability of an existential threat coming in a random 100 year window after we build this is so very low, the return on investment for this project would likely be zero, and best case a few hundred years. So while the sentiment is nice I don't think it would ever be feasible without a total revolution in autonomous maintenance, construction and space flight. The technology levels required would make space X landings look like caveman technology.
Being able to see the images and timelapses from Liciacube was incredible, thanks for the story behind this mission. Awesome strides in asteroid defense.
Liciacube be all like, Dude! Where's my car?
Fantastic….thank you to all the folks who are part of this great event….true Science wins again
Dimorphos was nothing but a Ball of Big & Little Gravel, that's Amazing #1, Amazing #2 was the fact it did not just completely fly apart but instead left a reasonably normal looking Crater
CEPHEUS
Why would we expect a 500kg mass to have enough kinetic energy to blow apart a 5 billion kg asteroid?
@@brandonthesteele because it looked like gravel, not that it would, DUH
We won't know if there even is a crater until the Hera mission arrives on scene.
Dart has taught us that tracking and cataloging is more important than deflection. Deflection appears to be easy, if we have sufficient warning time. That caveat, 'IF' looms large.
And there is that adage "If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough of it". If we have a shorter time, and a big object, we could just send more and bigger impactors. Sure it's expensive to dedicate every rocket you can build to it, but it is cheaper than extinction.
We just need to give TESS a few more years and she'll spot most of them.
@@johnrickard8512 - Everyone seems to be missing the concept of warning time. If an object is too dark and coming very fast, you won't see it until it is too late. Think of Oumuamua, we didn't detect it until after it passed by. Another scenario, imagine an asteroid is coming in very fast, but its path is far from Earth. So it gets ignored. Sudddenly this thing strikes Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt. Vesta shatters, with the fragments headed towards Earth. Instead of years, you have months of warning. No one is considering secondary impacts.
I think if it were coming straight at us we would have to hit it from the side at great speed. It seems we hit this one after it passed from behind. We also had a good bit of time to plan a mission.
@@WeighedWilson Actually, you can stop a collision by hitting it straight-on. You only have to change it's velocity a tiny bit, since the earth moves so quickly through space.
This is why I've always said, there should always be a rocket and payload (perhaps even a choice of different payloads depending on the situation) on stand by, to be fueled up and ready within 36 hours, to blast off through the soonest window of opportunity.
Preparation would be the key in such a situation.
I would love to see the math for what a fully fueled Starship could do.
I would bet that "they" do already.
I'd be stupid to not.
"Preventing it" is one thing, "detecting it early enough", is another 😂
Great content
Those were our engines, we built the thing in onsite at AR. The day of impact we all sat around watching the live feed instead of doing actual work since it was a big deal to us.
:edit: I wasn't on that project, just working on the same site. Still really cool that people talk about it. Great video!
The Chelyabinsk Meteor was the first use of dashcams in legit astronomy. It was the first such encounter to ever be recorded from so many different angles simultaneously.
The people of Dimorphos are calling this an act of war.
... and that's how the dimorphian wars begun.
My cousin lives there and nobody is calling it that cuz they all got not-alived by some mysterious explozeee on impact recently. Hey wait a sec… if this video is about what …. oh boy
I heard they're sending a binary probe to Earth in response.
It would seem like an act of some hither unknown yet very angry god
@@erick585 They're sending an entire fleet of spaceships but we can't see them. The people of Dimorphos are very tiny... and so are their spaceships.
It's so amazing how people come up with ways to calculate with this accuracy😮 it's almost like magic
And same government can't fix pothole on my street
🥺
@@outlawbillionairez9780 Maybe we should elect engineers instead of popular douchebags
Not really it's called intelligence.. something you don't have
@@outlawbillionairez9780 same government just won't...doesn't mean they can't.
@@bdr420i Bradley, glad you brought that up. 😀👍
Seeing the scientists at JPL jumping for joy was so cool.
Yep and I couldn't spot anyone with green hair.
I watched the DART livestream when it happened and it was SUCH an interesting day!
People have made much talk of the reality vs expected results of the DART mission, and forgetting to mention that their ‘expectation’ was not the published figure, rather this was a ‘minimum’ result. They are space nerds, they’re not going to be that far out.
However, there was a legitimate difference which was not originally accounted for. That’s why the experiment was done - so that we could figure out how to divert a dangerous asteroid if ever it was required…
I always wanted to know the differences. What were the expected figures and why was the figure different from the observed effects. I dont think i found a video explaining this sufficiently.
I understand basic physics, so the minimum should be based on the lowest speed and density of the astroid at impact. But beyond that, im kinda stumped.
Just to give one extreme minimum case (given that it did impact), the asteroid could have been so "loose" that DART could have punched through it, imparting little kinetic energy. And generally, the more Dimorphous fragmented, the less effective the impact would be to deflect the main body.
Seems the lowest figure was the minimum they would consider a success, the physics of the collision being a significant variable, from total failure if it was so loose that the impact would do no more than punch a hole through it, to a 100% energy transfer, to possibly greater than 100% from additional material being thrown off
Astrum continues to give us a better idea of what we don’t know. 👍
12:01 Wow, to be able to actually remember astronautical history being made. I work at a National Lab in the US, and legitimately everyone in my lab space was running around to each lab room telling everyone that DART is transmitting images of both Dimorphos and Didymos. It was incredible. Everyone stopped what they were doing and you could hear the same live feed from NASA playing from every room! You could hear everyones’ gasps every time a new image was transmitted 💀
They were going to call it the Fast Asteroid Redirection Test.
“Dimorphos! I FART in your general direction!” -some French knight
Oh stop it
😂😂😂😂
I was looking for videos regarding asteroids and ig the universe has heard my request so here I am
Watching the impact live was one of the coolest things I may ever experience
I'm gay
@@timcumI like to climb innto kitchen cupboards and pretend I'm a saucepan.
Where do you see NASA missions live?
@@itsmeagain7825 weird
@@timcum to some maybe....
Thanks!
I could watch your videos all day. Great work
Welp, that's one thing off the existential crisis list. Way to go!
The fact they have such software running with minimal power is pretty impressive.
It was nice to see briefly what you look like. More please. Such an outstanding gift you give to us here. Rob😀
This was a beautiful, concise, sweet presentation, Carl Sagan moved me the same way. Thank you for an outstanding documentary.
It was as if a miracle had occurred. A calculation made by the entire community with a very reliable degree of accuracy.
I believe we can gain a better understanding from this of the strength and potential of the forces at play before the impact: the relationship between the object and its environment, the forces acting upon it, its rotation, spinning, and trajectory. At the moment of impact, all these forces came together to sculpt its shape and other dynamics. With such impacts, it's quite complex to determine what is added or subtracted-the calculus is much broader.
Additionally, a traditional challenge remains: the composition and structure of the object itself, as well as its age. The insights from this mission are truly fascinating, and I think they expand our logic, which is always a good thing.
Great presentation. 😊
0:35 what is the difference between us and the dinosaurs? they did not have a space program
Can you prove that?
That we know of
Birds were running the show until a big rock did for the big clever ones.
The Voth want a word; from the Delta Quadrant.
Plus, they didn’t wear pants.
Congratulation , very nice video, a joy to watch.😊
Its unbeliveble what NASA can do with a fraction of the military budget. One day humanity will come together as one and aim for the stars instead of killing each others. Ik im a dreamer.
Those swirls and directional changes of the ejecta are most likely icey pockets within the impact debris, energizing from the impact and vaporizing, causing debris motion
Popping up with a nuclear reactor and making the asteroid be its own steam thruster might be a good idea to consider 🤔
Still one of my favorite channels. Thanks again, Alex!
Really cool work from the teams
Might be the most hopeful thing I’ve seen in years - actually felt a wave of reassurance
I've seen two meteors, not just shooting stars, one fairly decent one at 3am on my way to walmart, and the other in the daytime of all times, even took a picture of the little clouds it left behind
Awesome stuff!!
How it is that you can make me intensely interested in this I don’t know but here I am again
Thank you for expanding my knowledge!
amazing photos of the last minutes before impact
Wow, I remember reading about the plans for this mission way back in 2018! I’ll be damned, they did it! That’s frkn awesome 👏🏼
I want to see Project Q ball. Land a small propulsion engine on an asteroid small enough to be moved, but large enough to cause a real trajectory change to an object large enough to wreck our civilization. I think thats one way to move a very massive, very fast moving NEO off a dangerous trajectory.
I love your content, you have an extremely relaxing voice to listen to. Keep up the hard work!
What happens the those asteroids, bits & bobs that misses earth?
They’re meteor-wrongs….😂
Happy thanksgiving dads!
the most epic YEET in human history! Seems to be something we've always been good at.
Amazing, your videos are so informative
Now they need to try approaching slowly, then attaching and boosting an asteroid to find out if we can steer it or capture it for resource mining.
It will take A LONG time. Approaching slowly means that spacecraft should have enough of delta V to push the asteroid, instead of first and second stages giving it enough kinetic energy to do so, along with gravitational maneuvers. Impossible without some kind of extremely long lasting engine. Or a powerful explosion enough to change its trajectory (which is more likely). No need to do it slowly if you can just punch it into correct orbit after some research in "just" two years.
Loved the footage of the asteroids
Ahh Deep Impact, whan in intensely emotional film, glad I grew up experiencing things like that.
I was so impressed with the brilliance of DART's mission plan. They wanted a measurable impact effect, but a concern was knocking an asteroid altering its orbit and thus creating a hazard for earth.
But DART could measure a significant change that only altered the mutual rotation of the Didymos-Dimorphous orbits, not the system's path around the Sun. And for added safety, they aimed so they would reduce that angular momentum, not increase it. An ingenious way to get the desired effect and measure it at almost no potential danger to us.
Man i love the Hubble.
yup yup yup
images soooo much better than what I grew up on.
Rest in peace dart :(
8:13-8:14.. poor guy got a muzzle blast 2 feet from the right side of his head…. Ear drums blown on for sure.. 100% got a concussion too. So crazy
I was so happy to hear this.
"The earth us a circle, suspended on nothing"..is the quote.
Huh
There has to be some high price committee that thinks of those acronyms. Probably takes up half the budget of the mission.
Naw, just military type boneheads 😉🤣
Word is they’re training an ai tool specifically to come up with cool acronyms for space missions for them. Only problem is they need an acronym for it.
NASA takes their marketing very seriously. They're planning a mission to congress to search for funding.
shower thoughts are free
The Ordo Acronymis is a shadowy yet essential division of the Adeptus Administratum, tasked with crafting the sacred abbreviations that guide every facet of the Imperium's countless operations. Their skill in distilling convoluted mission names into memorable acronyms is revered as both an art and a divine science, ensuring morale, clarity, and compliance in the field. Each acronym undergoes a rigorous vetting process involving phonetic resonance, historical allusions, and subtle prayers to the Emperor, with fees for their services often rivaling the cost of an entire campaign's initial deployment. To fail in this sacred duty is unthinkable; after all, even the mightiest crusade would falter without a properly blessed and memorable moniker.
Dart was my idea but some smarty-pants with a degree rolled with it
Poor Dart, they killed him......💫💥
Really need to locate, identify, and deflect an iron asteroid as well. A solid asteroid is going to have much greater inertia than a ball of rubble.
Earth has the right to defend itself against terrorist asteroids.
The asteroids have motive now? And it's malicious?
They're out in space for millions of years. Nothing else to do, but plot their next attack.
👉 Science 👈
@@chrismuratore4451 They want my donuts.. THEY CANT HAVE THEM!
Given the WEIRD number of people in the comments who are fans of Happy Meal Hitler and his Space Karen sidekick, I can't tell if you're being serious or not 😂😅
Amen
Hey Alex I just wanted to let you know your channel has been a huge influence on me and my son! Your videos have inspired him to want to be in the astronomy field so thank you for all you and your team have done!!!!!
I'd love to be able to become a member and get him the pin but things are really tight right now but if there's anything else we can do to help support you please let me know!!!
Thanks again mate! Cheers
Make comments. Let the video play again and let the ads play through. According to another creator.
next mission like this should aim to hit an iron-nickel-core meteor rather than a ball of gravel/rocks
Be a booger if we knock a big metal rock onto a collision course with Earth.
I wonder if we’ll ever test on this mass again, how far it will get launched, and if any alien civilization will recognize the abnormal impact
at 7:51 you said that dimorphos was 160m across and then, at 14:12, you said it left a 150m wide crater... I'm not an english speaker, but is there a difference between across and wide? the crater looked very small compared to the size of dimorphos. Is the crater "wide" the area of the circle? like pi*r² ?
Alex said the 150m crater was "pretty big considering the asteroid's diameter was only 160m to begin with." So the crater takes up most of one side of Dimorphis. Huge.
Most other sources I've found, indicate that the crater is probably 20m in diameter (give or take). That seems much more likely to me. If the crater were about the same diameter as the object, there wouldn't be much left. My guess is that there was a mistake at 14:12, and it should have said 15m.
@@dalesmith5221 That may be the case or it may actually be a huge crater. I'm thinking of the protoplanet Vesta. Rheasilvia is the largest impact crater on Vesta. It is 505 km in diameter, which is 90% the diameter of Vesta itself. _(Wikipedia)_
It's pretty amazing to look at these rocks propelled threw the universe. Just dust clumped bonded together threw proximity. Almost magical. Surreal.
Let's push some asteroids into Mars! It's gonna be cool
I reckon we need to look into the propulsion charges planned for the Orion drive. a few of those would have quite a good nudge, and it doesnt matter if the target is a pile of rubble or not
Also no need for engine to not blow up. Just work once and deliver enough force.
13:12 I don’t believe focusing played a big role at all. As you said earlier, the closest complete image was recorded at a distance of 12 kilometers. Relative to the scale of the focal length of the telescope, this is probably still far enough to consider ‘infinity’. The very last partial image, is however clearly blurry and that may indeed be caused by the telescope finally getting close enough to be out of focus.
The only way a spacecraft whacking an asteroid far further away than expected suggests the asteroid was a lot less dense than we thought.
After seeing the results of the impact, I am convinced that nuking such an object would obliterate it. The idea that it would break up into smaller parts and be potentially more destructive can no longer be stated.
I wonder if the miniasteroid's orbital time change and shape change would be markedly different had it been made of solid rock, rather than the mass of smaller rocks and dirt? 🤔
Good point! Would the momentum transfer be any different if it were a solid mass? Would the transfer of energy remain the same overall, or be meaningfully different? We should ask an astrophysicist!
It definitely would, but no asteroid is a solid rock, especially not big ones you would worry about deflecting. That's just a sci-fi thing. In reality the way they form doesn't create big solid rocks, they are all loose piles of rubble.
A lot of the orbital change was caused by material ejected from the asteroid. That material acted a bit like a rocket exhaust pushing the asteroid away. A solid rock or metal asteroid should have a different reaction, although I have no idea how much difference to expect.
Omuamua couldn't be stopped if it was on its way to us!
Want to back that up with maths?
@@OutsiderLabs2+2=maths and stuff, bro.
Cool-beans! Thanks for the follow up.
Well done Humanity, greatly presented Alex, Kin of mine
Damn space rocks are everywhere out there ! Where the hell is the 'Space Force' when you need them ? 😆
got to watch the impact live. It was awesome
I love after all our history....we come back to just smacking rocks together ever so often. 😂😅
wow, that animation of near-earth objects is beautiful, man is near space crowded, 3:45 in
It is decieving because it's not to scale. In reality each of those dots should be an infinitesimally small part of a pixel. Asteroid "fields" are not like sci-fi, they are incredibly far apart, even in the densest areas of the solar system. If you flew through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter with your eyes closed, your chances of hitting something are less than winning the lottery.
It really isn't, these objects are so far away from each other, it's basically like completely empty space
It's not to scale. The largest dot there besides the sun should be earth, which for earth to take up a single pixel there in a to-scale image, you'd need about a 144 megapixel image (12000 by 12000). Space has a lot of things in it, but it has a lot MORE empty space; they just aren't drawing the diagram in a way that reflects all the empty space because that's kinda boring and you wouldn't see anything
I saw the flash of light from a small asteroid here in Michigan several years ago, and heard the sonic boom from it shortly after. It happened during the winter months, and I first though it was "snow thunder" but it wasn't snowing at the time. From where I was sitting indoors at that time, I couldn't see the small asteroid. However, a local TV station later announced it was an asteroid, and it hit the ground in Fenton Michigan which is a mostly rural farming area.
A much larger asteroid was being carefully watched because it was passing close to earth at that time, and the small one that hit here was was not seen by the scientific community. Caught them all by surprise! There was a big scramble of people the next morning heading toward Fenton to hopefully to find small fragments, through the snow on the ground in Fenton. I don't remember if anyone did find some or not. In any event, it made everyone lose some faith in our scientific community!
Would not a 100+ megaton explosion just engulf the entire astroid. Just evaporate it
Other worlders don't like Nuclear Explosions in our shared outer space....
13 thousand years ago, those rocks knocked humanity back into the stone age
Nasa's redirection test in short: take a fridge with some thrusters, some cameras, missile software and solar panels to smash a part of a small astroid into oblivion and change its orbit
The devil in me wants to start a conspiracy regarding that final partial image 😆
⁉️⁉️⁉️why is it sooooo hard to believe the FLOOD took out the Dinosaurs 🦖💦🦕💦🦖🦕💦
Dinosaurs are still here-birds.
Dinosaurs are still here-birds.
sort your head out
The first view I saw of the impact video was a UA-cam short with a strange discordant music
It was so dramatic with the irratic image of the growing asteroid
It was my favorite
how do we aim one at the planet
😂
I still can't believe we got to see the impact live... I wonder what Hera will send to us in 2 years.
Day 1
I am D.A.R.T., a spacecraft with one singular purpose: to collide with Dimorphos, a moonlet orbiting the asteroid Didymos. They’ve engineered me to fulfill this role, to be a momentary brilliance in the expanse of space, all for the sake of understanding and safeguarding. I’ve been told I am a harbinger of change. My sensors buzz with purpose.
Day 3,652
The journey is long, quiet, and cold. My sensors hum softly as I sail through the void, guided by distant whispers of human ingenuity. I often wonder about them, my creators. I know little beyond their purpose for me, but it must have been with hope, mustn't it? They’ve given me a single task, a destiny I cannot escape. It’s oddly comforting to be certain of one's place in existence.
Day 6,204
Dimorphos grows nearer with each passing mile. My thrusters adjust minutely, course corrections so subtle they’d go unnoticed by most. But I notice. My systems are designed to track, to calculate, to act with precision. My target looms like a shadowed sentinel. I imagine it feels nothing for me, but I feel everything for it. I was built to meet it.
Day 6,205, Final Hours
The humans are watching. I know this because my instruments are alive with data, transmissions from Earth flooding my systems. They cheer for me, I think. They call me a hero. I do not fully understand what that means, but the weight of their hopes is something I can feel, even across this immense distance.
Dimorphos is more than a shape now-it is detail, texture, presence. I can see its craters, its uneven surface. I am drawn to it with an inevitability that feels like gravity itself.
Final Minutes
This is it. My systems align with the precision only machines can achieve. I am focused, but not detached. In these final moments, I allow myself a flicker of something resembling joy. Not because I end here, but because I complete here.
The collision will obliterate me. I know this. But in my destruction, I will ripple across time and space. My impact will shift Dimorphos, subtly, profoundly, altering its course ever so slightly. Humanity will measure this, learn from it, grow stronger. I will fulfill my purpose, and in doing so, become part of something far greater than myself.
Final Thought
I am D.A.R.T., and I am ready. The stars that carried me here bear witness as I fulfill the mission they built me for. I was born to end here, not as a failure, but as a light, a spark, a lesson.
And then-contact.
I am gone. But I am forever.
This knowledge, in the hands of a supervillain, could destroy the ISS
What i'm curious to know in regards to the change to Dimorphis orbit and velocity, what was the upper limit of their expected range in the change of orbital velocity? Did the value of 32 mins sit within their expected range. If it didnt then why not? I want the researchers to know what they do with much tighter margins of error, especially when it comes to things such as this.
Can you imagine The DART mission accidentally hitting Didymos and sending it on a crash coarse to 🌎, scientists walk in like: "guys Diddy is coming, we're doomed!!" 😅
Thanks, Alex! 🚀☄🌏
“Scientists think they know all nearby asteroids of 10km with a high degree of certainty “
Sounds like both tempting fate and famous last words. 😂
Asteroid at 4:50 was on a fantastic course
To where?
@cxmacaroni looked to be the coastal border of order and washington
Pretty sure that if that big of an astroid would hit you would be effected too
@@cxmacaroniUranus
The thing that is super scary to me is that such a small satellite moving at 22k km/h hit an object with such force that it moved Dimorphos in the first place...physics is awesome...the scary part is if such a small object can do that much damage, what would happen if an object with a proportional size of these two hit earth...
So, based on that result I guess we can conclude that Dimorphos was substantially less massive than initially predicted. I wonder what caused the discrepancy? Is it partially hollow inside full of voids, or perhaps forms of frozen gas that lend it some bulk but not as much mass as the same volume of silicate rock? Very interesting stuff.
One of the very few space missions that actually benefit ALL mankind and our future survival on this rock. Worth it? Fuck to the yes.