DART is the mission based on the Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon. You know, the movie where the oil drillers are trained to go to space because there couldn’t possibly be an astronaut capable of being trained to be an oil driller. Anyway, if you think Michael Bay’s explosions are over the top, well so was the DART mission. It rammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a lazy 22,000 kph which was expected (by NASA) to shorten its orbit around Didymos by about 10 min. Turns out they were wrong. Bits of pulverised asteroid were expelled into space and its orbit was reduced by more than 30 min.

With no sense of irony, NASA came out and said ‘this might have felt like a movie plot, but we showed that NASA is a serious defender of the Earth’. (Actually, they used the word ‘planet’, not ‘Earth’, but Earth fits better into my story 😊). Defenders of the Earth was a marvel comic based around Flash Gordon, the Phantom, and Mandrake the Magician. So now NASA is a marvel comic band of superheros? Good for them. They weren’t the only ones doing the back-slapping and congratulating though. Bill Nye (the science guy) came out (not in that way) and said missions like this could ‘save the planet’. Honestly, I think the planet is pretty much indifferent to asteroid impacts. Even big ones are weathered within a few thousand years or so. Different story for humans though.

But let’s let NASA have their moment of glory. The mission so far looks like a great success and means that we might be able to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs. If we could find an incoming asteroid in time to do the initial investigation and scoping, get the required funding from governments and organisations around the world, design and build a launch vehicle and kinetic impactor, actually launch it successfully – because let’s face it, projects like this are always right on schedule – we might be ok.

I feel so much safer now.

TL;DR – asteroid go boom, NASA say yay