¶ Understanding Asteroid Craters and Formation
The Space Pod, questions from kids. I'm Carrie Nugent. I'm a professor at Olin College, and I study asteroids. As every scientist knows, nobody asks harder or better science questions than kids. Today's question is from Isaac, age five. My name is Isaac and I'm five years old. How many potholes are on an asteroid? Potholes or craters. Oh craters, really.
Well, that's a great question, Isaac, and thanks for asking it. My name is Nancy Chabot. I'm the chief scientist of the space exploration sector at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Club. And I work on asteroids and studying asteroids and have looked at lots of asteroids. And your question is like really simple, but it's also super hard to answer because
Craters come at so many different sizes. They come at really giant craters that you can see everywhere, but they go all the way down to tiny, tiny, tiny little craters. In fact, even when we look at the rock. on some asteroids, they have little tiny potholes, craters like in them. And so if I had to count all of those, it would be more than than I could count like all day long. But we do study them and they're really interesting because
What they do is they reveal material that is on the inside of that rock or on the inside of that asteroid and they bring it up to the surface. So craters are fascinating in that way. The craters on the asteroids form because asteroids get hit by stuff all of the time. They've been hitting each other for
Billions of years this has happened. Billions of years these asteroids have run into each other, making these craters, small craters, big craters, sometimes destroying the whole asteroid and blowing it into bits. And then those bits go off and hit other things. And this happens all the time and has been happening. So there are a lot of craters on asteroids, and it really depends on the size.
¶ The DART Mission's Intentional Impact
So along with things running into each other, getting destroyed and hitting each other to make those creators, I was involved in a mission called DART, the double asteroid redirection test mission. And it purposefully made a new crater on an asteroid. We purposefully designed this spacecraft.
and threw it into space at fourteen thousand miles per hour and crashed it into an asteroid on purpose to move the asteroid slightly and it made a crater. Now we don't know what the crater looks like because that spacecraft was Totally destroyed. But The Hera mission, which is being led by the European Space Agency, is going to go orbit that asteroid later this year.
And I'm so excited to go see what that crater that we made with that spacecraft on that asteroid looks like with this mission. So that's a little bit about craters on asteroids. You were on the mission and you were watching this spacecraft that you helped build smash into this asteroid moon. What did that feel like?
When we were watching the Dart spacecraft crash into the asteroid, people would ask us a lot of times, are we sad? Are we sad that we built this spacecraft and now we're gonna go destroy it? And no, instead we were super excited and proud. This is what we designed this spacecraft to do. It was filling its destiny, its fate, and it did it so successfully. That spacecraft had to autonomously on its own
Fire the engines and target towards the center of the asteroid. This asteroid that had never been seen before. The spacecraft had to like do all this smart processing on board in order to make that happen. And you know what? that spacecraft hit within six feet of the center of that asteroid. It did so good. We were so proud of it. And seeing this asteroid that we had never seen before with those images that came back in real time. Oh, it was amazing, total highlight of my career.
¶ Learning More About Planetary Defense
If folks want to learn more about Dart and your work, what should they do? Well, a good way to learn more about planetary defense that we call it, which is looking at asteroids in order to help protect the planet, is to go to science.nasa.gov slash planetary defense. That tells you a lot about these asteroids that are closest to the Earth. For the DART mission in particular, we have a really great website, and that's DART.jhuap-l.edu. I would recommend both of those.
Fun fact, if you just go into Google and you type Dart mission into your browser, you'll get a little Easter egg that happens when you do that search. So I totally encourage you to do that. Just go into your browser, type Dart mission, and you'll see what happens. That was amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks, Isaac, for your question. And thanks to Dr. Chabot for her answer.
Do you know a kid with a space question? I'd love to hear it. Just record them asking the question and upload the audio file at listen to spacepod.com. I'll do my best to get them an answer. You can find Spacepod on almost any podcast player or at listen to spacepod dot com. The show is produced by me, Carrie Nugent.
Intro music is from The Return by Deltron thirty thirty. Huge thanks to Deltron thirty thirty for letting me use it. The beeps you just heard are from the very first space probe, Sputnik. The views expressed here do not reflect the views of my employer or the employer of my guest. Thanks for listening.