I did not plan on staying up for this. Monday night I had every intention of going to bed at a normal hour, and then I remembered NASA was about to fly a fridge-sized spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose, live, with a camera bolted to the front of it, and that plan went out the window.
So: DART. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test. It's been in the news for a while as "the planetary defense mission," which sounds like a Michael Bay pitch meeting, and honestly the whole thing kind of is one, minus Bruce Willis. NASA launched this thing back in November last year, aimed it at a little moonlet called Dimorphos that orbits a bigger asteroid called Didymos, and the entire point of the mission was to smash into it at close to 14,000 miles an hour and see if that nudges its orbit. Neither asteroid is any threat to Earth, to be clear — this is a test, a proof of concept for "what if one day we actually needed to do this for real."
I pulled up NASA's stream around 7pm Eastern on my laptop, half paying attention while I made dinner, and then somewhere around the last twenty minutes I just stood in the kitchen staring at the screen like an idiot. The DRACO camera on DART was sending back one image per second, and at first Dimorphos was just a dot next to the much bigger Didymos. Then it separated into its own dot. Then it stopped being a dot and started being a shape, and you could see it was lumpy and gray and covered in boulders, and it kept getting bigger and bigger in the frame with this horrible calm, no dramatic music, just mission control counting down altitude and a room full of people at Johns Hopkins APL getting quieter and quieter.
The last full image came in from about 7 miles out. The very last transmission was half a frame, cut off mid-download, because the spacecraft had already hit. 7:14pm Eastern, impact confirmed, and then the room just erupted. That part actually got me a little — not the science, the reaction. Grown adults who've spent years of their lives on this project just screaming and hugging each other because a piece of hardware they built did exactly what it was supposed to do, once, forever, no do-overs. There's something about a mission where you get literally one shot and it either works or it's over that hits different than a normal launch.
Here's the thing nobody's saying loudly enough though: we don't actually know if it worked yet. We know DART hit the target, which honestly was the "easy" part given how good the onboard targeting software is. What we don't know is whether the impact actually changed Dimorphos's orbit around Didymos by a measurable amount. NASA's own benchmark is something like a 73-second shift as the minimum for calling it a real success, with about 10 minutes being the expected change if things go well, and that number only comes from weeks of ground and space telescopes watching how the two asteroids' shadow-and-light pattern shifts over time. So this whole viral moment, the "we did it!" headlines, the memes: all of that is really just "we hit the thing," which was never really in doubt. The actual result is still pending.
I'll admit my brain went straight to Armageddon and Deep Impact while I was watching, because how could it not, but the real version is so much less dramatic and somehow more nerve-wracking. No countdown horns, no dramatic music, just a slow zoom on gray rock and a room of scientists holding their breath. My NASA TV stream also chose the literal worst possible thirty seconds to buffer, right as the picture was getting big and detailed, and I nearly threw my laptop across the kitchen. Got it back with about four seconds to spare before the signal cut.
Anyway. We spent money and years of engineering time to build a very expensive, very precise way to punch a rock, and it worked, at least the punching part. Ask me again in a few weeks whether the rock actually moved.