Behind the Spacecraft: Justyna Surowiec

NASA searches the skies every night to find, track and catalogue near-Earth objects. But what would they do if there were a threat? NASA is launching its first planetary defense test mission — DART — and Johns Hopkins APL public affairs officer Justyna Surowiec wants to make sure you know all about it.
The DART mission is a test of a technique that could be used to mitigate the threat of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth should one be discovered in the future. DART’s target is not a threat to Earth. While no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years, only about 40 percent of those asteroids have been found as of October 2021.