Behind the Spacecraft: Andy Rivkin

NASA’s #DARTmission is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to try to change its motion in space. But how will we know if this test worked? That’s where Johns Hopkins APL scientist Andy Rivkin comes in. He’ll be studying the precise change in the asteroid’s motion right here from Earth. In fact, Andy loves DART so much, he even wrote a song about it. Follow DART: www.nasa.gov/DART

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.