UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — On Sept. 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos and marked humanity’s first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object and the first full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology. As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos — which poses no threat to Earth — demonstrated a mitigation technique for potentially protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid in the future.

Nancy Chabot, planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, will share some of the latest results relating to DART’s impact event and discuss what that means for potentially applying this technique, if needed in the future, in her talk "Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART): NASA’s First Planetary Defense Test Mission” at 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 27. The talk, which is free and open to the public, takes place in 112 Walker Building.

Chabot’s talk is part of EESI’s Spring 2023 EarthTalks speaker series, “Exploration of our Solar System.” We now live in the golden age of solar system exploration. With a dozen NASA missions currently in development — as well as spacecraft actively on Mars, near Jupiter and in the Kuiper belt — the current scale of mission activity is unprecedented and brings forth a new era of comparative study of varied worlds at the systems level. The 2023 Spring EarthTalk series is intended to provide a venue for the expansion of participant’s horizons into our solar system.

The series is supported by Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. Talks are also available via Zoom. For more information about the spring 2023 series, visit the EarthTalks web page.