How Asteroid Deflection Works

In October 2026 ESA's Hera spacecraft sent its first picture of the double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos, the moonlet NASA's DART spacecraft hit on purpose in 2022. This film explains the established science behind planetary defence: what near-Earth objects are, what the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk airbursts showed, how often rocks of each size strike, how surveys find asteroids and turn a few sightings into an orbit and an impact probability, the Torino scale, how a kinetic impactor works through momentum and the extra push of its ejecta (the factor beta), how DART shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 33 minutes and why a binary asteroid made that measurable, what Hera will measure, the gravity tractor and nuclear options that remain proposals, and why years of warning matter most.

Nudging a world

How we find dangerous asteroids, and how we could push one away.

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