The Insane Engineering of the DART Mission

I'm just here to give props for that 'the dinosaurs finally clapped back' line

I think it's awesome that when I was a kid we'd never seen an asteroid up close, and since then Rosetta visited a comet, Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx collected samples, and DART demonstrated planetary defence, all in less than 10 years

Love to see humanity entering the "planetary defense" phase of our development.

I worked on DART, love to see Real Engineering covering the mission!

That first joke about the dinos clapping back was enough to get me invested for the rest of the video.

Good job humans! You have passed one of the great filters. Keep it up!

Look at us. We went from throwing rocks at each other to throwing metalic objects at big rocks in space. 😁

"The dinosaurs finally clapped back" is honestly the funniest sentence I've heard recently.

Hey Brian! I don't know if you will see this but your videos has changed my life. I was always interested in space and engineering and watching your videos motivated me to get into this field. Now I am pursuing a masters degree in Physics and a bachelors in engineering. It might be just another upload for you but each video you post is a life changing moment for someone. I really love watching your videos. Thank you!

The facility to watch content like this for free is a blessing

Wow I never actually saw the official results, a change in 4.5% is actually crazy I didn’t expect that much

I'm still happy that dart was a huge massive success than we all expected

When you said "tools in our arsenal" I heard '"tools in our arse, and all..." ...which is not surprising given that when I was 12 years old I'd humiliated myself in science class by claiming that "the dinosaurs went extinct due to earth being hit by a hemorrhoid..." Ahh... the circle of life! (btw - great video!)

Ok but the 5% difference I didn't actually expect that's actually wild to think that the space craft imparted that much energy onto the 'moon'

The thruster targeting system looks so similar to star tracking software (autoguider) used in astrophotography for long exposures. It would seem that system could be designed to replace moving the servo motors with tapping the thrusters. So cool.

The large orbit change had to be due more to the ejecta than the DART impact alone. Would have liked to see a simplified version of a momentum analysis in this video.

I explains Real Engineering as the channel that opens a brand new dimension to explore. It's my favourite channel.

I still don't think people get how big this is. We took what was once considered a dooms day situation and made it beatable

Now if only we could prevent a man-made radioactive projectile from hitting earth

5:24 I got a nitpick: the orbit that results from the collision is shown to circularize, or in other words, the dotted line appears to "spiral inwards" after collision. This would only occur if ejecta from the impact was being continuously released from the asteroid for a duration of at least half an orbit. It seems pretty sure that whatever ejecta occurs would do so immediately after the impact. If this is the case, the resulting orbit will be an ellipse, not a circle, with an apoapsis equivalent to its distance at the time of impact, and a periapsis much smaller than that of the original orbit.