we've seen asteroids come through the atmosphere and kind of explode
and cause some damage and thankfully so far nothing recent enough that it really has a
large large impact on our civilization but it could happen there are multiple different ways
that you might attack the problem of oh no doomsday asteroid is inbound
one of those ways is a kinetic interceptor which is what dart is working on
as part of planetary defense dart which stands for double asteroid redirection test its mission is to
impact an asteroid in a binary system the reason we're doing this test is to try and prove out the
technologies that would be needed to say save earth if an asteroid were coming our direction
and we needed to adjust its trajectory so that it would miss the planet smart nav is the autonomous
algorithm on board and the purpose of smart nav is to identify demorphis which is the smaller
of the two asteroids in the dynamo system and we send maneuver commands to the spacecraft for the
spacecraft to hit demorphis smart nav the small body maneuvering autonomous real-time navigation
set of algorithms was developed because as we're getting images in from the spacecraft there's
not enough time for humans to be in that loop responding issuing guidance commands up to the
spacecraft so we've developed a set of autonomous algorithms to look at the images that are coming
in on the camera to assess them to identify what pixels correspond to asteroids what pixels don't
then to take those asteroids feed them into a filter that then estimates how far are we
actually going to miss the asteroid we need to correct our trajectory to hit it and so
all of that's going to go on onboard the spacecraft we don't really know exactly
what we're going to see when we get there the way smart nav operates is it has to essentially
derive exactly how it's going to maneuver the spacecraft based purely on what it sees
draco is our instrument on board and so it really is the camera so if you consider the brain
as the smart nav algorithm draco is the eyes that provides the inputs to the smartnav algorithm
smartnav moves the spacecraft from side to side the guidance and control part makes sure that
spacecraft is pointed in the right direction so you know if you're taking a picture with a camera
and you don't point it in the right direction you don't see anything you don't see anything
smart name is not going to be able to work there really is this focus on we need to be
able to collect data at the very end and one of the things that interferes with the collection
of data is when we do maneuvers when we maneuver we shake things and we can get blurry images now
from the standpoint of smart nav a slightly blurry image is fine we can still find the center of it
but from the standpoint of trying to track on the asteroid individual craters to help tell
the scientists precisely where we hit that's not going to work so there's this restriction that
about two minutes out we have to stop maneuvering and we're moving at six kilometers a second so if
you actually look at that on the map it's as if we were over the indy 500 when we stopped maneuvering
and then we simply have to coast all the way to baltimore and we have to land inside camden yards
to be successful we have to show that we actually change the orbit of the secondary asteroid around
the primary even though we don't know exactly what demorphus will look like
we're confident that we've kind of spanned the simulation space of what that could look like
and in all of those cases we're confident that we'll be able to close that loop
and impact the asteroid that we want to impact this will be the first time that a spacecraft
does do this autonomous navigation guidance and control on board and it will be the first
of many future missions that we are going to put more autonomous behaviors on board a spacecraft
and so for us this is kind of the first step in that path