Can We Stop an Asteroid? The Physics Behind NASA’s DART Mission (EP. 30)

From First Principles · Mar 16, 2026 · 54m · transcript

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a full deep dive on planetary defense. We break down NASA’s DART mission, why the goal was never to “blow up” an asteroid but to gently nudge it, and why the newest result is even bigger than the original headline: scientists can now directly detect that the Didymos–Dimorphos system changed not just locally, but in its heliocentric path around the Sun.

Summary

DART actually worked — not just by shortening Dimorphos’s local orbit around Didymos by 33 minutes, but by measurably changing the motion of the whole binary system around the…