NASA media briefing feat; Kate Calvin (Chief Scientist), Lindley Johnson (Planetary Defense Officer), Tom Statler (Program Scientist), Ed Reynolds (DART project manager), Lena Adams (DART systems engineer).
Couple things off the bat. First, these press conferences by NASA tend to be dumbed down. They're scared of being connected to the inevitable "Aliens-Confirmed" headlines and don't want to be left without an alibi. Second, they suck at reading teleprompters for nerves and lack of practice. They themselves usually wrote whats on the teleprompter but you can never be too sure. There for certain was editing involved regardless. This one was way better than say the Perseverance one, so on the higher end of panel-previews.
This is a preview, and the impact happened last night. I'll put up a during-impact-vid below but there's more information in this one. Test results with the good stuff for this particular mission will come in the form of a scatter of astronomical observations in the next few weeks followed by a lecture which may take a year (depends on who publishes first.) Then the ESA Hera mission will follow up in 2024 and kind of absorb the DART mission, giving a bunch of quick images before a lull before anyone publishes and lectures.
- Tom Statler, the skinny guy in the middle, drops some good info at 5:30. Most Reddit level questions will be answered in this bit.
- Lena Adams' bit starting 13:20 is pretty good, but possibly old news at the time I post this.
- At 15:40 public Q&A starts. It's pretty good. Partly because it's a mix of credited media reporters who do this full-time. There's a big difference between a press-conference and a press-release They aren't random reporters, they do NASA and they personally know the NAS'ites. These reporters know how to ask good questions and they usually compare notes prior so they ask different questions.
- One thing I noted was that Dimorphos did in fact look a lot like Bennu, but there was a bit predicting it would not. That's not really a contradiction. They know the density of both and density is a bigger deal than albedo. They also know the spectroscopy and that gives them an average idea of what the rubble in the rubble pile is. So DART probably was stopped by Dimorphos but for sure there was a splody. The astronomers will have something to say today or soon.
This one is happening at LPI at the same time as the countdown to impact. So there are some wonky editing-presentation things that happen but in this day-&-age are actually normal for these kinds of live events.
- At 30:00 it goes into Q&A
- At 39:30 the Q&A is interrupted to see the impact. There's no video but there is audio.
- At 49:10 Ed reacts "With all those boulders It's definitely looking fluffy." Implying he suspects it would have deviated from orbit a lot and sent out a lot of debris.
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