Game of DART
We are no longer playing darts in the dark. The possibility of a cataclysmic meteor strike impacting Earth was first explicitly forecast in 1941 by Harvard astronomer Fletcher Watson, who wrote about the dangers of an Earth-crossing asteroid crashing into the planet. While the first Earth-crossing asteroid was found in 1932, Watson’s 1941 writings are cited as the first cogent technical literature to forecast both the enormity and rarity of such an impact. This hypothesis gained broader scientific consensus in the late 20th century, particularly after the 1980 Alvarez team discovery of iridium at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, which confirmed that impacts had caused mass extinctions. For decades, the idea of deflecting an asteroid that might hit Earth was a theoretical exercise—something scientists hoped would work, but had never proven. It was a "possibility" based on computer models. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission changed that. By crashing...