Enlarge / An artist's conception of DART's electronics in the last moments before they suffer catastrophic failure. (credit: NASA )

This coming Monday, NASA will broadcast its first attempt to modify the orbit of an asteroid, a capability that will be essential if we detect an asteroid that poses a threat of colliding with Earth. The planetary defense effort is focused on a craft called DART, for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which will target a small asteroid called Dimorphos that orbits the larger 65803 Didymos, forming a binary system. If all goes according to plan, DART will direct itself to a head-on collision that slows Dimorphos, altering its orbit around Didymos. NASA has repeatedly emphasized that there's no way for either asteroid or any material released by the collision to pose a threat to Earth.

Ars will be at the mission control center in the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) for the planned collision, which will also be broadcast live on NASA's YouTube channels. While we'll know immediately whether the collision occurred as planned, it may take several months before we're certain that Dimorphos' orbit was successfully modified.

To get you ready for Monday's festivities, we've put together a background on the DART mission and the planned follow-up observations.

Enlarge / A NASA rendering of the Lucy spacecraft before efforts were made to fully open one of its solar arrays in May and June. (credit: NASA)

NASA confirmed this week that its Lucy mission to explore a series of asteroids has a clean bill of health as it approaches a key gravity assist maneuver in October.

In a new update , the space agency said Lucy's solar arrays are "stable enough" for the $1 billion spacecraft to carry out its science operations over the coming years as it visits a main-belt asteroid, 52246 Donaldjohanson, and subsequently flies by eight Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun.

The fate of the Lucy mission had been in question since the first hours after it launched on an Atlas V rocket last October when one of its two large solar arrays failed to fully open and securely latch. Each of the arrays was intended to unfurl like a hand fan.

Enlarge / Lindy Elkins-Tanton, second from left, and colleagues in Siberia. (credit: Scott Simper / ASU)

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a Siberian-river-running, arc-welding, code-writing, patent-holding, company-founding, asteroid-exploring, igneous petrologist professor. At various times, she has been a farmer, a trainer of competition sheepdogs, a children’s book author, and a management consultant for Boeing Helicopters. She’s currently a professor at Arizona State University , she helps run a learning company , and she is the principal investigator for NASA’s “Psyche” mission to a metal asteroid .

Her self-described “curvy” career path has taken her research into planet formation, magma oceans, mass extinctions, and mantle melting. The results she’s generated have been foundational and have earned her a constellation of prestigious awards. There is even an asteroid—Asteroid 8252 Elkins-Tanton—named after her.

Given all that, perhaps the biggest revelation in her new autobiography , A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, is that this stellar high achiever was plagued by the same doubts and lack of confidence that afflict the rest of us. She wavered between forestry and geology as she was applying for college, she was stymied by organic chemistry as a freshman, and she was told she either wasn’t studying hard enough or wasn’t good enough. At times she felt she didn’t belong, and at other times she was told so. But Elkins-Tanton overcame those obstacles—and others far more profound.