decription of haiti after weeks of protests at the economic and fuel supply crises. and work begins to remove the tens of thousands of floral tributes left to honour the queen, in central london. welcome to our viewers on pbs in america and around the globe. within the last few hours, nasa has successfully managed to test the world s first planetary defence system by deliberately crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid. the dart mission is the first ever attempt to change the course of a large object roughly the size of a football stadium. the probe is thought to have hit the asteroid targetjust i7 metres off the bullseye. a live camera relayed the spacecraft s final few seconds to nasa scientists before it crashed into the rock. there, oh, my goodness. oh, wow. four, three, two, one. oh, my gosh! whoo! oh, wow! confirming visual confirmation. cheering at a press conference following the succesful mission, the dart team spoke of their relief that the mission had been ach
feeling. and also very tiring. quite a lot of money going into it as well. earlier, i spoke to former rocket scientist and editor of nasawatch.com, keith cowing, who spoke about the scale of the mission. what you re talking about is you have got a little man orbiting another asteroid. this asteroid might cause a problem to earth butjust because we knockedit to earth butjust because we knocked it around doesn t mean that we made things worse. we are not going to be hit by it. but what they were trying to do is by slamming something into this moment, to give itjust enough of a punch that it might change the orbit of the as to write just a little bit and that may be enough to prevent any other asteroid that we determined to be a problem hitting earth. but it requires a lot of precision and i7 a lot of precision and 17