NASA’s DART mission successfully hits an asteroid
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This article was originally published on September 26, 2022 at 11:00 AM ET.
Tonight, the world had to see if NASA’s attempt to redirect the asteroid Dimorphos would be a huge success. It’s too early to know if the test hit all its targets, but the first leg went according to plan.
At approximately 7:16 PM ET, the car-sized spacecraft delivered a dynamic impact to the target. After visual confirmation from the vehicle’s cameras, the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland announced, “Okay.” After that, the signal from the beat-up spacecraft was lost.
“Now is the time for science to begin,” Laurie Lethin, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said live on air. An age that has the potential to protect itself from things like… how wonderful.
As a dry run for future asteroid prediction and deflection, a spacecraft named the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (or DART) slammed into an asteroid tonight at about 7 million miles from Earth at 14,000 miles per hour. Space telescopes and cameras monitored the impact, but it will take days or possibly weeks to see if DART actually changed the rock’s trajectory. NASA program scientist Tom Statler said at a media briefing last week, “This is like the science fiction books I was a kid in, a very corny episode of Star Trek.” , which is now a reality.
The $325 million planetary defense test will begin with the November 2021 launch of DART. The goal is for the spacecraft to push the 525-foot-wide asteroid into a tighter orbit around its parent rock (Didimos, Greek for “twin”). Dimorphus is a small relative of the 2,500-foot-wide Didymus, a satellite that orbits large rocks at distances of less than a mile. The two make up a binary asteroid system. In other words, a small moon (Dimorphus) orbits a large body (Didymos). The asteroid pair was chosen in part because neither asteroid poses any threat to Earth, according to NASA.
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“This is really about asteroid deflection, not destruction,” said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, at a briefing last week. “This isn’t going to blow up an asteroid. We’re not going to put it in a lot of pieces.” thrown into space.
DART weighs 1,260 pounds, but it weighed far more when it hit the 11 billion-pound asteroid. “Some people describe it as driving a golf cart to the Great Pyramids,” says Chabot. The spacecraft would not survive a collision, and its pieces would slowly break apart in the low gravitational field of the asteroid system.
The DART spacecraft was manufactured by APL under the direction of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). APL’s mission aims to demonstrate that a spacecraft can deflect an asteroid large enough to destroy (or an asteroid just a few hundred feet wide) when it deliberately collides with it. This method is called kinetic impact deflection, and is just one of several methods that have been proposed to redirect potentially dangerous asteroids.
[Related: An asteroid the size of a blue whale is speeding past Earth today]
According to the European Space Agency, the effects of the collision were only visible from a small part of the Earth passing through large telescopes on the South African island of Reunion, an Indian Ocean island, and Namibia.
NASA estimates the chance of DART missing an asteroid at less than 10%. The crash itself was inevitably exciting, but the mission isn’t just about crashing into a rock in space to see if it can be done. also helps. After tonight, the research team will return to Earth and use telescopes to measure how much the asteroid has deflected.
DART is one of several asteroid-related space missions. About a pound of space debris from a distant rock, Bennu is now heading to Earth for further study, and in September 2023 she is scheduled to arrive via NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Additionally, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is exploring a Trojan asteroid near Jupiter, and the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout is aboard NASA’s New Moon rocket, awaiting launch as part of the Artemis I mission.
Check out the full video of the countdown and impact moments below.
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