The NASA Dart Mission was designed to test whether a probe could knock a hazardous space rock away from a crash course with Earth.
NASA’S usually pretty careful with its spacecraft. But this time, with DART, it’s different. A team of scientists have now deliberately plowed a craft into a tumbling space rock at high speed. The NASA Dart Mission Accomplished.
The impact occurred at 7:14 p.m. ET greeted by cheers from the mission team in Laurel, Maryland. The NASA Dart Mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, launched 10 months ago.
At the time of impact, Didymos and Dimorphos were relatively close to Earth – within 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers). The team estimates that the spacecraft hit the asteroid at a point about 55 feet (17 meters) away from the space rock’s center.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A NASA spacecraft rammed an asteroid at blistering speed Monday in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock menaces Earth.
While the asteroid, Dimorphos, was not at risk of impacting Earth, this demonstration could determine how to deflect space rocks that could pose a threat to Earth in the future.
“We’re embarking on a new era of humankind, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous, hazardous asteroid impact,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “What an amazing thing. We’ve never had that capability before.”
The DART spacecraft also revealed what Dimorphos looks like for the very first time.
“It looks adorable, it’s so cute,” said Carolyn Ernst, DRACO Instrument Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab. “It looks in a lot of ways like some of the other small asteroids we’ve seen.”
“They have to make it exciting, you know, we find the asteroid only 18 days before it’s going to impact, and everybody runs around with their hair on fire,” he says. “That’s not the way to do planetary defense.”
NASA Dart Mission or Double Asteroid
- NASA just crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to change its motion in space. “The NASA Dart Mission Accomplished”
- This was part of NASA’S DART – or Double Asteroid Redirection Test – mission
- DART’s goal is to be able to knock an asteroid off path if one ever threatens Earth.
- The spacecraft collided with Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Didymos, at 15,000 miles per hour.
- Dimorphos was chosen for this mission because its size is relative to asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth.
- There are more than 27,000 near-Earth asteroids – none of which are currently on a direct impact course with Earth
- DART’s success will be determined by telescopes on Earth observing how much Dimorphos’ orbit changes after impact orbit changes after impact.
- The impact may change the speed of Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%
