NASA launched a spacecraft Tuesday night on a mission to crash with an asteroid to see if it’s feasible to deflect a fast-moving space rock away from Earth if one were to threaten the planet.
The DART spacecraft, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a $330 million mission that echoed the Bruce Willis film “Armageddon.”
If all goes well, it will collide head-on with Dimorphos, an asteroid measuring 525 feet (160 meters) diameter, in September 2022. (24,139 kph). “The asteroid will not be destroyed by this. It’ll only nudge it in the right direction “Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is in charge of the project, is a mission official.
Dimorphos is orbited by Didymos, a considerably bigger asteroid. The two pose no threat to Earth, but they do provide scientists with a means to assess the collision’s efficacy.
Dimorphos orbits Didymos once every 11 hours and 55 minutes. DART’s mission is to produce a collision that will slow Dimorphos down and make it to fall closer to the larger asteroid, reducing its orbit by 10 minutes. Earth-based telescopes will monitor the shift in orbital period. The objective must alter by at least 73 seconds to be declared successful.
The DART technology might be used to modify the trajectory of an asteroid years or decades before it collides with Earth, posing a threat of disaster.
A slight push “would build up to a large alteration in its future location, and the asteroid and the Earth would no longer be on a collision trajectory,” according to Chabot.
