Washington: NASA is preparing a mission to intentionally smash a spacecraft into an asteroid – a test run should humanity ever need to stop a giant space rock from wiping out life on Earth.
It may sound like science fiction, but DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is an actual proof-of-concept experiment that took place aboard a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday (0621 GMT Wednesday) at 10:21 p.m. Pacific Time is being destroyed. in California.
The goal is to slightly change the trajectory of Dimorphos, a “moonlight” approximately 525 feet (160 m, or two Statue of Liberty) wide that encircles a much larger asteroid called Didymos (2,500 feet in diameter). pair class Sunday Together.
The impact should occur in the fall of 2022, when the binary asteroid system is 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, nearly the closest point they ever meet.
“What we’re trying to learn is how to address a threat,” Thomas Zuburchen, top NASA scientist, said of the $330 million project, the first of its kind.
To be clear, the asteroids in question pose no threat to our planet.
But they belong to a class of objects known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), which come within 30 million miles.
of nasa Planetary Defense Coordination Office Most are of interest to those larger than 460 feet, which have the ability to level entire cities or regions with many times the energy of an average atomic bomb.
The 10,000 known near-Earth asteroids are 460 feet or more in size, but none have a significant chance of being hit in the next 100 years. One major caveat: Scientists think there are still 15,000 more such objects to be discovered.
Planetary scientists can create miniature impacts in laboratories and use the results to build sophisticated models of how an asteroid is supposed to turn – but the models always fall short of real-world tests.
Scientists say the Didymos-Dimorphos system is an “ideal natural laboratory” because Earth-based telescopes can easily measure the pair’s brightness variations and judge the time it takes the Moon to orbit its bigger brother .
Since the current orbit period is known, the change will reveal the effect of the impact to occur between 26 September and 1 October 2022.
Furthermore, since the orbits of asteroids never intersect our planet, they are considered safe to study.
The DART probe, which is a box the size of a large fridge with limousine-sized solar panels on either side, will hit just 15,000 mph in Dimorphos.
Andy rivkin, the leadership of the DART probe team said the current orbital period is 11 hours 55 minutes, and the team expects Kick to be about 10 minutes past that time.
There is some uncertainty about how much energy will be transferred by the impact, as the internal structure and porosity of moonshine are not known.
The more debris generated, the more pressure will be exerted on the dimorphos.
“Every time we look at an asteroid, we find stuff we don’t expect,” Rivkin said.
The Dart spacecraft also carries sophisticated equipment for navigation and imaging, including: italian space agencyThe Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids (LICIACube) to see the accident and its after-effects.
“CubeSat is going to give us, we hope, the shot, the most spectacular image of the impact of Dart and the ejecta plume emanating from the asteroid. It will be a truly historic, spectacular image,” said Tom Statler, Dart Program Scientist.
The so-called “kinetic impactor” method is not the only way to bend an asteroid, but it is the only method that is ready to be deployed with current technology.
Others that have been envisaged include flying a spacecraft closer to provide a smaller gravitational force.
Another is detonating a nuclear one – but not on the object itself, as in the Armageddon and Deep Impact movies – that would probably create many more dangerous objects.
Scientists estimate that 460-foot asteroids collide once every 20,000 years.
Asteroids six miles or more wide – such as those that struck 66 million years ago and caused the extinction of most life on Earth, including the dinosaurs – occur in about 100-200 million years.
It may sound like science fiction, but DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is an actual proof-of-concept experiment that took place aboard a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday (0621 GMT Wednesday) at 10:21 p.m. Pacific Time is being destroyed. in California.
The goal is to slightly change the trajectory of Dimorphos, a “moonlight” approximately 525 feet (160 m, or two Statue of Liberty) wide that encircles a much larger asteroid called Didymos (2,500 feet in diameter). pair class Sunday Together.
The impact should occur in the fall of 2022, when the binary asteroid system is 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, nearly the closest point they ever meet.
“What we’re trying to learn is how to address a threat,” Thomas Zuburchen, top NASA scientist, said of the $330 million project, the first of its kind.
To be clear, the asteroids in question pose no threat to our planet.
But they belong to a class of objects known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), which come within 30 million miles.
of nasa Planetary Defense Coordination Office Most are of interest to those larger than 460 feet, which have the ability to level entire cities or regions with many times the energy of an average atomic bomb.
The 10,000 known near-Earth asteroids are 460 feet or more in size, but none have a significant chance of being hit in the next 100 years. One major caveat: Scientists think there are still 15,000 more such objects to be discovered.
Planetary scientists can create miniature impacts in laboratories and use the results to build sophisticated models of how an asteroid is supposed to turn – but the models always fall short of real-world tests.
Scientists say the Didymos-Dimorphos system is an “ideal natural laboratory” because Earth-based telescopes can easily measure the pair’s brightness variations and judge the time it takes the Moon to orbit its bigger brother .
Since the current orbit period is known, the change will reveal the effect of the impact to occur between 26 September and 1 October 2022.
Furthermore, since the orbits of asteroids never intersect our planet, they are considered safe to study.
The DART probe, which is a box the size of a large fridge with limousine-sized solar panels on either side, will hit just 15,000 mph in Dimorphos.
Andy rivkin, the leadership of the DART probe team said the current orbital period is 11 hours 55 minutes, and the team expects Kick to be about 10 minutes past that time.
There is some uncertainty about how much energy will be transferred by the impact, as the internal structure and porosity of moonshine are not known.
The more debris generated, the more pressure will be exerted on the dimorphos.
“Every time we look at an asteroid, we find stuff we don’t expect,” Rivkin said.
The Dart spacecraft also carries sophisticated equipment for navigation and imaging, including: italian space agencyThe Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids (LICIACube) to see the accident and its after-effects.
“CubeSat is going to give us, we hope, the shot, the most spectacular image of the impact of Dart and the ejecta plume emanating from the asteroid. It will be a truly historic, spectacular image,” said Tom Statler, Dart Program Scientist.
The so-called “kinetic impactor” method is not the only way to bend an asteroid, but it is the only method that is ready to be deployed with current technology.
Others that have been envisaged include flying a spacecraft closer to provide a smaller gravitational force.
Another is detonating a nuclear one – but not on the object itself, as in the Armageddon and Deep Impact movies – that would probably create many more dangerous objects.
Scientists estimate that 460-foot asteroids collide once every 20,000 years.
Asteroids six miles or more wide – such as those that struck 66 million years ago and caused the extinction of most life on Earth, including the dinosaurs – occur in about 100-200 million years.
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