World

“Asteroids, We’re Coming For You”: NASA Launches Mission, A First

November 24, 2021
Sezarr

A NASA mission intentionally sabotaged a spacecraft in the asteroid Dimorphos explosions.

NASA has launched a mission to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid – the world’s first to test asteroid-deflection technology. The space probe will collide with the asteroid to change its speed and course.

“Asteroid Dimorphos: We’re Coming For You!” The space agency tweeted today with a clip of the explosion.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket The DART (Double Asteroid Redirect Test) experiment lifted off at 10:21 p.m. Pacific time from Vandenberg Space Force Base near California in the US, a NASA TV livestream showed.

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). This pair orbits the Sun together.

The impact is expected in the fall of 2022, when the binary asteroid system is 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, the closest point they have ever seen.

The test is intended to determine whether or not a real asteroid impact threat is detected in the future, and the technology is sufficient.

NASA said that Dart’s target asteroid does not currently pose a threat to Earth. But the asteroid belongs to a class of objects known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), which come within a radius of 30 million miles.

“What we’re trying to learn is how to address a threat, this is a $330 million project, the first of its kind,” Thomas Zuburchen, a top NASA scientist, told AFP news agency.

Traveling at about 15,000 mph, the spacecraft, which weighs 1,344 pounds and measures 59 feet across, is about to collide head-on with Dimorphos.

After Dart’s kinetic impact with its target asteroid, a probe team will measure how much the asteroid’s motion in space was impacted by using telescopes on Earth, NASA said on its website.

NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is most interested in masses larger than 460 feet, which have the potential to flatten entire cities or regions with energy many times the energy of an average nuclear 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.

The DART spacecraft also carries sophisticated instruments for navigation and imaging, including the Italian Space Agency’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) to observe the accident and its aftermath.

“CubeSat is going to give us, we hope, the shot, the most spectacular image of Dart’s impact and ejecta plume emanating from the asteroid. It will be a truly historic, spectacular image,” said Dart program scientist Tom Statler.

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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