Los Angeles: Ten months after launch, NASA’s asteroid-deflecting Dart spacecraft approached a planned impact Monday with its target in a test of the world’s first planetary defense system, designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth. was designed for.
The cube-shaped “Impacter” vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was to fly into the asteroid Dimorphos, which was nearly as large as a football stadium, and hit the ground at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 hrs.). ) self-destruct around GMT) about 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.
Completion of the mission will test the ability of a spacecraft to alter the asteroid’s trajectory with sheer kinetic force, propelling the object at high speed enough to mislead our planet to keep it out of harm’s way. For.
This is the world’s first attempt to change the motion of an asteroid, or any celestial body.
Dart, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, made most of its journey under the guidance of NASA flight directors, with controls assigned to an autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey.
Monday evening’s planned impact is to be monitored in real time from the Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
The astronomical target of DART is an asteroid “Moonlight” approximately 560 feet (170 m) in diameter that forms part of a binary pair with the same name as part of a binary pair with the same name five times as large as a single one. The origin orbits the asteroid, the Greek word for twin.
Neither object presents any real threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their Dart test may not accidentally pose a new existential threat.
Both Dimorphos and Didymos are smaller than the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid, which hit Earth about 66 million years ago, wiping out nearly three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species, including dinosaurs.
Small asteroids are far more common and pose more theoretical concern in the near term, according to NASA scientists and planetary defense experts, making the Didymos pair a suitable test subject for their size.
In addition, their relative proximity to Earth and the dual asteroid configuration make them ideal for DART’s first proof-of-concept mission, short for Double Asteroid Redirect Test.
robotic suicide mission
The mission represents a rare instance in which a NASA spacecraft must crash in order to be ultimately successful.
There are plans for DART to fly directly into Dimorphos at 15,000 mph (24,000 kph), bumping it enough to shift its orbital track closer to that of its larger companion asteroid.
The cameras on the impactor and a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released a few days before DART are designed to record the collision and send the images back to Earth.
According to APL, Dart’s own camera is expected to return images at a rate of one image per second during its final approach, with those images streaming live to NASA TV an hour before impact.
The DART team said it expects to shorten Dimorphos’ orbital track by 10 minutes, but considers at least 73 seconds successful, a viable technique for deflecting an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. As practice proves – if ever discovered. For an asteroid millions of miles away, a small nudge may be enough to make it safely away from the planet.
The test results won’t be known until a new round of ground-based telescope observations of the two asteroids in October. Earlier calculations of Dimorphos’ starting location and orbital period were confirmed during a six-day observation period in July.
DART is the latest of several NASA missions in recent years to detect and interact with asteroids, primitive rocky remains from the formation of the Solar System 4.5 billion years ago.
Last year, NASA launched a probe on a visit to Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter, while the grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is returning to Earth with a sample collected from asteroid Bennu in October 2020. Is.
Dimorphos Moonlet is one of the smallest celestial bodies to receive a permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by NASA. Although none are known to pose a potential threat to mankind, NASA estimates that many more asteroids are not known in the near-Earth vicinity.
NASA has set the full cost of the DART project at $330 million, which is far less than the space agency’s most ambitious science missions. -Reuters
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