![]() ![]() “So if you were going to do this for planetary defense, you would do it five, 10, 15, 20 years in advance in order for this technique to work,” she said.Įven if DART misses, the experiment still will provide valuable insight, said NASA program executive Andrea Riley. In 2024, a European spacecraft named Hera will retrace DART’s journey to measure the impact results.Īlthough the intended nudge should change the moonlet’s position only slightly, that will add up to a major shift over time, according to Chabot. The observatories will track the pair of asteroids as they circle the sun, to see if DART altered Dimorphos’ orbit. Science & Medicine UN aims to fight asteroids, creates a global warning networkĮven the United Nations is taking the threat of asteroids hitting our planet seriously. Telescopes on all seven continents, along with the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and NASA’s asteroid-hunting Lucy spacecraft, may see a bright flash as DART smacks Dimorphos and sends streams of rock and dirt cascading into space. Cameras on DART and a mini tagalong satellite will capture the collision up close. The impact by DART should shave about 10 minutes off that.Īlthough the strike itself should be immediately apparent, it will take months to verify the moonlet’s tweaked orbit. Little Dimorphos completes a lap around big Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. If it goes screaming past both space rocks, it will encounter them again in a couple years for a second try. Unless DART misses - NASA puts the odds of that happening at less than 10% - it will be the end of the road for DART. “Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a Great Pyramid,” Chabot said. The size of a small vending machine at 1,260 pounds, the spacecraft will slam into roughly 11 billion pounds of asteroid. The spacecraft’s navigation is designed to distinguish between the two asteroids and, in the final 50 minutes, target the smaller one. Managers are confident DART won’t smash into the larger Didymos by mistake. NASA insists there’s a zero chance either asteroid will threaten Earth - now or in the future. It isn’t going to put it into lots of pieces.” Rather, the impact will dig out a crater tens of yards in size and hurl some 2 million pounds of rocks and dirt into space. “This isn’t going to blow up the asteroid. “This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption,” said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University, which is managing the mission. Dimorphos - roughly 525 feet across - orbits its parent body at a distance of less than a mile. Discovered in 1996, Didymos is spinning so fast that scientists believe it flung off material that eventually formed a moonlet. It is actually the puny sidekick of a 2,500-foot asteroid named Didymos, Greek for twin. ![]() The asteroid with the bull’s-eye on it is Dimorphos, about 7 million miles from Earth. The $325-million planetary defense test began with DART ’s launch last fall. ![]()
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