NASA’s DART mission hits an asteroid in the first planetary defense test mission
After 10 months in space, NASA’s DART (Dual Asteroid Redirection Experiment) mission — the world’s first demonstration of planetary defense (Earth protection) technology — successfully collided with its target asteroid on Monday, NASA’s first attempt to change motion of an asteroid in space. Mission control announced the successful collision at 7:14 p.m. ET.
As part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s collision with a dimorphous asteroid demonstrates a mitigation technique applicable to protecting Earth from an incoming asteroid or comet, should one be detected.
“DART is an unprecedented success for planetary defense, but it’s also a mission of unity with real benefits for all of humanity,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “As we at NASA explore the universe and our home planet, we’re also working to protect home This, and this international cooperation has turned science fiction into real science, which demonstrates one way to protect the planet.”
DART’s target was the lunar asteroid Dimorphos, a small body only 160 meters in diameter. It orbits a larger asteroid called Didymus that is 780 meters in diameter.
The mission’s one-way flight demonstrated that NASA could successfully steer a spacecraft into a targeted collision with an asteroid to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact.
The investigation team will now observe Dimorphos using ground-based telescopes to verify that the DART impact changed the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos. The researchers predict that the impact will shorten Dimorphus’ orbit by about 1 percent, or about ten minutes. Accurately measuring the degree of deflection of the asteroid is one of the main goals of the full-scale experiment.
“Planetary defense is a unifying global activity that affects everyone who lives on Earth,” said Thomas Zerbaken, deputy director of the Science Mission Administration at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We now know that we can target a spacecraft with the precision necessary to hit even a small object in space. A small change in its speed is all we need to significantly change the trajectory of the asteroid.”
The spacecraft’s only instrument, the DRACO camera, along with a sophisticated guidance, navigation and control system working together with the SMART Nav algorithms, allowed DART to detect the two asteroids, differentiate between them, and target the smaller body.
These systems guided the 570 kg box-shaped spacecraft on its final 90,000 km through space into Dimorphus, a deliberate crash at about 22,530 km/h to slightly slow the asteroid’s orbital speed. The latest DRACO images taken by the spacecraft Seconds before impact, reveal Dimorphus face in detailed close-up.
Fifteen days before impact, DART’s Italian-made LICIACube cubesat was launched from the spacecraft to take pictures of DART’s impact and the cloud of material ejected from the asteroid as a result. Along with the DRACO images, the LICIACube images are designed to show the results of the impact to help researchers better characterize the effectiveness of the kinetic impact in deflecting asteroids. LICIACube does not have a large antenna, so the images will be broadcast to Israel one by one in the coming weeks.
“DART’s success is a significant addition to the essential toolbox we must have to protect Earth from a devastating asteroid impact,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary protection officer. “It demonstrates that we are no longer powerless to prevent natural disaster. This type. Together with improved capabilities that will accelerate the finding of the remaining dangerous asteroids through our next planetary defense mission, the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, a mission that will come after DART can give us what we need to save the day.”
The asteroid pair is 11 million km from Earth, and a global team is using dozens of telescopes located around the world and in space to observe the asteroid system. In the coming weeks, they will characterize what was ejected from the impact and precisely measure the change in Dimorphus’s orbit to determine how effective the diversion was. The results will help the valid and to improve scientific computer models that are essential for predicting the effectiveness of this technique as a reliable method for deflecting asteroids.