Asteroid Movie in Real Life?
Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
NASA is making some asteroid movies into reality! NASA aims to crash an asteroid and to see if it can redirect its course. Dimorphos is an asteroid seven million miles away from Earth that NASA is targeting to crash into. You don’t need to worry as it is not exactly a threat to our beloved planet.
NASA’s mission is called DART or Double Asteroid Redirection Test. This is a mission that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson described as a "colossal step forward in planetary defense."
"This is the world's first mission to test the technology for defending Earth against an incoming killer asteroid," Nelson said in a recorded statement.
At 7:14 p.m., the spacecraft is expected to collide with the asteroid Dimorphos at a speed of over 14,000 miles per hour on September 26th, Monday.
"It'll be a first test to help determine our response if we really do see an asteroid out there threatening to hit Earth," Nelson said.
The mission's one-way trip demonstrated that NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid in order to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact.
A series of images captured by the DRACO camera as the spacecraft collided with the asteroid (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL)
The investigation team will now use ground-based telescopes to confirm that DART's impact changed the asteroid's orbit around Didymos. The impact is expected to shorten Dimorphos' orbit by about 1%, or about 10 minutes; precisely measuring how much the asteroid was deflected is one of the primary goals of the full-scale test.
"Planetary Defense is a globally unifying effort that affects everyone living on Earth," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We now know that we can aim a spacecraft with the precision required to impact even a small body in space." We only need a small change in its speed to significantly alter the path an asteroid takes."
The spacecraft's sole instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO), along with sophisticated guidance, navigation, and control system that works in tandem with Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real-Time Navigation (SMART Nav) algorithms, enabled DART to identify and distinguish between the two asteroids, targeting the smaller body.
The DART spacecraft successfully crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at 14,000 mph (22,530 km/h) to slightly slow the asteroid's orbital speed. An Italian CubeSat was deployed to capture images of DART's impact and the resulting cloud of ejected matter.
Images of DART's collision with an asteroid will help researchers better characterize the effectiveness of kinetic impact in deflecting an asteroid. "DART's success provides a significant addition to the essential toolbox we must have to protect Earth," says Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer.
The results will help validate and improve computer models critical to predicting the effectiveness of this technique as a reliable method for asteroid deflection. "DART could one day be used to change the course of an asteroid to protect our planet," NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office says.
Johns Hopkins APL manages the DART mission for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency's Planetary Missions Program Office. The European Space Agency's Hera project will conduct detailed surveys of both Dimorphos and Didymos, with a particular focus on the crater left by DART's collision.
