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Bam! NASA spacecraft crashes into asteroid in defense test


CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A NASA The spacecraft crashed into an asteroid at breakneck speed Monday during an unprecedented costume rehearsal for a rock killer day. The earth.
The galaxy collapse occurred at a harmless asteroid 7 million miles (9.6 million km) away, with the spacecraft named Darts plunge into the space rock at 14,000 mph (22,500 km/h). Scientists expect the impact to create a crater, throw streams of rock and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit.
“We have an impact!” Mission Control’s Elena Adams announced, jumping up and down and raising her arms in the air.
Telescopes around the world and in space aim at the same point in the sky to capture the spectacle. While the impact is immediately apparent – Dart’s radio signal suddenly stops working – it will take days or even weeks to determine how much the asteroid’s path has changed.
“Now is when the science begins,” NASA said Lori Glaze, director of the planetary science division. “Now we’re going to see how effective we really are.”
The $325 million mission is the first attempt to change the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space.
“It’s an incredible thing. We’ve never had that ability before,” Glaze noted.
Earlier in the day, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reminded everyone via Twitter, “No, this is not a movie plot.” He added in a pre-recorded video: “We’ve all seen it on movies like ‘Armageddon,’ but the stakes in real life are high.”
Monday’s target: a named 525-foot (160-meter) asteroid Dimorphos. It is actually a moon of Didymos, Greek for twin, a rapidly rotating asteroid five times larger and splattered out of the matter that forms the base counterpart.
The pair have orbited the sun for several cycles without threatening the Earth, making them ideal candidates for the world saver test.
Launched last November, the vending machine-sized Dart – which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test – navigates to its goal using new technology developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory. used by Johns Hopkins University, spacecraft construction and mission management unit.
Dart’s onboard camera, a key part of this intelligent navigation system, caught the Dimorphos just an hour before impact.
Adams, a mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins, exclaims. “We’re seeing Dimorphos, it’s amazing, it’s amazing.”
With an image returning to Earth every second, Adams and other ground controllers in Laurel, Maryland, watched with increasing excitement as the Dimorphos grew larger in the field of view with their companions. its bigger. Within minutes, Dimorphos was alone in the paintings; it looks like a giant gray lemon, but there are rocks and rubble on the surface. The final image freezes on the screen when the radio transmission ends.
Aircraft operators cheered, hugged and exchanged high punches. With their mission accomplished, the Darts team goes straight into celebratory mode. There is no sadness about the collapse of the spaceship. “It’s meeting its fate,” said Betsy Congdon, Johns Hopkins mechanical team leader.
A small satellite followed a few minutes later to take pictures of the collision. The Italian Cubesat was released from Dart two weeks ago.
Scientists insist Dart will not break the Dimorphos. The spacecraft weighs just under 570 pounds (570 kg), compared with 11 billion pounds (5 billion kg) for the asteroid. But that would be too much to narrow its 11 hour 55 minute orbit around Didymos.
The impact will be reduced by 10 minutes, but the telescope will need anywhere from a few days to nearly a month to verify the new orbit. The scientists note that the predicted orbital shift of 1% does not seem like much. But they emphasize that it will be a significant change over the years.
Planetary defense experts prefer to push a threatening asteroid or comet out of the way, if given enough lead time, than to blow it away and create more pieces that could rain on Earth. Multiple impactors may be needed for large space rocks, or a combination of impactors and so-called gravity tractors, uninvented devices that would use their own gravity to pull a asteroid into a safer orbit.
“The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program to help them know what was coming, but we do,” said NASA senior climate adviser Katherine Calvin, referring to the mass extinction 66 million years ago. year is thought to be due to the impact of an asteroid. , volcanic eruptions, or both.
The nonprofit B612, which protects Earth from asteroid strikes, has been promoting impact tests like Dart since it was founded by astronauts and physicists 20 years ago. . Ignoring Monday’s feat, the world must do a better job of identifying the countless space rocks lurking out there, the fund’s chief executive officer, Ed Lu, a former astronaut, warned.
According to NASA, less than half of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth objects within a deadly 140 meters have been detected. And less than 1% of the millions of smaller, potentially fatal, asteroids are known.
The Vera Rubin Observatory, nearing completion in Chile by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy, promises to revolutionize the field of asteroid discovery, Lu noted.
Finding and tracking asteroids, “That’s still the name of the game here. It’s what has to happen to protect the Earth,” he said.





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