NASA is preparing a mission to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid – a test run if humanity needs to stop a giant space rock from wiping out life on Earth.
It sounds like science fiction, but the DART (Dual Asteroid Redirection Test) was a proof-of-fact test that blew up at 10:21 p.m. pacific time, Tuesday (11:51 a.m. PT. Wednesday IST) aboard a SpaceX rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The aim is to slightly alter the orbit of Dimorphos, a “moon” about 525 feet (160 meters, or two, two Statues of Liberty) wide that surrounds a much larger asteroid called Didymos (2,500 in diameter) feet). The couple orbits the Sun together.
The impact will occur in the fall of 2022, when the binary asteroid system is 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth, roughly the closest they have ever come.
“What we’re trying to learn is how to deflect a threat,” From NASA Lead scientist Thomas Zuburchen said of the $330 million (approximately Rs 2,460) project, which is the first of its kind.
To be clear, the asteroids in question pose no threat to our planet.
But they belong to a class of objects known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), which can reach within 30 million miles.
NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is most interested in bombs larger than 460 feet, capable of leveling an entire city or region with many times more energy than a nuclear bomb. medium.
There are 10,000 known near-Earth asteroids that are 460 feet in size or larger, but none have a significant chance of appearing within the next 100 years. One key caveat: scientists think there are still 15,000 more such objects waiting to be discovered.
15,000mph kick
Planetary scientists can create miniature impacts in the lab and use the results to create sophisticated models of an asteroid’s trajectory — but the models are consistently inferior to those of an asteroid. with real world tests.
The Didymos-Dimorphos system is an “ideal natural laboratory”, the scientists say, because Earth-based telescopes can easily measure variations in the luminosity of the telescopes and predict time. time it orbits its sibling moon.
Since the current orbital period is known, the change will reveal the impact of the collision, which is expected to occur between September 26 and October 1, 2022.
Furthermore, since the orbits of asteroids never intersect our planet, they are thought to be safer to study.
The DART probe, about the size of a large refrigerator with limousine-sized solar panels on either side, will plunge into Dimorphos at just over 15,000 miles per hour.
Andy Rivkin, DART investigation team leader, said the current orbital period is 11 hours and 55 minutes, and the team expects the kick to be about 10 minutes less than that.
There is some uncertainty about the amount of energy that will be transferred through the collision, because the moonlet’s internal composition and porosity are unknown.
The more shards created, the more thrust on Dimorphos.
“Every time we visit an asteroid, we find things that we didn’t expect,” says Rivkin.
The DART spacecraft also contains sophisticated imaging and navigation tools, including the Italian Space Agency’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) to monitor the collision and its aftermath.
“CubeSat will give us, we hope, the most spectacular footage yet of the DART collision and its ejection beam,” said Tom Statler, DART program scientist. is a truly historic, breathtaking image.”
Nuclear explosion
The so-called “kinetic impact” method is not the only way to redirect an asteroid, but it is the only one available with current technology.
Other theories that have been put forward include flying a nearby spacecraft to impart a small gravitational pull.
Another explosion detonating a nuclear explosion nearby – but not on the object itself, as in Armageddon and Deep Impact – would likely create more dangerous objects.
Scientists estimate 460-foot-long asteroids strike every 20,000 years.
Asteroids six miles long or wider – such as the asteroid that occurred 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of most life on Earth, including dinosaurs – occurred about 100 every -200 million years.
