The DART probe will plunge into Dimorphos at just over 15,000 miles per hour.
Washington:
NASA is preparing to go on 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 DART (Dual Asteroid Redirection Test) is a proof-of-fact test, blasting off at 10:21pm Pacific Time, Tuesday (0621 GMT. Wednesday) on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Its target object: Dimorphos, a “moon” about 525 feet wide (160 meters, or two Statues of Liberty), orbiting a much larger asteroid called Didymos (2,500 feet or 780 in diameter) meters), together revolving around the Sun.
The impact will occur in the fall of 2022, when the pair of rocks are 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth, the closest they have ever come.
NASA’s top scientist, Thomas Zuburchen, said on a press call, about the $330 million project, the first of its kind: “What we’re trying to find out is how to deflect a threat.
To be clear, the asteroids in question pose no threat to our home planet.
But they belong to a class of objects known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) – asteroids and comets that approach our planet within 30 million miles (50 million kilometers).
NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is most interested in bombs larger than 460 feet (140 meters), capable of leveling an entire city or region with many times more energy. with the average nuclear bomb.
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: only about 40% of those asteroids have been found so far.
15,000 mph 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 based on assumptions imperfect, that’s why they wanted to do a real world test.
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 (24,000 kilometers per hour), causing a slight variation in the asteroid’s motion.
The scientists say the pair are an “ideal natural laboratory” for the experiment, because Earth-based telescopes can easily measure variations in the luminosity of the Didymos-Dimorphos system. and judge the time it takes Dimorphos to orbit its brother.
Their orbits never intersect our planet, providing a safe way to measure the impact of the collision, which is expected to happen between September 26 and October 1, 2022.
Andy Rivkin, leader of the DART investigation, says that the current orbital period is 11 hours and 55 minutes, and the team expects the kick to deviate from Dimorphos’ orbit by about 10 minutes.
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 not known.
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.
Didymos’ orbit could also be slightly affected, the scientists said, but it wouldn’t significantly change its course or accidentally trip the Earth.
Nuclear explosion
The so-called “kinetic impact” method is not the only way to redirect an asteroid, but it is the most readily available with current technology.
Other theories that have been put forward include flying a nearby spacecraft to impart a small gravitational pull.
Another explosion is detonating a nuclear explosion close by – but not on the object itself, as in Armageddon and Deep Impact – which could create more dangerous objects.
Scientists estimate 460-foot-long asteroids strike once every 20,000 years.
Asteroids 6 miles (10 km) wide – such as the asteroid that occurred 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of most life on Earth, including dinosaurs – occurred about Every 100-200 million years.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
