The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, aboard spacecraft from Space Launch Complex 4E, at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Bill Ingalls / AP
hide captions
switch captions
Bill Ingalls / AP
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, aboard spacecraft from Space Launch Complex 4E, at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Bill Ingalls / AP
LOS ANGELES (AP) – NASA launched a spacecraft Tuesday night on a mission to crash into an asteroid and test whether it would be possible to dislodge an accelerating space rock if they threaten Earth.
The DART spacecraft, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a $330 million project with an echo of the Bruce Willis movie “Armageddon” .”
If all goes well, in September 2022 it will hit Dimorphos, an asteroid 525 feet (160 meters) across, at 15,000 mph (24,139 km/h).
“This won’t destroy the asteroid. It just gives it a small boost,” said mission official Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the project.
Dimorphos orbits a much larger asteroid called Didymos. The pairing poses no danger to Earth but provides scientists with a way to measure how effective the collision would be.
Dimorphos completes an orbit of Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The goal of DART is a collision that will slow Dimorphos and cause it to fall closer towards the larger asteroid, which is out of orbit 10 minutes.
The variation of the orbital period will be measured by telescopes on Earth. The minimum change for the mission to be considered successful is 73 seconds.
The DART technique could prove useful in changing the course of an asteroid years or decades before it hits Earth with the potential to cause disaster.
A small nudge “would make a big change in its future position, and then the asteroid and Earth wouldn’t have collided,” Chabot said.
Scientists are constantly looking for asteroids and plotting their routes to determine if they could hit the planet.
“Although there are currently no known asteroids in the process of colliding with Earth, we do know that there are a large number of asteroids,” said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA. near-Earth planet out there”. “The key to protecting the planet is to find them well before they’re an impact threat.”
DART will take 10 months to reach the asteroid pair. The collision will happen about 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.
Ten days ago, DART will launch a small observational spacecraft provided by the Italian space agency that will follow it.
DART will stream the video until it is destroyed on impact. Three minutes later, the tracker will produce images of the impact site and ejected material.
