NASA is set for its inaugural ‘planetary defense’ mission to divert an asteroid 6 million miles from Earth. It will be launched this week.
Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART), which is a space probe in a rectangular shape, will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday, November 23, at 22:20 PST (Wednesday, 06:20 GMT). It will take off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
DART’s 6.8 million mile journey will end with DART colliding into Dimorphos (an asteroid orbiting Didymos), at 13.500mph (21,700km per hour) on October 20,22.
When it hits Dimorphos, the 1,210 pound space probe will change the speed of the 525-foot-wide space rock by a fraction of a per cent.
NASA will measure Dimorphos’ altered orbit due to the collision, even though it doesn’t present a threat to Earth.
Future missions could be saved from an asteroid strike by using this demonstration of “planetary defense”.
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NASA has provided this artist’s drawing that shows DART before it made contact with Dimorphos.
DART will collide with Dimorphos at 13.500 miles an hour (21,700 km/h) and it orbits another larger asteroid named Didymos. Here is Dimorphos compared to Rome’s Colosseum
NASA says that post-impact observations made from Earth-based optical telescopes, planetary radars, and Earth-based optical telescopes in October 2022 will determine the changes in Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos.
The space agency provided details of the DART mission, which carries a price tag of $330 million (£244 million), in a briefing for reporters earlier this month.
The launch will be livestreamed on YouTube, beginning at 05:30 GMT Wednesday.
“Although no asteroid is currently in contact with Earth at this time, NASA’s planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson said that we know there are a lot of asteroids near Earth.
“The key to planet defense is finding them early before they become an impact threat. It is not a good idea to find an asteroid heading towards Earth, then test its capability.
Dimorphos is a target asteroid that measures 525 feet across and orbits around Didymos, which in Greek means “two forms”.
Neither asteroid poses a immediate threat to Earth, although NASA lists Didymos as ‘potentially hazardous’.
Both are excellent candidates because they can be observed with ground-based telescopes.
Nancy Chabot from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (which built DART) said that Dimorphos makes an orbit around Didymos approximately every 11 hours and 55 mins.
NASA is aiming to go head-on ‘to cause maximum deflection’.ART is not going to ‘destroy an asteroid.
These are Dimorphos, Didymos and some other famous landmarks of Earth.
DART’s spacecraft will travel towards Didymos (depicted below) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch on November 24, 2012. Didymoon is approximately 525 feet in diameter (160 meters), and orbits Didymos which measures 2,559 feet (780 metres).
Chabot stated that it was just going to give the asteroid a little push. It will deflect the path of the bigger asteroid.
“It will only be about 1% change in the orbital period. So what was 11 hours 55 minutes ago might now be 11 hours 45 minutes.
Dimorphos composition can affect the deflection. Scientists aren’t sure how porous this asteroid actually is.
Chabot explained that Dimorphos is one of the most commonly occurring asteroid types in space. It is about 4.5 billion year old.
She said, “It’s just like normal chondrite meteorites.” It’s finely textured mixture of metal and rock.
Images of the impact will also be collected by a miniature camera-equipped satellite – called LICIACube – contributed by the Italian Space Agency that will be ejected by the DART spacecraft 10 days before impact.
LICIACube weighs only 31 pounds, and is roughly as long as an adult’s hand.
Infographic showing DART’s effect on Dimorphos, and Didymos’ orbit. The deployment of the Italian LICIACube is also displayed.
DART (pictured) was the first piece of NASA’s asteroid defense strategy. This collaboration was done with the European Space Agency in order to protect Earth from an impact from a hazardous asteroid.
Both Didymos and the smaller Dimorphos were discovered relatively recently; Didymos in 1996 and the smaller Dimorphos in 2003.
The year it was discovered, Dimorphos came within 3.7 million miles of Earth – 15 times farther away than the Moon.
NASA considers near-Earth objects ‘potentially dangerous’ when they are within 0.05 Astrological Units (4.6 Million Miles) or measure more than 460ft in diameter.
There are more than 27,000 Near-Earth Asteroids that have been identified, but they do not pose any threat to the planet.
These radar images depict the Near-Earth Asteroid Didymos (65583) and its Moonlet, as seen from the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope located in Puerto Rico.
A 1999 discovery of Bennu was an asteroid. However, the likelihood of it impacting the Moon is very low.
NASA announced in August that Bennu has a slight higher chance of reaching Earth because it is only a third mile across.
The space agency upgraded the risk of Bennu impacting Earth at some point over the next 300 years to one in 1,750. Bennu has an even greater chance than 2700 of striking Earth in the afternoon on September 24, 2182.
Recent research suggests that multiple small impacts of a massive, human-made deflection device could be required to disperse an asteroid like Bennu.