After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its asteroid target on Monday, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.
Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT.
As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered.
“At its core, DART represents an unprecedented success for planetary defense, but it is also a mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “As NASA studies the cosmos and our home planet, we’re also working to protect that home, and this international collaboration turned science fiction into science fact, demonstrating one way to protect Earth.”
DART targeted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a small body just 530 feet (160 meters) in diameter. It orbits a larger, 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid called Didymos. Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth.
The mission’s one-way trip confirmed NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact.
The investigation team will now observe Dimorphos using ground-based telescopes to confirm that DART’s impact altered the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos. Researchers expect the impact to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%, or roughly 10 minutes; precisely measuring how much the asteroid was deflected is one of the primary purposes of the full-scale test. READ MORE FROM NASA’s PRESS RELEASE
https://spaceweather.com/ BULLSEYE! NASA STRIKES ASTEROID DEAD-CENTER: NASA’s DART spacecraft hit asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26th–an incredible, dramatic bullseye 11 million kilometers from Earth. DART took this picture of Dimorphos only 11 seconds before impact, reveaing it to be a boulder-strewn rubble pile:
See more images from DART’s approach and impact
Mission scientsts say DART hit the asteroid less than 17 meters off center. Think about that: 17 meters off at a distance of 11 million kilometers.NASA still has the right stuff.
Now more hard work begins. Astronomers on Earth have begun monitoring Dimorphos’s orbit to find out whether or not it has changed in response to DART’s impact. If so, it proves that human tech can alter an asteroid’s trajectory–a possible strategy for future Planetary Defense. Stay tuned.
