Asteroid-deflecting spacecraft launched
Print Edition
A SPACECRAFT that must ultimately crash to succeed was launched late on Tuesday from California on a NASA mission to demonstrate the world’s first planetary defense system, designed to deflect an asteroid from a potential doomsday collision with Earth.
The DART spacecraft soared into the night sky at 10:21pm Pacific time from Vandenberg US Space Force Base, about 150 miles (243km) northwest of Los Angeles, carried aboard a SpaceX-owned Falcon 9 rocket.
The launch was shown live on NASA TV.
The DART payload, about the size of a small car, was released from the booster minutes after launch to begin a 10-month journey into deep space, some 6.8 million miles from Earth.
Once there, DART will test its ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory with sheer kinetic force, plowing into it at high speed to nudge the space boulder off course just enough to keep our planet out of harm’s way.
Cameras mounted on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft to be released from DART about 10 days beforehand will record the collision and beam images of it back to Earth.
The asteroid DART is aimed at poses no actual threat and is tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs. But scientists say smaller asteroids are far more common and pose a greater theoretical danger in the near term.
DART’s target is an asteroid “moonlet” the size of a football stadium that orbits a chunk of rock five times larger in a binary asteroid system named Didymos, the Greek word for twin. The team behind DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, chose the Didymos system because its relative proximity to Earth and dual-asteroid configuration make it ideal for observing the results of the impact.
The plan is to fly the DART spacecraft directly into the moonlet, called Dimorphos, at 15,000 miles per hour, bumping it hard enough to shift its orbital track around the larger asteroid.
Cameras on the impactor and a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released from DART about 10 days beforehand will record the collision and beam images back to Earth. Ground-based telescopes will measure how much the moonlet’s orbit around Didymos changes.
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