Image: NASA
On Monday, NASA successfully launched a spacecraft into space and crashed it into the never-before-seen asteroid Dimorphos. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission captured the attention of people worldwide, as it was NASA’s first planetary defense mission, made with the purpose of preventing us from suffering the same fate as the dinosaurs : being splashed by an asteroid.
But now that the accident has happened, what happens to the DART mission? Do we know if it was successful? Can we sleep better at night?
The short answer is, yes.
“You can rest a little better,” Carolyn Ernst, DART DRACO instrument scientist at Johns Hopkins APL, told ZDNET. “The first test we did was a success.”
The DART mission has two main components. The first was to see if NASA had the technology to send a spacecraft into space to hit a never-before-seen target asteroid, and that part of the mission was a success. As seen on Monday, the spacecraft hit its target.
However, the second part of the mission is to observe the aftermath of the impact to see if the asteroid’s trajectory has changed. This part of the mission is vitally important in measuring the success of the mission.
“You know, if you went up and tried to move an asteroid to deflect it from hitting Earth and it didn’t move, that’s not successful, right?” said Ernst.
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This is where the DART research team comes in. The team will spend the next six to 12 months, until major funding runs out, studying images and data to determine whether the impact made a difference.
“What we need to do now is figure out how far we’ve really deflected it … to really see how much push we’ve given it, and that can be a piece of the puzzle that informs you how I would actually design a mission that was going to try to deflect something,” Ernst said.
“So do you need something faster? Do you need something bigger? Do you need two? Is one enough or too much? And kind of thinking about that side of things.”
This research is vital because, while there is no imminent threat to Earth from an asteroid, it is very likely that there will be one in the future.
“Statistically speaking, something is going to hit Earth someday, just because if you have enough stuff in space and you sit for thousands or millions of years, something will hit you,” Ernst said.
Don’t worry: The odds of an asteroid crashing into Earth in our lifetime are unlikely, according to Ernst. But it’s always better to be safe than sorry, right? At least, I think that’s what the dinosaurs would have said.
“And of course, you know, the dinosaurs didn’t have the luxury of being able to come up with a plan, but we have the ability to start, and that’s what it is: the first step,” Ernst said.
To see how much the asteroid moved after the impact, the team will harness the power of their telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Lucy space probe. As those images come in, we’ll also see them via NASA. On Thursday, NASA released detailed views of the DART impact in a press release. The Webb Telescope captured images of the impact site before and after the collision.
Hubble captured images showing the movement of the ejecta, the material that was ejected into the air after the impact. The collaboration between both telescopes was a milestone for NASA.
“For the first time, Webb and Hubble have simultaneously captured images of the same target in space: an asteroid that was struck by a spacecraft after a journey of seven million miles,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson . “All of humanity looks forward to the discoveries to come from Webb, Hubble and our ground-based telescopes, about the DART mission and beyond.”
Because of the telescopic images that have come in so far, Ernst has a hunch that the second point of the mission, which actually moved the asteroid, was also successful.
“Based on how much material we see coming out in all these telescope observations, it looks like we’ve made a big push,” Ernst said.
However, in order to find out for sure, the research team will be working hard over the coming months to put the pieces of the puzzle together to tell a bigger story.
“In terms of what comes next, putting all this data together will be fascinating to see the story they tell,” Ernst said.