Sept 26 (Reuters) – NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in the world’s first test of a planetary defense system, designed to avoid a possible meteorite collision with the Earth
Humanity’s first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body occurred in a NASA webcast from the mission’s operations center outside Washington, DC, 10 months after launch from DART.
The live stream showed images taken by DART’s camera as the cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, no bigger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar panels, tore into the stadium-sized asteroid Dimorphos of football, at 7:14 PM EDT. (2314 GMT) about 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.
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The $330 million mission, about seven years in the making, was designed to determine whether a spacecraft is capable of changing an asteroid’s trajectory through sheer kinetic force, deflecting it off course to keep Earth out of danger
Whether the experiment was successful beyond the intended impact won’t be known until further ground-based telescope observations of the asteroid next month. But NASA officials praised the immediate outcome of Monday’s test, saying the spacecraft accomplished its purpose.
“NASA works for the benefit of humanity, so for us it’s the ultimate fulfillment of our mission to do something like this — a technology demonstration that, who knows, could one day save our home,” said the NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, a retired astronaut. , he said minutes after the impact.
DART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, made most of its journey under the guidance of NASA flight directors, with control handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey.
Monday evening’s target impact was monitored in near real time from the mission operations center at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Applause erupted from the control room as second-by-second images of the target asteroid, captured by the camera aboard DART, zoomed in and eventually filled the live webcast’s television screen from NASA just before the signal was lost, confirming that the spacecraft had crashed into Dimorphos. .
DART’s celestial target was an oblong asteroid “moonlet” about 560 feet (170 meters) in diameter that orbits a five times larger parent asteroid called Didymos as part of a binary pair of the same name, the Greek word for twin.
Neither object poses any real threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test could not create a new danger by mistake.
Dimorphos and Didymos are small compared to the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth about 66 million years ago, wiping out about three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft prior to impact with the Didymos binary asteroid system is shown in this undated handout illustration. NASA/Johns Hopkins/Handout via REUTERS
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Smaller asteroids are much more common and of greater theoretical concern in the near term, making the Didymos pair suitable test subjects for their size, according to NASA scientists and planetary defense experts. An asteroid the size of Dimorphos, while not capable of posing a threat to the entire planet, could annihilate a major city with a direct hit.
In addition, the two asteroids’ relative proximity to Earth and their dual configuration make them ideal for DART’s first proof-of-concept mission, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
ROBOTIC SUICIDE MISSION
The mission represented a rare instance in which a NASA spacecraft had to crash to succeed. DART flew directly at Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 km/h), creating a thrust that scientists hope will be enough to shift its orbital path closer to the parent asteroid.
APL engineers said the spacecraft was presumably broken into pieces, leaving a small impact crater on the rock-strewn surface of the asteroid.
The DART team said they hope to shorten Dimorphos’ orbital path by 10 minutes, but would consider at least 73 seconds a success, demonstrating that the exercise is a viable technique to divert an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, if ever discovered.
A strike at an asteroid millions of kilometers away years in advance could be enough to safely deflect it.
The previous calculations of the initial location and orbital period of Dimorphos were made during a six-day observing period in July and will be compared with post-impact measurements made in October to determine whether the asteroid moved and how much.
Monday’s test was also observed by a camera mounted on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft launched from DART days earlier, as well as by ground-based observatories and the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, but the images from these were not immediately available.
DART is the latest of several NASA missions in recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the formation of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago.
Last year, NASA launched a probe on a trip to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter, while the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returns to Earth with a sample collected in October 2020 from asteroid Bennu.
The moon Dimorphos is one of the smallest astronomical objects to receive a permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by NASA. Although none are known to pose a foreseeable danger to humanity, NASA estimates that many more asteroids remain undetected in the vicinity of Earth.
(This story corrects paragraph 6 name to Pam de Palm)
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Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Joey Roulette in Los Angeles; Edited by Sandra Maler and Stephen Coates
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