NASA’s asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft is approaching planned impact with its target

By Steve Gorman

– Ten months after launch, NASA‘s deflect asteroids ARROW The spacecraft approached a planned impact with its target Monday in a test of the world’s first planetary defense system designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth.

The cube-shaped “Impactor” vehicle, about the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to fly into the asteroid Dimorphos, about the size of a football stadium, and self-destruct around 7 p.m Summertime (2300 Greenwich Mean Time) about 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.

The mission’s finale will test a spacecraft’s ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory using pure kinetic force, slamming into the object at high speeds to knock it astray just enough to knock our planet out of the way .

It is the world’s first attempt to change the motion of an asteroid or other celestial body.

ARROWlaunched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021 has completed most of its journey under the guidance of NASAFlight controller from , with control handed over to an autonomous onboard navigation system in the final hours of the trip.

Monday night’s planned impact is scheduled to be monitored in real time by the Mission Operations Center at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

ARROWThe celestial target of is an asteroid called Moonlet, about 170 meters in diameter, orbiting a parent asteroid five times larger, named Didymos, as part of a binary pair of stars of the same name, the Greek word for twin.

Neither object poses an actual threat to Earth, and NASA Scientists said theirs ARROW Test cannot inadvertently create a new existential threat.

Dimorphos and Didymos are both tiny compared to the cataclysmic asteroid Chicxulub, which struck Earth about 66 million years ago and wiped out about three quarters of the world’s plant and animal species, including dinosaurs.

Smaller asteroids are far more common and pose a greater theoretical problem in the short term, making the Didymos pair suitable test targets given their size NASA Scientists and planetary defense experts.

Also, their relative proximity to Earth and the two-asteroid configuration make them ideal for the first proof-of-concept mission of ARROWshort for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

ROBOTICSUICIDEMISSION

The mission represents a rare case where a NASA Spaceship must ultimately crash to succeed.

The plan is for ARROW to fly directly into Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 km/h) and nudge it hard enough to shift its orbit closer to its larger companion asteroids.

Cameras on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini spacecraft triggered ARROW Days in advance to record the collision and send images back to Earth.

ARROWIts own camera is expected to return images at a rate of one frame per second during its final approach, with those images being transmitted live NASA TV start according to an hour before impact APL.

That ARROW The team said it expects to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by 10 minutes but would consider at least 73 seconds a success, proving the exercise a viable technique to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth — if one were ever spotted . A small nudge to an asteroid a million kilometers away could be enough to guide it safely away from the planet.

The outcome of the test will not be known until a new round of ground-based telescopic observations of the two asteroids is conducted in October. Previous calculations of Dimorphos’ launch location and orbital period were confirmed during a six-day observation period in July.

ARROW is the latest of several NASA Missions in recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, ancient rocky remnants from the formation of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Last year, NASA launched a probe on a journey to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter during the grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is on its way back to Earth with a sample taken from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020.

One of the smallest astronomical objects to have a permanent name, the Dimorphos moon is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes that have been tracked NASA. Although none are known to pose a foreseeable danger to humanity, NASA estimates that many more near-Earth asteroids remain undiscovered.

NASA has provided the entire cost of the ARROW $330 million project, well below that of many of the space agency’s most ambitious science missions.