NASA has successfully launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and it is now floating on its own in space, ahead of its planned collision with an asteroid in less than a year from now. DART is the first mission of its kind that is going to test whether slamming into a rogue asteroid that is on a collision course with planet Earth would be an effective method to avoid a catastrophe. The astronomy community usually keeps a vigilant eye on the path of asteroids, especially those whose orbit brings them close to Earth during their journey.
Thanks to advanced observation and modeling techniques, scientists are able to predict with a fairly high degree of accuracy whether Earth’s inhabitants should prepare for an asteroid armageddon or not. Take for example the Bennu asteroid, which has a higher-than-usual chance of hitting the Earth with a 0.037 percent probability in the year 2182. The odds are almost next to nil, but there is no dearth of cosmic anomalies out there, which means having a strategy in advance is probably a good idea. And that is where the DART mission comes into the picture.
The space agency has launched the DART spacecraft as part of an experiment to test the kinetic impactor technique that aims to crash a man-made object with an asteroid in order to change its trajectory if one ever poses an impact threat. Following its launch from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the spacecraft has now DART spacecraft will crash into it while cruising at a speed of 6.6 km/s at some point in September next year. All that action will happen roughly 11 million kilometers away from the Earth as scientists guide it to a smash-fest using the DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance & Asteroid Camera for OpNav) imaging hardware.
Preparing For An Asteroid Armageddon
Now, just to make it clear early on, DART’s target is not a threat to Earth. In fact, as per NASA’s observations, there is no documented asteroid bigger than 140 meters in size that has a chance of colliding with Earth within the next 100 years. As far as the collision goes, the aim is to alter the moonlet’s speed by a fraction of one percent, which is going to create enough momentum that the moonlet’s orbital period is changed by a factor of several minutes, allowing scientists to study the whole incident using ground-based telescopes. Speaking of observations, NASA’s Deep Space Network recently spotted its 1,000th Near-Earth Object (NEO), an asteroid between 65 and 100 feet in size that was detected using radio waves.
As for the DART spacecraft, it relies on Roll-Out Solar Arrays (ROSA) to generate power for its electric propulsion system which follows a blueprint similar to the one used for NASA’s retired Dawn space probe. However, spacecraft collision is not the only technique that scientists are testing to avoid an asteroid apocalypse. Research conducted by experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed that a nuclear blast near a threatening celestial body’s surface might also be an effective method to avoid an impact with Earth.
Source: NASA