NASA Successfully Strikes Asteroid With Satellite In Mission To Alter Its Course
By Nicole Rodrigues, 27 Sep 2022
On September 26, the world watched as a satellite deliberately crashed into an asteroid to knock it off-course. Now, NASA has just announced that the mission has succeeded.
At 7.14 PM EDT and a speed of 14,000 mph, DART (short for ‘Double Asteroid Redirection Test’) smashed into Dimorphos.
The main objective of the mission was to see if there was a way we could alter the course of comets bound for Earth. Dimorphos, a moonlet of the main meteor Didymos, was not headed for our planet but was the perfect candidate.
Dimorphos is part of a binary asteroid system that orbits its parent every 11 hours and 51 minutes, giving scientists enough time to track potential changes. Both are also only seven million miles away, making it the closest meteor system to us.
As DART closed in on the comet, it snapped some final images of its surface, giving us the first pictures of the meteor from up close.
Carolyn Ernst, DART’s DRACO camera instrument scientist at JHUAPL, noted that Dimorphos was “cute” as the mini-moon was caught pre-collision. Other images of the moonlet’s rocky surface gave us insight into its incredibly rough terrain filled with boulders and ridges.
According to the team, the collision would have created a crater about 65 feet wide. But just before it made an impact, DART released a tiny CubeSat called the LICIACube to capture images of the contact. It would eventually make its way back to Earth in the following days.
Watching DART diligently from Earth were over three dozen telescopes—almost one on every continent—tracking the satellite as it completed its mission.
NASA had initially set out to shift Dimorphos off course by 10 minutes. However, there is not enough data to compute if that time shift has been achieved. As per CNN, it could take up to two months to fully understand the quantitative effects of the impact.
The European Space Agency looks to launch a follow-up mission called Hera that will head up to the binary asteroids and study the effects of the clash.
The shattering mission cost some $330 million and took seven years in the making, Reuters notes.
[via CNN, Reuters, and Space.com, images via NASA/Johns Hopkins APL]