The DART spacecraft has successfully demonstrated the possibility of “protecting the planet”.
For the first time in history a spacecraft with The Earth crashed into an asteroid's satellite to test the possibility of saving our planet from extinction.
NASA's Double Asteroid Rendezvous Test (DART) spacecraft collided with a small asteroid at a distance of 11 million kilometers from Earth on the night of September 27.
The US space agency called it the first in the world's test of protection of the planet. The purpose of the launch was to change the orbit of an asteroid called Dimorphos around its larger parent asteroid Didymos enough to prove that humanity could deflect a dangerous asteroid if it were headed for Earth.
“Dinosaurs could not do this 65 million years ago, when the huge asteroid Chicxulub crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula and led to their extinction. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program to help them, but we do,” Katherine Calvin, NASA's chief scientist and senior climate advisor, said before the collision.
The golf cart-sized DART spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos at 7:14 p.m. ET (11:14 p.m. GMT) at a breakneck speed of 22,500 km/h. The spacecraft was not very large, but NASA calculated that its weight of 600 kilograms would be enough to make the 163-meter Dimorphos accelerate in its orbit around the “father”.
The vast majority of DART travel time to a target has been automated. DART's main camera sent images back to Earth every second until the spacecraft hit the asteroid.
The DART mission, which was proposed in 2011 and launched on November 23, 2021, cost $313 million and demonstrated the potential for future protection of the planet : collision of a spacecraft with an asteroid to change the latter's orbit.
Scientists will now track the Didymos-Dimorphos pair to see how much faster Dimorphos will now move in its orbit.
“The plan was 73 seconds, but in reality we think the change will be about 10 minutes,” NASA said.
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The European Space Agency is planning its own mission to the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system to track the impact of DART. This mission, called Hera, will launch a spacecraft to an asteroid in 2024.
