There is a chance that NASA will hit an asteroid 7 million miles from Earth.
If everything goes according to plan, the DART mission will hit the asteroid Dimorphos on Monday. The DART mission is hurtling through deep space towards the Didymos and Dimorphos asteroids.
The goal of the mission is to determine if we can alter the course of an asteroid in order to save civilization. The years of planning that have gone into the mission will lead to success, according to members of the DART team.
DART will be a key test of planetary defense.
Traveling at speeds of 4.1 miles per second (6.6 km/s), or 14,760 mph (22,760 kph), the DART will impact the Dimorphos, a moonlet that is close to the other member of its binaries.
NASA believes that shifting Dimorphos' orbital period will change the trajectory of the Didymos.
While DART will be a key test of the planetary defense strategy, it will also produce valuable science that will allow the astronomer to peer back into the history of the solar system.
We are looking at asteroids to make sure we don't get caught in their path. To learn more about the history of our solar system, we study asteroids. Calvin said that they catch a glimpse of a fossil of the early solar system when they see an asteroid.
She said the remnants captured a time when planets were forming. Water and other ingredients of life were delivered by asteroids and other small bodies. We want to learn more about the history of our solar system.
Lindley Johnson is a planetary defense officer at NASA.
Johnson said that this is an exciting time for space history and the history of humankind. This demonstration is crucial to our future.
Tom Statler is a DART scientist at NASA. The first test is to see if we can build an autonomously guided spaceship that will be able to hit the asteroid. The asteroid's response to the impact is the second test. "Because, at the end of the day, the real question is: How effective did we move the asteroid, and can this technique be used in the future if we ever needed to?"
The DART asteroid mission is NASA's first planetary defense vehicle.
The outcome of the DART mission will help answer that question, and many of the DART team members shared their confidence in the mission during the briefings. When the time comes, Edward Reynolds said the DART is ready to destroy itself on Dimorphos.
All subsystems on the spaceship are performing well and are green. Reynolds said that they have a lot of power and propellant. Some of the rehearsals are very small.
The team is ready according to Reynolds. The ground systems are ready and on schedule for an impact on Monday.
The DART team is keeping a close eye on the craft's trajectory over the next few days to make sure it doesn't go off course. On Monday, September 26th, at 2314GMT. The team is still making sure the impactor is on course, according to Elena Adams.
"Over the next couple of days, we are doing some trajectory correction maneuvers to make sure that we are on the right path to hit the asteroid," Adams said. We spent a lot of time practicing. As we go through the cruise phase, we make sure that we can hit the asteroid with our spaceship. We will do checks like streaming images back to Earth in the last few days.
In the next few days, we'll take more images of the Didymos system, we'll do trajectory correction maneuvers, and then at 24 hours prior to impact, it's all hands on deck.
Adams said the team has contingencies in place in case DART's small-body navigation system determines that the spaceship is off course. We're ready to intervene. We've been practicing this for a while.
DART's survival is one of the 21 contingency the team has planned for. If DART misses Dimorphos, Adams says the team will plan for a possible impact with other objects.
If it misses, we're going to sit down back into our seats and start saving the data. Adams said that they would have time with their Deep Space Network to get all that data down. We'll conserve propellant and look for other objects to return to.
In response to a question from Space.com concerning any flight testing the team has conducted, Adams mentioned a recent set of images the DART spacecraft's DRACO camera took of Jupiter. The DART team captured the images in order to fool the satellite's navigation system so that it could be tested.
The exit from behind Jupiter was watched by us. Adams said that they tricked the Smart Nav into thinking Jupiter was Didymos and that the separation happened.
Dimorphos will emerge from behind Didymos in the last four hours of the terminal phase. We trained the system to do this. We're excited to see it. I believe we can do it.
Statler said that the DART team believes they have the tools and knowledge to carry out a successful planetary defense mission.
An asteroid is being moved. Statler said that the motion of a natural body in space is being changed. It's the first time that humanity has done that. This is the stuff of science fiction books that I read when I was a kid. Now it's true. It's kind of amazing that we're doing that and that we're discussing what humanity should do in the future.
He said it opened up an amazing frontier. It is very exciting.
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