NASA will launch a mission later this month to hit an asteroid to make sure it doesn't threaten Earth in the future. Even if the asteroid-smashing goes awry, experts agree that it won't threaten Earth.
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, or DART, will essentially practice what the agency might do if a large asteroid were to collide with Earth. The mission will attempt to hit a space rock with a sledgehammer. DART will launch from the Space Force Base in California at 10:20 local time on November 23. It will crash into its asteroid target in late 2022.
Even if DART's target doesn't go according to plan, astronomer Amy Mainzer, who is the principal investigator of NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission, says there is no chance of impacting the Earth.
It will help save us all if we slam a spaceship into an asteroid.
DART will target the small asteroid moon Dimorphos that is around Didymos. Mission personnel chose this system because it is far away from Earth.
The distance from Earth to Didymos is almost 500 million kilometers. The distance between Earth and Didymos varies between 10 and 493 million km, according to Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Even if things don't go according to plan, the DART mission posed no risk of setting any chunks of asteroid on a trajectory toward Earth, he said.
There is a chance that a hunk of space rock hurtling towards our home planet is DART. NASA could use the same type of technology to push the rock out of Earth's way if the test is successful.
How likely is it that such an event will happen? Is there a chance that an asteroid could wipe out life on Earth like it did in the past with the extinction of the dinosaurs?
Mainzer said that it's an incredibly unlikely scenario. If there were really large global events, we wouldn't be here. If global extinction events were common, there's no way you would have a life.
DART will cause a change to the moonlet's position. The image is from NASA/JohnsHopkins APL.
She said that when you get to smaller sizes of impacts, they are not capable of causing global problems, but severe regional damage, and those are potentially more frequent events. Mainzer specified that when she says "frequent," she's talking in a way that could mean hundreds of thousands of years.
Mainzer explained that our understanding of what exists "near" includes a wide range of Earth. She said that she and other people around the globe are trying to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of what is near Earth. Near- Earth objects include objects within 13 astronomical units, 120.9 million miles or 194.5 million km of Earth.
She said that we are only aware of about 40% of the large objects, or objects larger than 140 meters, near our planet. That's great, but it means we have more work to do.
Mainzer explored the "what ifs" in her work as the science advisor on the comet-impact disaster dark comedy film "Don't Look Up" and is now working to fill in the knowledge gaps. A new project I am leading has just been put into the preliminary design phase by NASA. The Near-Earth object is called the NEO. She said that the objective of the mission was to raise the completeness of the 140-meter objects.
Mainzer said that DART is giving us the protective tools we need as we learn more about what's close to Earth.
She said that the importance of DART is that it will help to vet the technology that is needed, should we ever find something that does require mitigation. It will be easier to build the next spaceship if the technology has been demonstrated before. It takes a lot of time to get a spaceship together.
Mainzer said that time is important when fighting an asteroid.
She said that the key ingredient for all of the strategies was time. You have to have enough time to do it. You need enough time to build the craft. You have to have enough time because the less time you have, the less energy you need to push an object.
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