A small probe that could teach NASA how to save Earth from dangerous asteroids was carried into the dark California skies by a rocket.
There are no asteroids that are headed for Earth in the next 100 years. The agency has a plan to get the space rocks away from our planet. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test is testing the plan. Its sole purpose was to hit the center of the distant asteroid.
The probe lifted off from the Falcon 9 at 1:21 a.m. On Wednesday. The DART will spend about two hours unfurling its solar panels once it is in space.
The DART mission will be carried out with a Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA TV.
The probe will be hurtling toward the asteroids if that goes well. Didymos is a moonlet called Dimorphos. The moonlet is about the size of a football stadium. It will reach its target of 6.8 million miles from Earth in September 2022.
Ed Reynolds, the DART project manager at the Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a press conference on Monday that they are hitting it with a very small vehicle. If you have enough time, you can do big things with small vehicles.
On November 16, 2021, the Falcon 9 rocket will close around the DART spacecraft.
NASA/JohnsHopkins APL.
Dimorphos should be pushed closer to Didymos by about 10 minutes every 11 hours and 45 minutes because of that.
DART will prove that technology can change the path of dangerous asteroids if it succeeds. It will give NASA valuable data about how the collision affects the asteroid and how big a probe must be to move its target.
Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate administrator at NASA, said in a pre-launch press conference that there are a few impactors that are ready to go in case of a threat.
The final hour of DART will determine the mission.
NASA doesn't track every space rock in our neighborhood. 40% of nearby asteroids are 140 meters wide or larger, which is enough to level a city. Dimorphos is a perfect example of a city killer.
The Dimorphos asteroid is 160 m in diameter.
The office of the science.
Scientists don't know much about their target, other than its size and how quickly it travels to Didymos. They can see it with telescopes on Earth, but they can't see it directly.
DART's camera will catch sight of Dimorphos about an hour before the collision.
As Dimorphos comes into view, a system called SMART Nav is programmed to calculate the asteroid's center. The probe's navigation system will fire its missiles to get it to the target.
Every second, DART beams a new photo back to Earth. A small Italian spaceship is going to release itself from DART 10 days before the crash to fly alongside the NASA probe and record the crash.
The asteroid should be pushed closer to Didymos by 15,000 miles per hour (4 miles per second) if the spaceship hits Dimorphos's center. The impact will cause an explosion of between 22,000 and 220,000 pounds of rock material, which could give the asteroid an even bigger push than DART itself.
The European Space Agency plans to launch a follow-up mission to look at Didymos and Dimorphos. Hera will map Dimorphos, measure its mass and examine the crater left by DART.
If NASA has enough time to reach the asteroid, nudging it will work.
An artist's concept of a mission.
JPL-Caltech is a part of NASA.
NASA needs about five to 10 years' advance notice of an asteroid's advance in order to use a DART-like mission to divert an Earth-bound boulder.
It takes a long time to design and build a spaceship and travel to the asteroid. The probe needs to hit an asteroid before it gets to Earth. The slight impact of the spaceship takes the rock off course. It is carried further away from Earth by the change.
NASA is building a space telescope that will be used to identify hazardous asteroids with enough time. The telescope will be used to identify asteroids 140 meters or larger.
Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary-defense officer, said in the Monday briefing that if we don't find objects that could be an impact threat to the Earth, we can't do anything about them.
Aylin Woodward was involved in reporting.
