NASA's first planetary defense mission is underway, though we will have to wait a little while for its promised in-space fireworks.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) probe was launched from California early Wednesday morning.
DART will slam into a small asteroid named Dimorphos in late September or early October of 2022, changing the asteroid's position around Didymos. Astronomers will measure the change to see how effective the "kinetic impact" method is against a rock that lines Earth up in its crosshairs.
NASA's DART asteroid-impact mission is explained in pictures.
The DART team won't be doing anything until the big collision. In the first few weeks after a space mission is launched, there are a lot of milestones.
DART is currently in the commissioning period, a 30-day stretch just after liftoff in which mission team members are checking out the various systems and the main scientific instrument.
If everything goes according to plan, DRACO will open its eyes soon.
"We're going to open the DRACO doors and take our first pictures about eight days in," Elena Adams, DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said during a pre-launch news conference.
What would a planetary defense mission look like?
Adams said that the DART team will fire up the NASA engine about 20 days into flight.
Next-C is a solar-powered ion propulsion system. The probe is using a set of 12 hydrazine thrusters to make its way toward the Didymos-Dimorphos pair, but it won't be DART's primary propulsion system.
As DART nears its target, the action will ramp up considerably. Adams said that DRACO would take its first images of the Didymos system 30 days before impact. The probe will be helped by the photos. DART will deploy a tiny Italian craft called LICIA, which will zoom past Dimorphos just after the collision to observe its immediate effects.
DART will hit Dimorphos at about 15,000 mph. When the Didymos system is about the same distance from Earth as the two asteroids, there will be an impact. That is no coincidence.
The DART team wrote in the mission's press kit that the timing allowed scientists to make higher-quality telescopic observations of Didymos. The last time Didymos was this close to Earth was in 2003 and it will happen again in 2062.
Observations of Didymos and Dimorphos will not stop just from afar. The European Space Agency plans to launch a craft called Hera in a few years, which will travel to the Didymos system to look at the damage done by DART.
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