"DART is a critical step in demonstrating we can protect our planet from a future asteroid impact," said the Lab's Andy Cheng, who – with Andy Rivkin, also of APL – serves as the DART investigation co-lead. "This approval step advances the project toward an historic test with a non-threatening small asteroid." "DART would be NASA's first mission to demonstrate what's known as the kinetic impactor technique – striking the asteroid to shift its orbit – to defend against a potential future asteroid impact," said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Editor: Mike Levine.The first-ever mission to demonstrate an asteroid deflection technique for planetary defense – the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which is being designed and would be built and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory – is moving from concept development to preliminary design phase, following NASA's approval on June 23. Richard Binzel, professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory."It's like a Ferrari, right? It's just a beautiful piece of equipment, and then the whole point of it is to go smash into a rock!" she laughed. But we already know what happened to Elena Adams' $325 million baby. In a few weeks, NASA will calculate how much that little moon moved. The Italian Space Agency's LICIACube took this image of the DART spacecraft impacting the tiny moonlet Dimorphos, circling Didymos, September 26, 2022. How do you hit something where you don't even know its shape?"Īt 19 minutes to impact, you could see the moonlet Dimorphos for the first time. This past Monday, 10 months after liftoff, DART approached its target: Seven million miles from Earth, traveling four miles a second, toward an asteroid moonlet that nobody's ever seen.Īnd to make matters even tougher? Adams said, "We also don't know what it's made out of, we don't know its shape. So, we're actually right now already building the next telescope, a space telescope called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor), to search the sky 24 hours a day." "The smaller ones that could have regional damage, there are some out there that we don't know about. "The ones that really are the civilization-ending-size asteroids, we know we've already found 99% of those," Glaze said. NASA's Lori Glaze leads the division that oversees planetary defense. "So, we're going to see how well it works."ĭART is the first major project of a NASA department called the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. "This is the crown jewel of the spacecraft," Adams said. There's even a new self-driving computer, SMART Nav, which takes over when DART is too far away to control from the Earth It's a first test of, can we actually do it?"Īs a bonus, the 1,200-pound spacecraft is a veritable science fair of technology tests that could be useful in future missions: super lightweight solar panels that unroll a new ion thruster and a separate little camera satellite that DART carried in its pocket, the Italian Space Agency's LICIACube, so we can all enjoy pictures of the crash. If it goes fast enough, you're gonna move it. "It's basically like throwing a tennis ball at a 747. "Just a little nudge, a tap," said Adams. The goal is to bump the moonlet's orbit slightly closer to Didymos. An illustration of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft prior to impact against Dimorphos, a 525-foot-wide moonlet in the Didymos binary asteroid system. It has a moonlet of its own, and that's our target. The main asteroid, called Didymos, is about half-a-mile across. It took off last November on a mission to change an asteroid's path by crashing into it.ĭART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test because its target is, in fact, a double asteroid that orbits the sun. The easiest thing to do is to actually just change its direction slightly, and then it will miss Earth entirely."Īdams is the lead engineer on the DART mission, a joint venture of NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. And those chunks will still be going the same direction. "Because if you blow up an asteroid, you create a large number of chunks. "That's probably not the best way of doing it," said NASA's Elena Adams. Deep Impact (9/10) Movie CLIP - The Ultimate Sacrifice (1998) HD by
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