NASA is set to launch a spacecraft to test whether it can deflect an asteroid away from a potentially catastrophic collision with Earth.
Fortunately this asteroid is not a threat to Earth – but scientists generally regard impact events as the greatest threat facing humanity.
Take-off for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is scheduled for Tuesday and the spacecraft is attached to its payload adapter in SpaceX’s facility at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It will be launched on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.
The DART spacecraft itself is roughly the size of a small car, and the mission is being supported by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
It will eventually slam into its much larger target and hopefully shift its orbit, all while being observed by the LICIACube satellite developed by the Italian space agency.
It will be the first-ever demonstration of the “kinetic impactor” technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space.
In the culmination of the $330m (£246m) mission, DART will smash into a near-Earth double asteroid known as Didymos and Dimorphos, with the latter being a “moonlet” estimated to be about 160 metres in size.
The plan will be for the small spacecraft to kinetically impact Dimorphos at a speed of roughly 6.6 kilometres per second and, in doing so, shorten its orbit about Didymos.
This nudge technique is preferred to blowing asteroids apart in the style of the film Armageddon, because the fragments from such an explosion could continue to imperil the planet.
A study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US published in 2019 warned that for objects large enough to be targeted it was likely the blasted away fragments would reform under gravity.
Source : skynews
