Dart, the first large-scale planetary defense test, demonstrating a method of asteroid deflection technology
Usa, Dart mission: the first attempt to deflect a falling asteroid on Earth. Launched by NASA spacecraft less than 20 meters high
At 7.20 am in the morning (Italian time) Dart was launched inside a SpaceX Falcon 9 by Elon Musk, from the Vandberg space base in California. This is the first attempt in space history to deflect an asteroid. Dart's goal is to crash into Dimorphos, a 160-meter-wide lunar asteroid, for check if the impact can alternate route and speed. Dimorphos poses no threat to our planet, but Dart's mission will provide elements of study to understand if, in the event of an asteroid really dangerous for the Earth, this could be the strategy winning.
The experiment costs 325 million dollars, and if it were successful it would mean having found a way to protect our planet from the devastating consequences of the impact of a celestial body: it is enough for an asteroid of that size to reach the atmosphere to explode with the power of multiple nuclear bombs combined, causing tens of thousands of deaths and catastrophic environmental consequences.
Crashing into Dimorphos at a speed of 6.6 kilometers per second, Dart will slow it down by a millimeter per second by altering its trajectory: that's just enough to keep it away from us. Dimorphos does not travel alone, but is part of a binary system together with another lunar asteroid, Didymos, 780 meters high, more than double the Eiffel Tower. "In reality - explains Tom Statler, who planned the NASA mission - what matters most to us is to prevent collisions with the Dimorphos-sized asteroids, which are the ones most likely to come upon us.". To know if Dart has done his duty you will need patience: the spacecraft will intercept the asteroid no earlier than September 2022, nearly 11 million kilometers away from Earth.
Asi, an Italian "special correspondent" on Dart
Dart is NASA's first planetary defense mission it carries inside, the LICIACube satellite created by Argotec, in collaboration and with the contribution of the Italian Space Agency (ASI). LICIACube (acronym of Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids), a technological jewel of only 30x20x10cm and about 13 kilograms, is an ASI project entirely built in the Argotec company in Turin, and is the first satellite built in our country. to undertake a journey into deep space. While Dart will impact against the asteroid LICIACube, staying at a safe distance, it will have the task of photographing and acquiring the impact data to verify if the asteroid will deviate its trajectory. Dart will therefore be the first full-scale test of the kinetic impact technique for planetary defense purposes for the protection of the Earth, if in the future there are dangerous situations caused by celestial objects that intersect the earth's orbit.
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