Cape Canaveral. A NASA spacecraft rammed into an asteroid yesterday at breakneck speed in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a rock threatens Earth.
The galactic hit occurred on a harmless asteroid 6 million miles away, with the spacecraft named dart, that hit the rock at 22,500 kilometers per hour. Scientists hoped the impact would create a crater, launch streams of rock and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit.
“We have impact!” announced Elena Adams of mission control, jumping up and down and thrusting her arms skyward.
Telescopes around the world and in space pointed to the same point in the sky to capture the spectacle. Although the impact was immediately obvious (the radio signal from dart ceased abruptly), it will take days or even weeks to determine how much the asteroid’s trajectory changed.
“Now is where the science begins,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “Now we are going to really see how effective we were.”
The $325 million mission was the first attempt to change the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space.
“What an amazing thing. We’ve never had that capability,” Glaze added.
In the morning, Bill Nelson, administrator of NASA, reminded people via Twitter that “this is not the plot of a movie.” In a pre-recorded video, he added, “We’ve all seen it in movies like Armageddon, but the stakes are high in real life.”
The moment of impact, 11 million kilometers from Earth, could be followed live on the NASA channel.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, Maryland, designed and directed NASA’s ambitious mission.
However, as with many others, the effort requires the expertise of several US agency centers. In the case of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, it’s for navigation, precise target location, asteroid science, and Earth-to-spacecraft communications.
The target was the satellite of the asteroid Didymos, 780 meters in diameter, called Dimorphos, 160 meters in diameter. The two are only a kilometer apart.
Didymos, in Greek for twin, is a fast-spinning one who threw up the material that formed the junior partner.
dart, no bigger than a car, it took off in November from California.
“We are changing the movement of a natural celestial body in space, humanity has never done this before,” said Tom Statler, chief scientist of the mission. “It’s something out of science fiction books and TV episodes. star travel from when I was a child. Now it’s real.”
On the other hand, the ship’s built-in camera, called Drake, will take one image per second. The ones it captures will reach Earth with a delay of about 45 seconds.
To reach a target, the ship steered autonomously for the last four hours, like a self-guided missile. She aimed first at Didymos.
The small asteroid, which has never been imaged, initially appeared no larger than a pixel, before filling the field of view, until radio silence set in after the explosion.
As expected, three minutes later, a shoebox-sized satellite called Liciacube and launched by dart a few days ago, it would pass about 55 kilometers from the asteroid to capture images of the collision
The event was also observed by the Hubble and the James Webb, they should be able to detect a bright cloud of dust.
All of this should allow a better understanding of the composition of Dimorphos, which is representative of a fairly common population of asteroids, and therefore measure the effect that this technique, called kinetic impact, can have on them.
With information from the Editorial Office
NASA’s DART spacecraft is about to crash into an asteroid’s tiny moon, in the first test of a technique that could one day be used to deflect a dangerous space rock headed for Earth. Via GraphicNews.
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