NASA’s first ever planetary defense test was a success.
September 26th was the end of Nasa’s DART (or Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission.
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To change the trajectory of the spacecraft, it was necessary to smash it into an asteroid called Dimorphos.
Now Nasa has finally admitted that the collision between Dimorphos and its uncrewed craft was a success.
The trajectory of the asteroid has been shifted to orbit Didymos, which is a larger asteroid.
“This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and a watershed moment for humanity,”Bill Nelson, the Administrator of Nasa said Tuesday during a press conference.
Nelson stated that the mission is still in progress “shows NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us.”
Nasa’s spacecraft had been traveling over 14,000 miles per an hour when it collided into Dimorphos.
The space rock was approximately 7million miles away from Earth at that time and didn’t pose any threat to our planet.
“The impact was perfectly executed,”Megan Bruck Syal is the lead for the planetary defense program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California.
The Mission
On November 23, 2021, Nasa’s DART mission began.
The spacecraft launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California.
The impact between the craft & the space rock was recorded exactly at 7:14 PM EST on September 26, 2022.
Nasa’s experiment aims to establish a method of protecting Earth against future asteroids.
According to Nasa, no asteroids greater than 140m in diameter are currently on a collision course for Earth over the next 100 years.
Alan Fitzsimmons, a DART team member and astronomy professor at Queen’s University Belfast, said he would like to test a gravity tractor technique next,
Fitzsimmons agreed that this was important “because it’s actually very difficult to accurately guide and maneuver spacecraft in very close proximity to an asteroid.”