MISSIONS operations staff members leapt to their feet when a spaceship collided with an asteroid Monday. This was a major achievement in planetary defense.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission, (DART), intentionally smashed into an Asteroid 11million miles away from Earth tonight.
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This is Nasa’s first planetary defence mission. The agency will then use the information to determine if DART really changed the orbit of the asteroid.
Members of the mission operations staff watched the impact as the asteroids grew in size on the camera’s feed.
“We have impact!” a commentator announced.
DART lost its signal as it crashed into the asteroid. This confirmed that the impact had occurred.
“We are showing that planetary defense is a global effort,”Bill Nelson, Nasa administrator, said that the program was a “giant step in planetary defense.”
Nasa will capture images of the impact with a small satellite and beam them back to Earth approximately 24 hours later.
The plot is similar to the blockbuster flick 1998. “Armageddon”In which Nasa fly a spacecraft to an asteroidal to stop it hitting Earth.
“DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space,”Nasa has a website.
DART’s spacecraft is a rectangular-shaped box that measures twice as much as a washing machine. It is flanked by two 18-meter-long solar cells.
“DART was built to be destroyed,”Nasa stated in a statement.
It took nine months for the spacecraft to reach Didymos, a binary near-Earth object 11million miles away from Earth.
Didymos measures approximately 740m in size and is located between the orbits on Mars and Earth. It is not the primary mission’s focus.
Instead, Nasa’s intrepid battering ram will set its sights on a smaller asteroid – or moonlet – orbiting Didymos closely.
Dimorphos is an asteroid. “two forms”It measures 525 feet in circumference and was selected for this mission because of its potential threat to the earth.
The impact won’t destroy the asteroid but will change its speed so it aligns with the orbit of Didymos.
“Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a great pyramid or something like that,”Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory and DART coordination lead, said:
“But for Dimorphos, this really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption.”
Although there are not currently any asteroids on a direct contact course with Earth, there are nearly 27,000 near Earth asteroids in all shapes.
DART’s data could be used to develop planetary defense strategies. Scientists may also use the data to determine how much force is required for a near Earth asteroid to orbit.