NASA’s DART mission, or NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, will take off on November 24 at 10:20 pm aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (USA). .). Its objective is to deflect the asteroid Didymos and its moon Dimorphos using a spacecraft that will hit the asteroid on October 2, 2022, to modify its speed by one millimeter per second at about 11 million kilometers from Earth.
The white one, Dimorphos
This will be the US agency’s first large-scale demonstration of this type of technology on behalf of planetary defense with a NEO. Nearby objects to Earth or NEO (near earth object) are asteroids and comets whose orbits located approximately 45 million kilometers (or 0.3 astronomical units) of the Earth orbit. And detecting and having a successful method for future missions to deflect asteroids is one of the projects that both NASA and other space organizations around the world have in mind. Experts prefer to be cautious and ready if they ever face a real threat. According to the US space agency, there are just over 25,000 NEOs, but many more are waiting to be discovered.
Dimorphos is about 160 meters wide (like a small sports stadium) and orbits a much larger space rock known as Didymos that is approximately 780 meters wide . Both asteroids are one kilometer apart. Dimorphos orbits the largest asteroid at a speed slower than the normal pace of a person.
This binary asteroid system was discovered two decades ago. In Greek, Didymos means “twin”, a term that was used to describe the largest asteroid, and the smallest moon that orbits it, which at the time was named Didymos by later Dimorphos, which means “two forms.”
“As such, it will be the first object known to humans in two very different ways, one seen by DART before impact and the other seen by Hera of the European Space Agency, a few years later,” explained Kleomenis Tsiganis, planetary scientist and member. of the DART mission.
The objective of the mission
The DART mission, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, will try to deflect the asteroid Dimorphos through what they call a “kinetic impact”. The spacecraft, which is equipped with solar panels that measure 8.5 meters long each when deployed and a camera that will help it navigate and identify its target, as well as choose the best point of impact, will travel through space and It will deliberately crash into Dimorphos at about 15,000 miles per hour. This will change the speed of the tiny moon by a mere fraction, but enough that its orbital period is affected measurably. Knowing exactly how far we will get Dimorphos out of orbit will help us plan future asteroid deflection missions.
“DART is not the final answer, but rather the first important step if we need to defend Earth from the impact of an asteroid,” says NASA.
