NASA DART mission

In the first hour of "Connections with Evan Dawson" on Wednesday, September 28, 2022, experts help us understand NASA's DART Mission, a test to see if ...

The DART Mission is a test to see if the tactic could protect Earth from a rogue asteroid in the future. On Monday, NASA plowed a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if it could deflect its course. Experts help us understand the mission and its goals.

Although the DART Impactor spacecraft is receiving most of the attention, the NASA Cubesat satellite LICIACube, which performed the crucial task of taking ...

Dimorphos orbits a larger 780-metre asteroid called Didymos. Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth. By comparison, the dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit ...

[asteroids](http://tech.hindustantimes.com/tags/asteroids) and [comets](http://tech.hindustantimes.com/tags/comets) that orbit our [Sun](http://tech.hindustantimes.com/tags/sun). "The expected output of the impact is to shorten Dimorphos' orbit by about 1 per cent, or roughly 10 minutes. Today's successful impact is a big step forward in that direction. "However, the probability of that is non-zero and we must always be vigilant. However, for sufficiently large asteroids, that is not the case as the outer core will burn but there will be sufficient mass left to create damage. "We primarily use radars and lidars for this. The idea is, if we can encounter these asteroids whose trajectory is towards Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth. "This successful DART mission is an example of that. Dimorphos orbits a larger 780-metre asteroid called Didymos. Hence, It is better to prepare our defenses to avoid such asteroids on a collision course with Earth in the future," said Chrisphin Karthick, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), [Bengaluru](http://tech.hindustantimes.com/tags/bengaluru). We now know to precisely aim the spacecraft for such a small body.

Jay McMahon, a participating scientist on the NASA DART mission, which involved hitting an asteroid with a satellite, chats with 5280.

Has your involvement on the DART mission given you a “cool” factor on campus? It was fun and exciting—everyone was cheering and clapping at the end. In a conversation with 5280, the University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of aerospace engineering tells us what it was like working on the mission and what he’s looking for now that the DART satellite successfully collided with the asteroid. So there could be an asteroid we face that’s way smaller than what killed the dinosaurs, but is still big enough that it could cause significant damage if we didn’t see it in time and do something about it. Then of course, there’s all the pictures and videos we’re now getting from telescopes. For example, the spacecraft was doing little maneuvers the whole time to keep re-centering the asteroid. One of the things that can affect the orbit is the shape of smaller orbiting body. So that was the goal: to make sure that if that ever happens, we would be able to do something to protect ourselves. Jay McMahon: I’ve been on the team for a year and a half now. It had taken 10 months for their satellite to catch up with its target—a small asteroid called Dimorphos—and on September 26, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft was finally within striking distance. It was great; we had a big watch party here at the aerospace engineering building at CU Boulder. Orbiting peacefully around a larger asteroid, Didymos, and located 7 million miles away (about 30 times the distance to the moon), it was never headed toward Earth like the fictional planet-killer Bruce Willis and crew destroyed in Armageddon—but NASA saw a chance to run a real-life test.

This week, NASA's DART mission has successfully collided with an asteroid 7 million miles away, slightly diverting its orbit. It is no exaggeration to state ...

The mid-sized ones are the objects of most concern. It is the square of the velocity that makes the impact so devastating, especially when the velocities are reaching into the tens of thousands of miles per hour. About 175 megatons of rock was lifted by the impact and rained down over an area of about 9.5 kilometers from ground zero. Since we cannot pack a billion trucks into 50 meters (the estimated size of the rock), we can use another analogy: The impact energy was equivalent to the detonation of 20 to 40 megatons of TNT (mega=million). The ground around the impact was instantly vaporized, together with most of the asteroid. The danger of asteroids and meteors is real, and getting caught by surprise is not a good idea. The alternative explanation at the time held that the crater was the result of some violent volcanic activity. The crater has a diameter of 1.2 kilometers, and it is 200 meters deep. That’s a matter of power transfer, and we can still hope that it is possible to amplify the collision speed and divert a larger rock just enough. But Dimorphos is small, and impacts can be destructive at different levels, depending on the size of the colliding rock or comet. Remarkably, we can now protect ourselves from some of the objects from space that drive our shared fears. Considering that the target was 7 million miles away, and DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, traveled at about 14,000 miles per hour, the test was an extraordinary technological feat of planning and precise execution.