nasa dart launches crash killer asteroid

DRACO is short for Didymos Reconnaissance & Asteroid Camera for OpNav. The spacecraft will come speeding in at about 15,000 miles (24,140 kilometers) per hour, targeting Dimorphos, said Nancy Chabot, DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.Ī camera on the spacecraft, called DRACO, and autonomous navigation software will help the spacecraft detect and collide with Dimorphos. Didymos and Dimorphos will be relatively close to Earth – within 6,835,083 miles (11 million kilometers) – in September 2022. It’s the perfect time for the DART mission to occur. This is an illustration of NASA's DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency's LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos system. Kleomenis Tsiganis, a planetary scientist at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a member of the DART team, suggested that the moon be named Dimorphos, which means “two forms.” In Greek, Didymos means “twin,” which is a nod to how the asteroid – nearly half a mile (0.8 kilometer) across – forms a binary system with the smaller asteroid, or moon – 525 feet (160 meters) in diameter – that was discovered two decades ago. Detecting the threat of near-Earth objects, or NEOs, that could potentially cause grave harm is a primary focus of NASA and other space organizations around the world.

Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that place them within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of Earth. It also will be the first time humans have altered the dynamics of a solar system body in a measurable way, according to the European Space Agency. This will be the agency’s first full-scale demonstration of this type of technology on behalf of planetary defense. The mission target is Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Didymos. The Falcon 9’s booster returned for a vertical landing on Earth.īut the true test for this asteroid deflection technology will come in September 2022, when the spacecraft reaches its destination, to see how it impacts the motion of a near-Earth asteroid in space. Live coverage of the event aired on NASA TV and the agency’s site.

ET November 24) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The DART mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, lifted off at 10:21 p.m. A NASA spacecraft that will deliberately crash into an asteroid has successfully launched.

Nasa dart launches crash killer asteroid