The DART mission had to distinguish between the two asteroids in the final hour before impact. Processed by Emily Lakdawalla, Daniel Machacek, Ted Stryk, Gordan Ugarkovic / Thomas Appéré DART faces many technological challenges Data from NASA / JPL / JHUAPL / SwRI / UMD / JAXA / ESA / OSIRIS team / Russian Academy of Sciences / China National Space Agency. Space agency missions have visited a number of asteroids and comets Image: Emily Lakdawalla/The Planetary Society. That makes this a very safe and efficient way to do this test," said Chabot before the impact. "Crashing this small spacecraft into a much larger asteroid is only going to cause a small change in how Dimorphos goes around Didymos. Then at the time of impact, another, Italian-made spacecraft, called LICIACube, filmed the impact from the side. On September 26 (or September 27, depending on where you live), DART crashed into Dimorphos at roughly 6.1 kilometers per second (3.8 miles per second).ĭimorphos was about 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth at the time of DART's impact.Īs DART got closer and closer to the asteroid, we were able to see a stream of live images. The DART spacecraft launched on November 24, 2021, on a 10-month "cruise" toward the pair of asteroids called Dimorphos and Didymos. But Chabot said they wanted to do this test now "to be ready for when we might potentially need it." 10-month 'cruise' to Dimorphos There are still asteroids that scientists have yet to find. In fact, there are no known asteroid threats to the Earth for the foreseeable future." "This asteroid is not a threat to the Earth. "This is just a test," said Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory during a press briefing on September 15. But it was also be the start of streams of new data on what scientists call "planetary defense."ĭART slammed into Dimorphos, an asteroid of around 160 meters (525 feet) in diameter which orbits Didymos, another, larger asteroid of around 780 meters in diameter.ĭART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. The collision marked the end of part one of the DART mission, a 10-month space journey to autonomously impact and deflect a non-hazardous asteroid. NASA successfully crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid on September 26.
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