At 1:14 a.m. on Tuesday, the ship collided with the asteroid Dimorphos at a speed of 22,000 kilometers per hour. The objective is to gently alter its course. However, we won't know whether he's been successful for many days, maybe even weeks.
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| [NASA's DART mission] |
One baby step for mankind, but a big leap forward for all of humanity. The Dart probe was successful in its mission to alter the path of a double asteroid between the night of Monday, September 26 and Tuesday, September 27. The mission required the Dart probe to operate between the hours of Monday night and Tuesday morning. A mission of this magnitude has never been attempted before, and its goal is to teach people how to defend themselves from possible dangers in the future. At 23:14 (GMT), the NASA spacecraft, which is about the size of a car, purposefully collided with an asteroid while traveling at almost 20,000 kilometers per hour. At the same time when the two spacecraft collided, the NASA workers who were assembled at the Mission Control Center in Maryland, United States, burst with delight.
A few minutes earlier, the breathtaking visuals that were being relayed live by the spacecraft revealed that the distance between the Earth and the asteroid Dimorphos had progressively increased. Just before the photos stopped at the time of the explosion, we were able to make out each individual stone that was scattered throughout its gray surface. According to Lori Glaze, who is the director of planetary sciences at NASA, "We have begun a new age in which we possibly have the power to defend ourselves from a devastating asteroid strike." This statement was made.
Dimorphos has a diameter of around 160 meters and does not provide any threat to our planet. It is really the satellite of a much bigger asteroid called Didymos, which it has circumnavigated in a total of 11 hours and 55 minutes thus far. The orbit of Dimorphos is going to be shortened by ten minutes in order for NASA to achieve their goal of bringing it closer to Didymos.
It will take the scientists anything from a few days to a few weeks before they can establish with absolute certainty that the path of the asteroid has been changed. This will be possible because of telescopes located on Earth, which will be able to see the change in brightness that will occur when the smaller asteroid moves in front of and behind the larger one.
This "planetary defense" mission, designated Dart (dart in English), is the first to test such a technology. If the aim is kept relatively modest in comparison to the doomsday scenarios depicted in science fiction films such as "Armageddon," then Dart will be the first mission to test such a strategy. It gives NASA the opportunity to practice for the possibility that an asteroid would one day threaten to strike Earth.
Since leaving California, the ship had been at sea for a total of 10 months at this point. The last portion of the flight was totally automated, functioning very similarly to a self-guided missile such that it could attack a target as tiny as Dimorphos. It was anticipated that a shoebox-sized satellite named LICIACube, which had been launched by the spacecraft upriver, would pass around 55 kilometers from the asteroid three minutes after the impact in order to acquire photographs of the ejecta.
The event was also planned to be viewed by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, which ought to be able to detect a brilliant cloud of dust and hence assist in determining the quantity of material that was expelled.
All of this should make it possible to get a better understanding of the composition of Dimorphos, which is indicative of a population of fairly frequent asteroids, and as a result, to quantify the precise effect that this approach, which is termed kinetic impact, may have on them.
In addition, the European Hera probe, which is scheduled to lift out in 2024, will perform close observations of Dimorphos in 2026 in order to evaluate the effects of the collision and, for the first time, determine the mass of the asteroid.
In the past, asteroids have presented scientists with a number of unexpected opportunities. By the year 2020, the American spacecraft Osiris-Rex has penetrated the surface of the asteroid Bennu far further than was anticipated. In a similar vein, the make-up of Dimorphos cannot be determined at this time.
The main scientist on the mission, Tom Statler, issued a warning about a week ago, saying that "if the asteroid reacts to the Dart hit in a totally unanticipated manner, it might really cause us to reassess the degree to which kinetic impact is a method that can be generalized." with regard to the mission. The extinction of the dinosaurs occurred around 66 million years ago as a result of the impact of a meteorite approximately 10 kilometers in diameter with the earth.
In the neighborhood of the planet Earth, astronomers have counted close to 30,000 asteroids of varying sizes (they are called near-Earth objects, that is, their orbit crosses that of our planet). As of right present, none of these known asteroids pose a danger to our planet within the next hundred years. However, not every single one of them is mentioned just yet. According to the findings of the experts, almost all of those measuring one kilometer or more have been found. However, scientists believe that they only know about around 40% of the asteroids with a diameter of 140 meters or more; these are the asteroids that are capable of destroying a whole area.
According to Lindley Johnson, who works as a planetary defense officer for NASA, "Our most essential responsibility is to locate" the people who went missing. The sooner that they are discovered, the more time the specialists will have to devise strategies to protect themselves from the threat that they pose. According to Lindley Johnson, the Dart mission is a key first step in this direction: "This is a really exciting period (...) for space history, and even the history of mankind."