Home » Technology » DART mission, NASA. Tomorrow the DART mission starts. Its goal is to change the orbit of the Didymos asteroid

DART mission, NASA. Tomorrow the DART mission starts. Its goal is to change the orbit of the Didymos asteroid

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission begins on Wednesday. Its goal is to try to change the course of the asteroid as part of NASA’s planetary defense program. The probe is to hit the satellite of the Didymos asteroid, changing its course by a fraction of a percent.

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If all goes to plan, the DART spacecraft will be launched into space with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket at 22.21 CEST on Tuesday (7.21 CEST) from Vandenberg, California. It will make a ten-month journey to the double asteroid Didymos 11 million kilometers away.

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Purpose of the DART mission

The goal of the mission is the asteroid Didymos, which is an object classified as NEO – near-Earth asteroids. It is about 780 meters in diameter. Its solar orbit is exactly two years, 40 days and five hours. It’s a binary asteroid – Didymos has its natural satellite called Dimorphos. Didymos’ moon is also not very large, it is 160 meters in diameter. What’s more, the asteroid together with the moon is included in the PHA group, i.e. potentially dangerous asteroids.

Although the asteroid does not pose a threat to Earth, Dimorphos will serve as an experimental object to demonstrate the possibility of changing the course of the celestial body by deliberate collision with a spacecraft. The collision of the 633-kilogram probe is expected in late September 2022, at a speed of 23.7 thousand kilometers per hour. For most of the mission, the spacecraft will be controlled from Earth, but for the last four hours of flight, an autonomous control system created by NASA will “target” the asteroid.

The collision will change the orbit by a fraction of a percent

According to NASA predictions, a DART impact on Dimorphos will change its orbit around Didymos by a fraction of a percent. This is to increase the time it takes Dimorphos to circle Didymos by 10 minutes (currently it is 11 hours 55 minutes). The effect is to be observable with telescopes located on Earth. The collision is to be recorded by the LICIA Cube satellite created by the Italian Space Agency. In the following years, the effects of the collision will be monitored by the Hera mission of the European Space Agency (ESA).

DART will be the first spacecraft to test the new NASA NEXT-C ion engine in space, powered by solar energy. – The right time to deviate an asteroid’s course is when it is as far from Earth as possible. The farther it is, the less force it takes to change its orbit clearly enough to pass us instead of hitting Earth, Lindley Johnson, head of NASA’s planetary defense program said at a press conference.

Johnson announced that the DART mission will be the first of many planned tests to defend Earth against asteroids. In addition to trying to change course by hitting an asteroid, the agency also wants to test the “gravity tractor” method. It consists in placing, for a long time, a spacecraft near an object, which is supposed to deflect its orbit by the force of attraction.

While none of the asteroids identified so far pose a threat to Earth in the foreseeable future, many objects have yet to be observed. NASA estimates that about 90 percent of asteroids larger than a kilometer in diameter have been discovered, but only about 40 percent of the smaller ones. Meanwhile, a mere 150-meter asteroid would destroy a large city and cause far-reaching effects that are felt over a large area.

photo-source">Main photo source: PAP/EPA/NASA/JOHNS HOPKINS APL HANDOUT

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