LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 24 (BUS): NASA launched a spacecraft Tuesday night on a mission to smash into an asteroid and test whether a space rock could be thrown off course if one were to threaten Earth.
The DART spacecraft, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a $330 million project with echoes of Bruce Willis’ “Armageddon.”
If all goes well, the 1,200-pound (540-kilogram) box craft will smash head-on at Demorphos, an asteroid 525 feet (160 meters) in diameter, at 15,000 mph (24,139 kph) this September. , according to the Associated Press.
“It’s not going to destroy the asteroid. It’s going to give it a little boost,” said Nancy Chabot, the mission in charge of the Johns Hopkins Laboratory of Applied Physics, which is running the project.
Demorphos orbits a much larger asteroid called Didymus. The pair do not pose a threat to Earth, but they do provide scientists with a better way to measure the effectiveness of a collision than a single asteroid flying through space.
Dimorphos complete one cycle of Didymus every 11 hours 55 minutes. DART’s goal is a crash that will slow the Dimorphos’ movement and cause it to fall close to the larger asteroid, reducing its orbit by 10 minutes.
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