Washington, Sept. 27 (BNA): NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully hit a distant asteroid at supersonic speed on Monday in the world’s first test of a planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential meteorite collision with Earth.
Reuters reports that the first human attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or other celestial body appeared in a NASA webcast from the Mission Operations Center outside Washington, D.C., 10 months after the launch of DART.
The live broadcast showed images captured by the DART camera as a cube-shaped “rammed” craft, no larger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, strewn at the asteroid Demorphos, the size of a football field, at 7:14 p.m. EST (2314 GMT) at a distance of 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.
The $330 million mission, which took about seven years to develop, is designed to determine if the spacecraft is able to alter an asteroid’s path through sheer kinetic force, pushing it off course enough to throw Earth out of harm’s way.
It won’t be known if the experiment was successful after its intended effect has been achieved until more ground-based telescope observations of the asteroid are made next month. But NASA officials praised the immediate result of Monday’s test, saying the spacecraft fulfilled its purpose.
“NASA works for the good of humanity, so for us it is the ultimate accomplishment of our mission to do something like this — a tech demonstration that, who knows, could save our home one day,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, retired astronaut, said minutes after the collision.
Launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, DART made most of its flight under the guidance of NASA flight managers, with control handed over to an independent onboard navigation system in the final hours of flight.
The effect of the eye of the target was monitored Monday evening in near real time from the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Cheers rang out from the control room as second-by-second images of the target asteroid, captured by the onboard DART camera, eventually filled the TV screen for NASA’s live webcast just before signal was lost, confirming that the spacecraft had crashed into Dimorphos.
DART’s celestial target was a rectangular asteroid about 560 feet (170 meters) in diameter orbiting a five times larger asteroid called Didymos as part of a binary pair of the same name, the Greek word for twin.
Neither object poses any real threat to Earth, and NASA scientists haven’t said their DART test couldn’t accidentally create a new hazard.
Demorphos and Didymus are both very small compared to the cataclysmic asteroid Chicxulub that struck Earth about 66 million years ago, wiping out about three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species including the dinosaurs.
Smaller asteroids are more common and of more theoretical interest in the near term, which makes Didymos’ pair a good fit for testing for their size, according to NASA scientists and planetary defense experts.
An asteroid the size of Dimorphos, while incapable of posing a planetary threat, could threaten a large city with a direct hit.
In addition, the two asteroids’ relative proximity to Earth and their double configuration make them ideal for the first DART proof-of-concept mission, short for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
ZHB