![]() The shape of that tail has changed over time. The DART mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, lifted off at 10:21 p.m. ![]() 8, 2022, shows the debris blasted from the surface of Dimorphos 285 hours after the asteroid was intentionally impacted by NASA’s DART spacecraft on Sept. A NASA spacecraft that will deliberately crash into an asteroid has successfully launched. NASA put the entire cost of the DART project at $330 million, well below that of many of the space agency's most ambitious science missions. This imagery from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope from Oct. The DART spacecraft, cube-shaped with two rectangular solar arrays, is due to rendezvous with the Didymos-Dimorphos pair in late September 2022. The explosive new mission launches on November 23. NASA spacecraft will crash into an asteroid at 15,000 mph. The Dimorphos moonlet is one of the smallest astronomical objects to receive a permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by NASA.Īlthough all none poses a foreseeable hazard to humankind, NASA estimates many more asteroids remain undetected in the near-Earth vicinity. The DART spacecraft will crash into the asteroid Didymos at 15,000 miles per. Last month, NASA launched a probe on a voyage to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter, while the grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRES-REx is on its way back to Earth with a sample collected last October from the asteroid Bennu. A small nudge to an asteroid millions of miles away would be sufficient to safely reroute it.ĭART is the latest of several NASA missions of recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago. The DART team expects to shorten Dimorphos' orbital track by 10 minutes but would consider at least 73 seconds a success. Ground-based telescopes will measure how much the moonlet's orbit around Didymos changes. The plan is to fly the DART spacecraft directly into the moonlet, called Dimorphos, at 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph), bumping it hard enough to shift its orbital track around the larger asteroid.Ĭameras on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released from DART about 10 days beforehand will record the collision and beam images back to Earth. The team behind DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, chose the Didymos system because its relative proximity to Earth and dual-asteroid configuration make it ideal for observing the results of the impact.
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