NASA Did an Armageddon and Smashed a Spacecraft into An Asteroid
On 26th September 2022, NASA aimed for an asteroid. Their mission was to knock the asteroid into a new orbit. The American space agency then confirmed that its planned collision with the space rock called Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour went even better than expected.
12 A successful bulls-eye hit unlike ever before
This kind of winning strike had never been done before. During a news conference, Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, said, “We conducted humanity’s first planetary defense test, and we showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of this planet.”
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11 NASA launched a spacecraft on a collision course with a small asteroid
In November 2021, NASA sent a spacecraft the size of a refrigerator toward a small asteroid as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART. Scientists made DART to destroy the spacecraft.
On 26th September, the spacecraft crashed into a small asteroid. Earth’s defenders hoped that this would be enough to change the asteroid’s orbit. This strategy was meant to protect the Earth from incoming comets and asteroids. Even a small change in the space rock’s trajectory means that people can breathe a huge sigh of relief if the asteroid gets pushed off its collision course with Earth.
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10 The targeted asteroid was Dimorphos
Dimorphos, a small space rock just over 500 feet wide, was the target for this mission. It was a safe bet and didn’t pose any danger to Earth. Before DART hit it, Dimorphos went around Didymos, a bigger asteroid, every 11 hours and 55 minutes. On the day of the crash, an onboard camera took pictures of the asteroid as it came closer and closer. As the spacecraft got closer, the asteroid’s surface filled the screen, and boulders came into focus before the transmission stopped. DART and its camera had crashed into the surface they were trying to photograph.
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9 The collision knocked the asteroid out of orbit
Not only did the spacecraft connect with Dimorphos, but it also changed its orbit by 32 minutes, making it revolve around a bigger asteroid faster. The goal of the DART mission was to make that change in time. Scientists hoped the collision would bring Dimorphos closer to Didymos and speed up its orbit. They have been analyzing data and making more observations of the double-asteroid system to determine how effective this defense mechanism was. Nelson says that scientists would have thought DART was a huge success even if it had only cut Dimorphos’s orbit by 10 minutes. The team in charge of the mission was happy to see that the real shift was about three times that amount.
Mr. Nelson said, “If an Earth-threatening asteroid was discovered and we could see it far enough away, this technique could be used to deflect it.”
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