NASA’s DART mission gets ready for asteroid impact

• The asteroid is growing closer.
• NASA spacecraft will intentionally collide.
• DART mission, will collide with the space rock on September 26.

The asteroid that a NASA spacecraft will intentionally collide with is growing closer.

After being launched 10 months ago, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART mission, will collide with the space rock on September 26.

To see how it influences an asteroid’s speed in space, the spacecraft will crash into an asteroid’s moon. At 5:30 p.m. ET that day, a live broadcast of photographs taken by the spacecraft will be accessible on NASA’s website. The impact is predicted to happen at approximately 7:14 p.m. ET.

Dimorphos, a tiny moon orbiting Didymos, a near-Earth asteroid, is the target of the expedition. According to NASA officials, the asteroid system offers no risk to Earth, making it the ideal target for testing a kinetic impact, which may be necessary if an asteroid is ever on course to strike Earth.

The occasion will serve as the organization’s first large-scale demonstration of planetary protection deflection technology.

Robert Braun, director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Space Exploration Sector, declared that “for the first time ever, we will demonstrably affect the orbit of a celestial body in the cosmos.”

Asteroids and comets with orbits that bring them within 30 million miles  of Earth are referred to as near-Earth objects. The major objective of NASA and other space organizations throughout the world is to find threats from near-Earth objects, or NEOs, that could cause significant harm.

Collision path

Didymos was found by astronomers more than 20 years ago. It refers to the asteroid’s binary system with the smaller asteroid, or moon, and in Greek means “twin.” Didymos is 0.8 kilometers wide.

Dimorphos, on the other hand, has a diameter of 525 feet and is named for its “two shapes.”

The Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation, or DRACO, on board the spacecraft recently captured the first image of Didymos.

When it snapped pictures in July, it was around 20 million miles away from the binary asteroid system.

Images captured by DRACO on the day of impact will not only provide us our first look at Dimorphos, but also let the spacecraft autonomously direct itself toward the tiny moon.

According to Nancy Chabot, planetary scientist and DART coordination lead at the Applied Physics Laboratory, these photographs will be streamed back to Earth during the event at a rate of one per second and offer a “quite beautiful” view of the moon.

Didymos and Dimorphos will be 6.8 million miles from Earth at the time of impact, which is relatively near (11 million kilometers).

When it collides with Dimorphos, the spacecraft will have accelerated to around 15,000 miles per hour.

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