![]() Believed to be essentially a rubble pile, Dimorphos will emerge as a point of light an hour before impact, looming larger and larger in the camera images beamed back to Earth. It has a single instrument: a camera used for navigating, targeting and chronicling the final action. The Johns Hopkins lab took a minimalist approach in developing Dart - short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test - given that it's essentially a battering ram and faces sure destruction. NASA insists there's a zero chance either asteroid will threaten Earth - now or in the future. It isn't going to put it into lots of pieces." Rather, the impact will dig out a crater tens of yards (meters) in size and hurl some 2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of rocks and dirt into space. "This isn't going to blow up the asteroid. "This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption," said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the effort. ![]() Dimorphos - roughly 525 feet (160 meters) across - orbits its parent body at a distance of less than a mile (1.2 kilometers). ![]() Discovered in 1996, Didymos is spinning so fast that scientists believe it flung off material that eventually formed a moonlet. ![]() It is actually the puny sidekick of a 2,500-foot (780-meter) asteroid named Didymos, Greek for twin. The asteroid with the bull's-eye on it is Dimorphos, about 7 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) from Earth. The $325 million planetary defense test began with Dart's launch last fall. The impact should shorten that time period, but scientists don't know by how many minutes.Īdams says that telescopes will be watching closely in the weeks and months after the impact to "see how does it react to being pushed."This is stuff of science-fiction books and really corny episodes of "StarTrek" from when I was a kid, and now it's real," NASA program scientist Tom Statler said Thursday.Ĭameras and telescopes will watch the crash, but it will take days or even weeks to find out if it actually changed the orbit. Right now, Dimorphos goes around every 11 hours and 55 minutes. In fact, this pair of asteroids is so small and far away that telescopes see them as little more than a point of light.Ĭhanges in brightness, however, tell scientists when the orbiting Dimorphos passes in front of its companion. No one knows what shape this asteroid has or whether its surface is smooth or rugged. Images sent back by the doomed spacecraft in the last seconds before the crash will give scientists their first good look at Dimorphos. Then, in the final hour or so, it will detect the smaller one and switch to that target. Initially, the spacecraft will orient itself by aiming for the larger asteroid, explains Adams. Space Astronomers want NASA to build a giant space telescope to peer at alien Earths "A lot of times when I tell people that NASA is actually doing this mission, they kind of don't believe it at first, maybe because it has been the thing of movies," says Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. It might sound like a movie plot, but it's not It's a space rock of that smaller size that the DART mission - short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test - will take head-on. But there are plenty of smaller asteroids, the size that could take out a city, that still haven't been found and tracked. For the foreseeable future, none that big are headed our way. NASA has identified and tracked almost all of the nearby asteroids of a size that would cause world-altering damage if they ever struck Earth. Scientists will then watch to see how the asteroid's trajectory changes. The golf-cart-size spacecraft will travel to an asteroid that's more than 6 million miles away - and poses no danger to Earth - and ram into it. In the first real-world test of a technique that could someday be used to protect Earth from a threatening space rock, a spacecraft is scheduled to blast off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Tuesday at 10:20 p.m. NASA is about to launch an unprecedented mission to knock an asteroid slightly off course. An illustration of the DART spacecraft approaching two asteroids it will crash into the smaller one to try to change how this space rock orbits its larger companion. ![]()
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