Move over, Bruce Willis: NASA is shoving an asteroid to test planetary defense
 |
This illustration shows the DART spacecraft approaching the two
asteroids, Didymos and Dimorphos, with a small observing spacecraft nearby. Credit:
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben |
Nuclear bombs.
That's the go-to answer for arriving space objects like asteroids and comets,
as far as Hollywood is troubled. Movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon rely on nukes to save the world and bring
the drama.
But planetary protection
experts say in reality, if astronomers spotted a risky arriving space rock, the
harmless and best answer might be approximately more subtle, like simply
pushing it off course by ramming it with a minor spacecraft.
That's just
what NASA is getting prepared to try, with a spacecraft that's scheduled to
smack into an asteroid at 7:14 pm Eastern period on Monday.
The effect will
be the culmination of NASA's Double Asteroid
Redirection Test (DART), a further than $300 million effort
which launched a space vehicle in November of 2021 to perform civilization's
first ever test of planetary defense technology.
"This
really is about asteroid deflection, not trouble. This isn't going to blow up
the asteroid," says Nancy Chabot, the
DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins University Useful Physics
Laboratory, who says the planned collision is just a nudge that's comparable to
"running a golf cart into the Great Pyramid."
Tweaking a
space rock's orbit
The mark
asteroid, called Dimorphos, is about 7 million miles gone and postures no
threat to Earth. It's about 525 feet diagonally and orbits another, larger
asteroid.
NASA officials
stress that there's no way their test could turn either of these planetary
rocks into a menace.
"There is
no scenario in which one or the further body can developed a threat to the
Earth," says Thomas Zurbuchen,
secondary administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA. "It's
just not scientifically probable, just because of momentum conservation and
other effects."
As an
alternative, the impact should slightly shorten the time it takes for Dimorphos
to orbit its larger asteroid pal. Right now, a full circuit takes 11 hours and
55 minutes. The DART impact must change the track of Dimorphos so that it moves
closer to the large asteroid and takes less time to go around, doing so perhaps
once each 11 hours and 45 minutes.
These two
asteroids are so far gone that telescopes see them as a single point of bright
that dims and brightens as Dimorphos goes around. Pictures from the DART
spacecraft's camera will be the first casual that scientists have to see the
asteroid they've been employed to hit.
The space
agency will broadcast pictures from the doomed spacecraft in actual time on its
website. Dimorphos will loom greater and greater as the spacecraft hurtles
towards it at about 14,000 miles per hour. At the moment of impact, the
pictures will abruptly stop.
But a lesser
spacecraft nearby will be observing, and will send pictures back to Earth over
the following days. Telescopes on all 7 continents, as well as space telescopes
like James Webb, will also sight the collision and its aftermath for weeks, creation
explanations that will let astronomers precisely amount how the asteroid's path
got altered.
"The lowest
line is, it's a excessive thing," says Ed Lu, who helps as
executive director of the Asteroid Institute, a program run by a nonprofit
dedicated to terrestrial defense. "Someday, we are going to find an
asteroid which has a high probability of beating the Earth, and we are going to
want to deflect it."
When that chances,
says Lu, "we should have, in advance, some experience expressive that this
would effort."
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