NASA DART Experiment
NASA just crashed a 300 million dollar spacecraft into an asteroid why, to save us from the apocalypse haven't you seen Armageddon besides of Texas Mr. President we didn't see this thing coming all right no full disclosure this asteroid wasn't on its way to obliterate Earth it's still 11 million kilometers away and there was no risk of it running into our planet but this Collision was part of a mission called the double asteroid redirection. Test and the goal was to help test out our planetary defense systems to see whether we could knock an asteroid off its trajectory if it was hurtling towards Earth and it worked aside from getting some amazing live streamed footage NASA also got a lot of great scientific data on how to protect our planet? so that if we ever find a killer asteroid set to collide with Earth we know how to stop it or at least nudge it out of the way we might have just found our get out of Apocalypse free card.
NASA describes the dart Mission as a test of quote kinetic impactor technology but it's essentially the Hulk smash of space signs on one side you have the dart spacecraft which is about the size of a small golf cart or a vending machine on the other side is the target a little asteroid moonlit called dimorphous. It's 160 meters or 520 feet in diameter and it orbits around a larger asteroid called Didymus, both of them forming a binary asteroid system a little dancing pair that orbits around the Sun every two years they go from being out past Mars to coming relatively close to Earth well close in space terms it might look like a close shave with our planet but when darftmate impact dimorphous was still 11 million kilometers or just under 7 million miles away from Earth but even though this in impact happened a long way away we still got to see it all go down on a live stream we're seeing dimorphous so wonderful wonderful that point of light that's slowly getting bigger is the binary asteroid system as we got closer to impact we started to see more details of the asteroids come into Focus those images came thanks to the single instrument on board. Dart the Draco camera that stands for Didymus reconnaissance and asteroid camera for optical navigation NASA and its names Draco helped navigate Dart towards its Target taking high resolution images of the asteroid on the way in the final moments before impact those images beamed back to us showing Amazing detail on these ancient rocks then at 7:14 PM eastern time in the US here on Earth we got confirmation of impact oh..
Wow a wedding visual confirmation in the name of planetary defense fantastic it was incredible to see how so many years of hard work and creativity resulted in a direct hit of dimorphs was just an adrenaline rush I'll add that I've been at the lab now for quite a few years and I've been involved in a lot of missions an achievements and never before have I been so excited to see a signal go away and of image to stop the final image was taken just one second before impact six kilometers above the surface of dimorphs dot crashed while the image was being transmitted so that's why most of it is blacked out NASA later released a sped up video stitching together the final images from Draco scientists expect dimorphosis orbit will change by about one percent after the impact but telescopes on Earth will measure that change exactly over a number of weeks in fact the atlas project in Hawaii has already used its telescopes to capture images of the dart impact and the resulting debris timing this whole thing was a complex game of orbital physics and if you Keen to know more about the planning and the background to the mission I actually interviewed the dart coordination lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory and while we're at it just to answer one of the big questions and comments that I got on that video no NASA didn't knock the asteroid out of orbit and into a collision course with Earth that would have been really dumb NASA and the Johns Hopkins team spent a lot of time with their protractors and rulers and calculators making sure that that didn't happen but you know what if our planet explodes in a week I owe you a Coke but back to the impact I know what you're thinking if the space probe crashed into the asteroid those instruments are Cactus right we won't get any more visuals or data Dart was our last hope right no there is another 15 days before Dart crashed it deployed a small CubeSat made by the Italian space agency ASI called lycia Cube about the size of a toaster Lithia Cube was sent up to take images of the dart impact after the crash its job was to use an onboard RGB camera to study the ejector cloud and the impact crater from the crash because Lithia Cube doesn't have a large antenna those images need to be downlinked to Earth one by one over a number of weeks they want as much detail as possible after all how many times do you get to play Demolition Derby up in space and these images are actually set to provide a lot of valuable data to scientists about the asteroid and the impact Dart didn't exactly blow the asteroid to Smithereens remember Dart is about the size of a small golf cart and the asteroid is the size of one of the Great Pyramids but still it was traveling at more than 22000 kilometers or roughly 14 000 miles an hour before impact when it hit in the vacuum of space that was enough to knock the asteroid off course so if dimorphous didn't pose a threat then why spend 300 million dollars to crash into a harmless asteroid well because the not so harmless asteroids could still be out there according to the mission team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory we found 90 of the asteroids near us that are a kilometer or larger in size scientists are tracking those but the smaller asteroids a few hundred meters across like the size of dimorphous we found less than half of those and they could cause enough damage to wipe out whole towns or cities if they impacted Earth thanks to this Mission we now know a lot more about what it takes to Target these kinds of asteroids and protect our planet so I guess I'm crossing asteroids off my deadly fears list for now thanks Nessa all right that's it for me for now but if you want to check out more on the dart Mission be sure to check out my previous video where I speak with the mission lead and dig into the science of space physics or for another big mission explainer why not take a look at my behind the scenes visit to the NASA Factory where they built the Artemis rocket that was a lot of fun and while you're here Chuck us a like why don't you and remember to subscribe for more space news as it happens I'm Claire Riley official smashing into space rocks reporter for CNET.
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