Report by Shuchi Giridhar
NASA launched a first of its kind Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
It is the first mission ever to test asteroid-deflecting technology. It is expected to slam into the Didymos asteroid and its moonlet, Dimorphos, between September 26th and October 1st 2022.
The spacecraft will complete a journey of 6.8 million miles from Earth to reach the asteroid.
The spacecraft was developed and built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and is worth about 330 million USD. It comes with a Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation (DRACO) for advanced navigation and will use Roll-out Solar Arrays (ROSA) to supply solar power for the electric propulsion. An electric propulsion system called NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster – Commercial (NEXT-C) shall also be tested by the spacecraft.
About Didymos Asteroid
The Didymos asteroid is a parent asteroid body (a celestial body that produces many smaller meteors from its own body). The Didymos asteroid is over 780 meters across and its moonlet (secondary body) is over 160 metres in scope.
The moonlet and the asteroid both are only separated over a kilometre. The Didymos asteroid is big enough to pose significant risk to a planet of Earth’s size and hence has been chosen to be averted by the DART mission.
How will we benefit from the mission?
The spacecraft will attain the kinetic impact deflection by purposefully crashing into Dimorphos at a speed of roughly 24140 km/hour. The kinetic impact caused by the crash will help change the speed of the moonlet’s orbit around the Didymos asteroid by a fraction of a second. This will in turn delay its orbital period by a few minutes and hence avoid its collision with Earth. The entire mission will be recorded and observed by NASA’s telescopes on Earth.
Plainspeak
NASA just made a spacecraft that can be used to deflect any space based object that can hit earth and damage life on Earth. This is a trial / test of that spacecraft.