02 OCTOBER: Cosmic dust and small asteroids are hitting earth all the time. The previous extinction level crash occurred nearly 66 million years ago which wiped out dinosaurs from the earth. In order to prevent that from happening to our present civilization, the National Aeronautics And Space Administration (NASA) launched the mission DART, Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) for planetary defence.
First images of this mission were revealed recently. The main objective of this mission is to test whether we will be able to deflect a threatening asteroid in the future with the kinetic impactor method. The kinetic impactor method as used in the DART mission involves sending one or more high-speed spacecraft towards a near-earth object in collision course with earth and deflecting it from the earth’s orbit. The spacecraft launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on November 23, 2021, at 10:21 P.M. PST and on 26 September 2022, the impact took place.
The first images of the mission have been released by the joint effort of the most famous observatories of NASA: Hubble and James Webb. The impact turned out to be much larger than expected. The rays can be seen ejected from the asteroid’s body 22 mins, 5 hours, and 8.2 hours after impact as released by NASA. This is the first time this method was tested to crash the low-cost DART spacecraft traveling at the speed of 14,000 miles per hour into the asteroid Dimorphos which didn’t pose any actual threat to our planet. Dimorphos is a small asteroid moonlet that orbits the asteroid Didymos. DART spacecraft weighs around 600 kilograms whereas Dimorphos weighs around 5 billion kilograms (diameter=525 feet). The asteroid pair is within 7 million miles of earth. A global team is going to observe this asteroid system to study the orbital change of Dimorphos.
The crash was successful but it will take the scientists around two months to assess if the orbit of the asteroid changed. If the crash had been unsuccessful, the spacecraft would be placed in orbit to create such opportunity again after two years. In four years, ESA (European Space Agency) will be studying the asteroid system in more detail. Planetary defense unifies all humankind and life on earth as one.
~ Vishalika Sharma