On November 24th 2021, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test satellite, the world’s first planetary defence system, from the Vandenberg US Space Force Base. It was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX. The spacecraft is aiming towards Dimorphos, a tiny moonlet with a diameter of around 160 metres. At a speed of around 6.6 kilometres per second, or 24,000 kilometres per hour, the spaceship will smash with it. Between September 26 and October 1, 2022, the collision is likely to occur. The goal of the test is to see if the technology is capable of dealing with a true asteroid impact hazard in the future. According to NASA, DART’s target asteroid is not now a threat to Earth. However, the asteroid is part of a group of objects known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), which come within 30 million miles of Earth.There are currently approximately 25,000 Near Earth Objects, with no known asteroid larger than 140 metres having a serious chance of colliding with Earth in the next 100 years. According to NASA, carrying out a real-world test on an asteroid with mostly unknown physical attributes is an essential next step to evaluate current models and enhance them further to address possibly hazardous asteroids in the future. Following the hit, the research team will use The DART mission also has advanced navigation and imaging instruments, notably the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) from the Italian Space Agency, which will monitor the crash and its aftermath. 460-foot asteroids impact once every 20,000 years, according to scientists. Asteroids six miles in diameter or larger, such as the one that struck Earth 66 million years ago and wiped out most life on the planet, including the dinosaurs, occur every 100-200 million years. “The CubeSat will, hopefully, capture the most magnifi cent photograph of DART’s collision and the ejecta plume ejected by the asteroid. That will be a genuinely historic and magnificent photograph," DART programme scientist Tom Statle stated. DART’s total budget is $313.9 million over eight years, which comprises spacecraft development, launch vehicle development, and mission operations through late 2022. Asteroid impacts are always deadly, but the size of the asteroid has a lot to do with it. Most asteroids will most certainly cause extinction events on Earth, similar to the one that occurred 66 million years ago when an asteroid with a diameter of 10 kilometres collided with the planet. Even more than its size, the speed of a comet can determine the magnitude of the impact it will have on Earth. With many aspirations and expectations set, DART is a big step towards the future of the Earth’s safety in space and paving way towards further developments into science and technology.
several telescopes on Earth to determine how much the asteroid has been deflected.
10 Jan 2022
Somalika Chhabra
