Around 7:10 pm tonight NASA will hopefully have successfully finished the first planetary defense test. The 308 million dollar mission is supposed to impact head into the asteroid Dimorphos.
Dart started out its journey last year on November 24. The small low budget project is supposed to test out a planetary defense system in case an asteroid was discovered that could possibly cause harm to Earth. Around a million of Near Earth Objects (nicknamed NEO’s by NASA) have been discovered in orbit around the Sun since Congress funded NASA to find at least 95% of NEOs in 1993. NASA completed this goal in 2016 and out of all the 95% of NEO’s only about 30 of them have been considered a threat. Some of these have been photographed up close by spacecraft, three probes have gone down and collected samples of these asteroids and one back in 2001 landed on a 22 mile NEO.
NASA ranks asteroids based on how dangerous they are on something called the Torino Impact Hazard Scale (TIHS) . It has a scale of 0-10, a zero being below 5% with an asteroid impacting Earth. And a 10 being a climate changing event. Although the danger of a big asteroid hitting is not going to be a threat for another 100 years, NASA wanted to do something, because if we discover a killer asteroid coming our way and we don’t have a plan, humanity will be toast.
The Dart spacecraft is testing out the most obvious way of moving an asteroid, smashing full on into it. People have said that this is too violent and have proposed ways like pushing or tugging the asteroid away from harm. However, these proposals have been too expensive, costing billions of dollars.
Dart is targeting the asteroid moon Dimorphos which orbits its parent asteroid named Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Dart will try to slow this orbit down to 11 hours and 45 minutes. Which may not seem like much. But NASA wants to crash into a threatening asteroid in deep space, before it reaches Earth's gravity and speeds up. Earth orbits the sun at over 67,000 miles per hour. So if NASA is able to delay it by 10 minutes in deep space then the asteroid will most likely miss or fly past Earth harmlessly.
To it see it live click here
Image Source: CNET