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NASA’s DART spacecraft will slam into an asteroid Monday

Scientists and engineers behind NASA’s DART mission will be watching Monday evening – hoping to witness a spacecraft crash into an asteroid.

This artist's illustration obtained from NASA shows the DART spacecraft prior to impact with the asteroid Dimorphos. — © AFP
This artist's illustration obtained from NASA shows the DART spacecraft prior to impact with the asteroid Dimorphos. — © AFP

Scientists and engineers behind NASA’s DART mission will be on the edge of their seats Monday evening hoping to witness what would otherwise be considered a failure – when a spacecraft crashes into an asteroid.

As the Washington Post puts it, if everything goes as planned, and the laws of gravity and motion don’t change at the last minute, this will happen at 7:14 p.m. Eastern time — or, to be precise: 7:14:23.

The $330 million spacecraft is due to slam head-on into an asteroid about 11 million kilometers (6,835,083 miles) above the Indian Ocean soon after midnight on Monday. The impact, at nearly seven kilometers (4.35 miles) a second, will obliterate the half-tonne probe, all in the name of planetary defense.

And please note that Dimorphos, the asteroid in question, poses no threat to humanity, according to The Guardian. So there’s nothing major at stake here, other than demonstrating a technology that someday might save civilization.

All drama aside, what does happen in space will be watched closely by telescopes back on Earth. “There are very few missions where telescope observations are critical to understanding the mission’s success,” Cristina Thomas, a planetary astronomer at Northern Arizona University who leads DART’s working group for observations, told Space.com. DART is such a mission. 

You can watch NASA’s DART asteroid impact live online on Sept. 26, starting at 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT).

Earlier this week, as part of the process, to calibrate the miniature spacecraft and its cameras, LICIACube captured these striking images of a crescent Earth and the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters. on September 22, 2022. Credits: ASI/NASA

Binary asteroid Didymos plays a key role

Astronomers had detected Didymos in 1996 and its companion, the “moonlet” Dimorphos. in 2003, but the rocks were just another binary asteroid at the time. “Nobody really followed up on it rigorously because, you know, there wasn’t a great need,” Thomas said.

Observations on the binary asteroid began in earnest in 2015, says Thomas, before the DART mission had been formally approved. So after 12 years with no eyes on the Didymos system, these first intensive observations were crucial, Thomas said, letting scientists latch back on to the asteroids.

And those observations became crucial to the DART mission, especially when scientists could pinpoint how long it takes Dimorphos to orbit Didymos – 11 hours and 55 minutes. 

That’s become the baseline for the experiment DART will execute on Monday. DART must shave 73 seconds off that orbital period to be considered a success, although scientists think the effect may be more like 10 minutes.

An artist’s depiction of Didymos and Dimorphos. (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL)

Scientists are thinking that if a real asteroid threatened Earth and we hit it far enough in advance, the effect will multiply enough that the asteroid crosses Earth’s orbit when our planet is elsewhere.

The mission’s success is not a slam dunk. The spacecraft could miss. Almost hitting the target doesn’t count. This isn’t horseshoes or hand grenades: Close doesn’t count when you’re trying to change the course of an asteroid.

“Mission success is pretty clear: You need to hit that asteroid,” said Elena Adams, an engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., which is conducting the mission under contract with NASA.

The scientists and engineers behind the mission say they won’t know if they’ll hit the asteroid until about 20 seconds before impact.

“The asteroids are extremely dark,” Adams said. “We have to hit something that’s the size of two stadiums. You can’t see them until about an hour before hitting them …. Even then it’s just a pixel in our camera.”

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We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of our dear friend Karen Graham, who served as Editor-at-Large at Digital Journal. She was 78 years old. Karen's view of what is happening in our world was colored by her love of history and how the past influences events taking place today. Her belief in humankind's part in the care of the planet and our environment has led her to focus on the need for action in dealing with climate change. It was said by Geoffrey C. Ward, "Journalism is merely history's first draft." Everyone who writes about what is happening today is indeed, writing a small part of our history.

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