NASA DART Crashed Into Asteroid
Every few million years an asteroid comes to visit us on Earth and that is regularly accompanied by extinction. Would we be able to stop these space boulders in time before they hit Earth? DART is a test by NASA to see if the principle works. Soon we will know the answer.
What is DART?
The probe DART, in full Double Asteroid Redirection Test, is a projectile with a mass of 610 kg that NASA wanted to test whether it is possible to move a small asteroid out of orbit. The target was the asteroid Dimorphos, which behaves like the moon of the asteroid Didymos. Dimorphos is about 160 m in diameter, Didymos just under a kilometer.
Didymos and Dimorphos
Big enough to do a lot of damage on Earth while still small enough to experiment with. This also concerns Near Earth Asteroids, asteroids that cross the Earth’s orbit and are therefore dangerous.
Of course, the gravitational pull of a one-kilometer boulder is not very great. The moon revolves around the rock in about 12 hours at a speed of 17 cm/s. That’s so little that DART can disrupt that orbit.
The crash of DART on Dimorphos
It required a lot of maneuvering to hit such a small target millions of miles away. The aim of the test is to see whether it was possible to shorten the orbital time of Dimorphos by at least 73 seconds. We know that the impact took place, so in that respect the test was successful. We just don’t know yet whether it was successful in disrupting the moon’s orbit.
We will have to wait until 2027, when the ESA mission HERA can observe the effects on the moon’s orbit. If the moon’s orbital time has indeed been reduced by 73 seconds, then we know that the DART trial was a success.
