Telescopes on all seven continents, along with the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and NASA’s asteroid-hunting Lucy spacecraft, may see a bright flash as Dart smacks Dimorphos and sends streams of rock and dirt cascading into space. Cameras on Dart and a mini tagalong satellite will capture the collision up close.Īlso Read | Did late cretaceous host icy conditions in Antarctica? Scientists answer Although the strike itself should be immediately apparent, it could take a few weeks or more to verify the moonlet’s tweaked orbit. The impact by Dart should shave about 10 minutes off that. Little Dimorphos completes a lap around big Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes.
If it goes screaming past both space rocks, it will encounter them again in a couple years for Take 2. Unless Dart misses - NASA puts the odds of that happening at less than 10% - it will be the end of the road for Dart. “Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a Great Pyramid,” said Chabot. The size of a small vending machine at 1,260 pounds (570 kilograms), the spacecraft will slam into roughly 11 billion pounds (5 billion kilograms) of asteroid. The spacecraft’s navigation is designed to distinguish between the two asteroids and, in the final 50 minutes, target the smaller one.Īlso Read | NASA's Webb Telescope captures clearest view of Neptune's rings after 33 years Managers are confident Dart won’t smash into the larger Didymos by mistake. It has a single instrument: a camera used for navigating, targeting and chronicling the final action.īelieved to be essentially a rubble pile, Dimorphos will emerge as a point of light an hour before impact, looming larger and larger in the camera images beamed back to Earth. The Johns Hopkins lab took a minimalist approach in developing Dart - short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test - given that it’s essentially a battering ram and faces sure destruction. NASA insists there’s a zero chance either asteroid will threaten Earth - now or in the future. It isn’t going to put it into lots of pieces.” Rather, the impact will dig out a crater tens of yards (meters) in size and hurl some 2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of rocks and dirt into space. "This isn’t going to blow up the asteroid. “This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption," said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the effort. Dimorphos - roughly 525 feet (160 meters) across - orbits its parent body at a distance of less than a mile (1.2 kilometers).Īlso Read | Babies in the womb react differently to flavours: researchers Discovered in 1996, Didymos is spinning so fast that scientists believe it flung off material that eventually formed a moonlet. It is actually the puny sidekick of a 2,500-foot (780-meter) asteroid named Didymos, Greek for twin. The asteroid with the bull’s-eye on it is Dimorphos, about 7 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) from Earth. The $325 million planetary defense test began with Dart’s launch last fall. “This is stuff of science-fiction books and really corny episodes of “StarTrek” from when I was a kid, and now it's real,” NASA program scientist Tom Statler said Thursday.Ĭameras and telescopes will watch the crash, but it will take days or even weeks to find out if it actually changed the orbit. The impact should be just enough to nudge the asteroid into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space rock - demonstrating that if a killer asteroid ever heads our way, we’d stand a fighting chance of diverting it. The impact should be just enough to nudge the asteroid into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space rock. (AP) DART is expected to zero in on the asteroid Monday, intent on slamming it head-on at 14,000 mph. A spacecraft named Dart will zero in on the asteroid Monday, intent on slamming it head-on at 14,000 mph (22,500 kph). In the first-of-its kind, save-the-world experiment, NASA is about to clobber a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away.
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