NASA’s “Armageddon” style asteroid deflection mission takes off in November – TechCrunch

NASA has a launch date for most Hollywood missions, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which is essentially a dry run of the movie “Armageddon.” Unlike the movie, it won’t be about nuclear weapons, oil rigs, or Aerosmith, but rather a practical test of our ability to alter an asteroid’s trajectory in meaningful and predictable ways.

The DART mission, managed by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (!), Involves sending a pair of satellites to a relatively nearby pair of asteroids, known as the Didymos binary. It is a large asteroid, about 780 meters in diameter – it is Didymos itself – and a “moonlet” of 160 meters in its orbit.

As the moon is more typical of the type likely to threaten the Earth – there are more asteroids of this size and difficult to observe – we will test the possibility of intercepting one by hitting it at nearly 15,000 miles per hour. . This will change the moon’s speed by a mere fraction of a percent, but enough that its orbit period is measurably affected. Knowing exactly how much will help us plan future asteroid deflection missions – unsurprisingly, there isn’t a lot of science out there about sinking your spacecraft into space rocks.

A companion spacecraft, called Light Italian CubeSat for Imagine Asteroids, or LICIACube, was just developed last week and will be launched shortly before the operation and will attempt to fly over at the very moment of impact and capture “The resulting ejecta plume and possibly the newly formed impact crater.

A very exciting and interesting mission, to be sure, but one that had to be delayed beyond its original launch window this summer, and November 23 marks the first day of the new launch window. DART is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg, Southern California at 10:20 p.m. on that date, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9.

With Osiris-Rex and the Japanese Hayabusa-2 missions, Earth authorities are becoming quite good at reaching out and touching asteroids. We will know more about the Didymos binary attack plan as the launch approaches.