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NASA has announced the launch date for an upcoming mission to hit an asteroid in the face with a spacecraft at high speed.
The mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), is expected to launch at 10:20 p.m. PST (7:20 p.m. EST) on November 23, and it could help global space agencies figure out how to hijack asteroids impact the Earth, according to a NASA press release.
DART will test an asteroid defense plan called the Kinetic Impactor Technique – essentially, pulling one or more large spacecraft into the path of an oncoming asteroid in order to alter the motion of space rock. The target is a binary asteroid (two space rocks moving in tandem) called Didymos, which consists of a larger asteroid measuring around 2,600 feet (780 meters) in diameter and a smaller “moonlet” measuring around 525 feet (160 m) in diameter.
NASA will target the moon, hoping that a direct impact will slow the rock’s orbit just enough for EarthTelescopes based can study the effects in detail.
“This will confirm to us the viability of the kinetic impactor technique to hijack an asteroid orbit and determine that it remains a viable option, at least for the smaller asteroids, which pose the risk of damage. ‘most common impact,’ Lindley Johnson, NASA Planetary Defense Officer, told sister site Live Science Espace.com earlier this year.
The DART spacecraft is expected to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket through the atmosphere. Once the DART spacecraft separates from the launcher, it will navigate space for about a year, traveling nearly 11 million kilometers from Earth before finally crashing into Didymos in late September 2022, according to NASA.
If all goes as planned, the DART spacecraft will crash into the moon’s surface at a speed of approximately 15,000 mph (24,000 km / h), wiping out the spacecraft on impact. This high-speed crash will barely phase the asteroid, causing it to lose a fraction of a percent of its speed, according to NASA.
Nonetheless, this minor change is expected to slow the moon’s orbital period by several minutes, allowing astronomers to study the impact of the mission. A companion spacecraft operated by the Italian Space Agency, called Light Italian CubeSat for Imagine Asteroids (LICIACube), will attempt to fly nearby and get a glimpse of the action.
NASA is closely monitoring all known near-Earth objects that could be found within 1.3 astronomical units (1.3 times the distance between Earth and the sun) of our planet. So far, the agency has detected more than 8,000 near-Earth asteroids larger than 460 feet (140 m) in diameter – or rocks large enough to wipe out an entire state if they were to strike the United States directly. , none of these objects pose a direct threat to Earth in the next century, NASA officials say said previously Espace.com.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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