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A mission to divert asteroids that could threaten the Earth has begun its final phase of design and assembly, according to a press release. NASA is testing a technique designed to protect the planet from an imminent attack of asteroids and it is of a satisfying simplicity: they will snap the ship into the rock.
The double asteroid redirection test (DART) will be directed to a two-asteroid system consisting of the Didymos 800 meters in diameter and the body 160 meters of it. The spacecraft will hit the smallest asteroid, called "Didymoon", at 3.7 miles per second, or 13,320 miles per hour, to try to deflect it.
"It's cool for a lot of reasons. This is NASA's first global defense mission, "Nancy Chabot, a DART project scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, told Gizmodo. "This is not the final solution, but it is the first step to solving the potential risks of asteroids and how to mitigate them."
This may seem alarmist, but we have written a lot about the real threat posed by asteroids. Even a rock 20 meters wide, like the one that exploded above Chelyabinsk in 2013, could damage a city and hurt hundreds of people. Perhaps if scientists detect a threatening asteroid with sufficient delay, a mission like DART could change the trajectory of the asteroid to avoid the Earth.
DART will be launched between December 2020 and May 2021. It will rely on a NASA (NEXT-C) commercial scalable xenon booster, a lighter solar electric booster, to get out of the Earth's orbit and get off the ground. head towards Didymos. He will arrive at the system in October 2022. Cameras and navigation software will direct the spacecraft into the smallest rock. It is hoped that the collision will change the speed of the asteroid a bit, but that scientists will detect the change with the Earth-based telescopes.
Do not worry about Didymoon's change of course to hit Earth or something like that. Currently, it revolves around Didymos every twelve hours. DART scientists expect their mission, if successful, to reduce this orbital time by eight minutes.
This is just a test to determine if such a method can work. Governments can not simply send a mission like this whenever they feel that an asteroid is a threat. Those who hope to hijack an asteroid will still need data about it, such as the composition of the rock. This requires better observations and simulations of asteroids, which is currently lacking in the US government.
We have written repeatedly that America is not ready for a major impact on asteroids. Although they are responsible for cataloging 90% of asteroids larger than 140 meters in diameter, researchers may only be one-third and current data could be problematic. We need better observation strategies. DART will not be useful against a huge asteroid that appears out of nowhere because we have not observed it. But the experimental mission could help determine if the deviation strategy is even feasible.
"You can not just do a little deviation and change if you do not have time to warn. [DART] "It's just one aspect of the strategy," Chabot said. "Identifying what exists, following it and characterizing it is just as important."
At the very least, pushing a spaceship into an asteroid seems to be the kind of science that brandishes the American flag. I hope that there will be some video.
[JHUAPL via Universe Today]Source link
