The crash will also be captured by a briefcase-sized satellite known as LICIACube, which will be trailing the spacecraft.
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"It needs to autonomously figure out how to hit the asteroid and make the course corrections very late, just minutes before impact."Īt the same time, it will send back high-resolution images of the projected crash site right up to the point of its fiery death. "Only a tiny error in the velocity when you're far away is enough to make you miss," Dr Cheng said. Now that the golf-cart-sized spacecraft has launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, it will spend the next 10 months flying towards its target.ĭART is NASA's first mission to attempt to nudge an asteroid out of its orbitĪs it homes in on the rocks in September or October next year, it will use its onboard camera to get a better idea of the size and shape of both Didymos and Dimorphos.Ībout four hours before impact, it will lock in its navigation system and then plummet towards Dimorphos at about 6 kilometres per second. "We don't even know of another asteroid system that meets all those criteria," Dr Cheng said. That will not only make it cheaper to get to, but brighter to look at through telescopes on Earth. The final reason is that it comes unusually close to us in 2022. "If you did this at a single asteroid, you would actually need a second spacecraft ," Dr Cheng said. It was also chosen because changes to its orbit can be observed from Earth-bound telescopes as it passes in front of its companion Didymos, causing dips in light. "There is no prospect that by doing the experiment, no matter what happens, that we would make it into an asteroid that might hit the Earth." Luckily, Dimorphos will never hit the Earth, which is one of the reasons why it was chosen. "It's the kind of asteroid that you would want to deflect if you ever discovered one heading toward the Earth, because would destroy the whole area around a city," Dr Cheng said. ( ABC: Modified from NASA/Johns Hopkins APL)īut an asteroid of this size could still pack a punch if it hit us. The diameter of the asteroids compared with the height of buildings and length of DART spacecraft to scale. "There are buildings that are bigger than this asteroid." "It's half the height of the Eiffel Tower," said Dr Cheng, who first proposed the mission to NASA. The spacecraft is heading out to an asteroid called Didymos, which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, about 11 million kilometres away from us.ĭidymos is orbited by a smaller asteroid called Dimorphos, which is about 160 metres in diameter.ĭimorphos is the smallest thing NASA has ever attempted to hit, says DART mission lead Andy Cheng of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. What is the spacecraft going to crash into? Here's what's happening in the real scenario. The lead character isn't played by Bruce Willis, but a $US313.8 million ($431 million) spacecraft the rock isn't the size of Texas and there are no plans to blast it apart with a nuclear bomb.
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defend the Earth, we will want to know by how much a real kinetic impactor moves a real asteroid."Īlthough this might sound like a flashback from the 1998 movie Armageddon, there are some key differences. "If we're ever in a situation where we need to. "Even though it's unlikely that an asteroid will hit us during our lifetimes, it's one of those things that can happen. "We're trying to make sure that a rock from space doesn't send us back to the Stone Age," said Thomas Statler, from NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. It's the first time NASA has attempted a trial of what it calls the "kinetic impact" technique - aka smashing a spacecraft into a space rock - as a planetary defence strategy. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) has begun its 10-month journey to nudge a space rock out of its orbit. NASA's one-way mission to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid has blasted off.
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