Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The NASA successfully launched a spaceship that will hit an ace theroid a 11 million miles from Earth next year,
The mission called “Double Asteroid Redirection Test” (DART) , which involves teams of NASA and the European Space Agency will test a series of technological maneuvers to prevent the impact of an asteroid against Earth.
The spacecraft was released on Wednesday 24 November, at 22: 21 Pacific hours, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
The success of the mission could pave the way for a new defense system. a planetary that can deflect incoming asteroids before impact .
The plan reflects the plot of the Hollywood blockbuster “Armageddon”, in which NASA flies a spacecraft against an asteroid to prevent it from hitting Earth.
“DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space,” NASA noted on its website.
The 1 pound DART spacecraft 200 pounds and the size of a refrigerator flanked by two 18 meter long solar panels, it will travel around the sun to crash into a small asteroid called Dimorphos a 15, 000 miles per hour on next year.
If the mission succeeds, it could demonstrate for the first time humanity’s ability to ejecting a potentially dangerous asteroid from Earth.
The DART space probe will visit Dimorphos and another asteroid, Didymos, in September or October 2022.
It is expected that the impact takes place between 26 of September and October 1 of next year .
The two asteroids, called binary systems, orbit the sun every two years along a path in the shape of a egg that extends close to Mars and returns close to Earth.
Dimorphos is the smallest of the pair, orbiting Didymos like a moon at a distance of approximately one mile and completes one revolution of the largest rock each 11 hours and 55 minutes.
Dimorphos, similar in size to one of the pyramids at Giza, is not a threat to the earth.
After DART crashes into its target, NASA and ESA telescopes on Earth will study it thoroughly to verify if the scheme has worked.
A tiny cubesat launched in conjunction with the mission will collect data before, during and after impact.
“The ship spacecraft DART will achieve kinetic impact deflection by deliberately colliding with Dimorphos at a speed of approximately 6.6 kilometers per second, with the help of an onboard camera (called DRACO) and sophisticated autonomous navigation software, ”NASA explained.
” The collision will change the speed of the moon in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent.
“This will change the orbital period of the moon in several minutes, long enough to be observed and measured with telescopes at Earth. ”
Space experts have already identified at least 24, 000 of the so-called “near-Earth objects”.
It is estimated that 4, 700 of them meet the classification of “Potentially dangerous objects” determined by NASA.
That means they have more 500 feet wide, pass 4.7 million miles from Earth and would cause devastating damage if collided with she.
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