However, he added, with the success of this mission, "I'm really interested to see how we're going to take that technology and move forward."Įmail Chelsea Gohd at or follow her on Twitter. "At this moment in time, we don't have a single object that really is a threat to Earth," Zurbuchen told during the news conference. While there aren't any large asteroids currently posing a risk of hurtling toward Earth, "this asteroid system is a perfect testing ground to see if intentionally crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid is an effective way to change its course, should an Earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future," according to a statement from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft. So in the future, if a rogue asteroid were to be on a trajectory that would pose a risk to Earth, NASA could theoretically use a spacecraft like DART to smash the rock away from a collision course with our planet. A live stream will be available at NASA TV, which you can watch below. However, it will be critically important to proving that this type of planetary defense strategy does work. Coverage of the first SLS rollout begins at 5:00 p.m. Explorers trudged the Atlantic Ocean searching for World War II artifacts lost at sea, but they stumbled on something else a 20-foot-long piece of debris from the Space Shuttle Challenger, which was destroyed shortly after takeoff in 1986. Potentially dangerous asteroids (images)īecause the two asteroids don't pose any threat to Earth, this test won't directly make Earth safer. The greatest asteroid encounters of all time! Mission team members on Earth will be studying the pair of space rocks using telescopes to measure the effect of DART's impact on Dimorphos' orbit. The mission aims to shorten the moonlet's orbit around Didymos by several minutes. The craft will collide almost head-on with the moonlet, pushing it and altering its orbit around Didymos. The mission will test kinetic impact technology, a planetary defense strategy. Neither asteroid in this system poses a threat to Earth, experts have reassured.ĭART's target is Dimorphos. whose last project 'God of Love' won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)ĭART will travel to a two-asteroid system that includes a small "moonlet" asteroid named Dimorphos that orbits around a larger asteroid known as Didymos, which means "twin" in Greek.ĭepending on where it is in its orbit around the sun, these two space rocks could be anywhere from 6 to 306 million miles (10 to 493 million kilometers) from Earth, but right now they're roughly 300 million miles (483.6 million km) away from Earth, astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts told. An artist's depiction of the DART spacecraft approaching the Didymos system.
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