Once they know that, they can make an informed decision on what might be necessary if, for instance, an asteroid twice as large was in fact on a collision course. Image Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman (That’s 550 kilograms at 6.6 km/s for our metric friends I leave it to the boffins to calculate the approximate impact force.)ĭART in its protective fairing before being loaded onto the rocket. What DART will do is fly right out there and, just when Dimorphos is coming around from the far side of Didymos, smash into it as hard as possible - and that’s quite hard, considering that the spacecraft will weigh about 1,210 pounds and its new ion engine will have propelled it to the eye-watering (if it had eyes, and there was air) speed of 4.1 miles per second.
And around it orbits our target: Dimorphos, about 525 feet across and sort of peanut-shaped, it’s about the size the Statue of Liberty would go bouldering on. The larger asteroid, Didymos, is about half a mile wide - not quite a planet-killer, but you wouldn’t want it coming down in your neighborhood either. The asteroid in question is actually the smaller of two in a binary configuration, traveling like a married couple through the solar system. And the target has been around for at least five years before that - people were talking about how this is really perfect, we can view its success from the ground, there’s no need for a second investigation.” It’s really been in the last five years or so that the program has increased its support. “It’s time to start getting together this toolset - it’s getting important for all our stakeholders. “Planetary Defense has been working on the problem for, really, decades,” explained Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Rest assured, this one in particular is no danger to our precious planet, but does happen to be a perfect test bed for the type of interception that might be necessary should such a danger appear. DART is our first attempt as a spacefaring species to deliberately change the path of an oncoming asteroid.
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