For the impact to be effective, DART traveled at 6.4 kilometers per second, an “incredibly fast” speed and necessary for the shock to alter “a little” the trajectory of Dimorphos
NASA launched just under a year ago a spacecraft that has deliberately collided with an asteroid at 1:14 a.m. this Tuesday, September 27 (Spanish peninsular time) to divert its orbitin an unprecedented test mission that is part of the US agency’s planetary defense strategy.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission (DART) took off promptly at 22:21 local time (06:21 GMT) on November 24, 2021 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California (USA). This mission has been considered “historic” by NASA, since the objective was to collide with an asteroid to divert it from its orbit in order to test the technology that would be necessary to avoid a possible collision against the Land.
The DART spacecraft headed for the asteroid Didymos and its small moon, Dimorphos, which was targeted by the impact to alter its orbit, and which is harmless to Earth. According to NASA calculations, Didymos and Dimorphos were relatively close to Earth – about 11 million kilometers – at the estimated time of impact. Once DART has collided with Dimorphos, NASA will examine changes in its orbit around Didymos to evaluate if the method is viable to defend the Earthin case an asteroid poses a threat to the planet in the future.
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For the impact to be effective, DART traveled at about 6.4 kilometers per second, an “incredibly fast” speed and necessary for the shock to alter “a little” the trajectory of Dimorphos, the size of the monument to George Washington -an obelisk 155 feet high (47.2 meters) located in the US capital-, but with greater volume, described in an interview with EFE the software engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Luis Rodríguez, from the DART team.
The collision was recorded by a briefcase-sized satellite called a CubeSat, which has been developed by the Italian Space Agency. That cubicle was deployed shortly before the collision to capture images and videos of the impact and its effects on Dimorphos. The data from the mission, according to NASA, will be combined with that of the Hera mission, of the European Space Agency and planned between 2024 and 2026 to analyze in more detail the asteroids and the crater that DART will leave in Dimorphos.