Nearly every day, a piece of space rock hits Earth’s atmosphere. Most of them burn up harmlessly in the sky. But a few times a year, one will survive the journey and explode over a city or town, causing damage or even loss of life. This is why NASA is sending the DART spacecraft on a mission to test our ability to deflect asteroids that are on a collision course with Earth.
What Is the DART Mission?
DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, and it is exactly what it sounds like. The DART spacecraft will deliberately slam into an asteroid in order to change its trajectory. By doing this, we can learn whether or not this technique could be used to protect Earth from a real-life disaster scenario.
The target of the DART mission is an asteroid called Didymos, which means “twin” in Greek. This name was chosen because Didymos actually consists of two asteroids orbiting each other—a larger one called Didymos A, and a smaller one called Didymos B. For the purposes of the DART mission, we are only concerned with Didymos B, which is about 600 meters in diameter and very much resembles a mountain.
How Will the DART Mission Work?
In order to hit such a small target from afar, the DART spacecraft will have to be traveling very fast—about 14,000 miles per hour, to be exact. When it collides with Didymos B, the spacecraft will create an impact crater that is roughly half the size of a football field. Scientists believe that this will be enough to change the asteroid’s orbit and prove that this technique can be used to protect Earth from future threats.
What Happens Next?
The results of the DART mission will be monitored by another spacecraft called LICIACube (short for Lightweight Integrated Camera and Impactor Analysis CubeSat). LICIACube will take measurements of the asteroid before and after the impact in order to assess how effective this method really is.
The DART mission is set to launch soon. It marks humanity’s first attempt at changing an asteroid’s orbit in order to protect our planet from future collisions. Although we have never tried anything like this before, scientists are hopeful that it will be successful and pave the way for future missions to defend Earth from dangerous space rocks.