Would you rather see a spacecraft crash into an asteroid…for science?
It sounds a bit like a movie plot, but it’s really a NASA experiment that will have major implications for planetary protection in the United States. If a spacecraft called Dart can send a small, innocent asteroid into an altered orbit, we’ll have a chance if a killer asteroid lands on Earth.
NASA says it will stream stopover information from the spacecraft, which you’ll be able to see below and on the company’s website.
In keeping with the schedule on NASA’s stoppage webpage, stopover protection begins at 6:00 PM Japan time. For the second crash, NASA’s focus was on 7:14pm Japan time.
The $325 million planetary protection takes a look at the goal, placing the asteroid (called Dimorphos, in case you doubt it) in a tighter path through the rocks of the larger area it orbits. We don’t know right away whether the check is working—measurement adjustments can take days or even weeks.
In any case, NASA says it’s impossible for Dimorphos or his big buddies to threaten Earth.
Dart, short for Double Asteroid Redirection, take a look, there’s only one digital camera used for navigation, aiming, and shooting inspections.
Dimorphos appeared to have some degree of sunlight an hour before the impact, showing a progressively larger amount of sunlight in digital camera photos that were re-transmitted to Earth. Managers were confident that the darts would not accidentally hit rocks in a larger area. The spacecraft’s navigation was designed to distinguish between the two asteroids and target the smaller one.
You don’t see the explosion in the movie when the Dart, which is 1,260 kilograms lighter than a small car, hits the 11 billion-pound Dimorphos.
“It’s really about asteroid deflection, not perturbation,” Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission crew leader at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory, told Related News. “It doesn’t blow up the asteroid. It doesn’t break it down into many items.”
As an alternative, the crash would have created a sizable crater and ejected 2 million kilograms of rock and dust into the area. Naturally, it will be the best in the world of darts.
NASA puts the probability of failure at less than 10 percent. If Dart misses every asteroid, it will try again 2 times in a few years.
Read more: NASA spacecraft crashed into asteroid Monday
Associated Press reporter Marcia Dunn contributed to this report.