NASA are now less than two weeks away from conducting a historic experiment in space, where they will attempt to send a probe crashing into an asteroid.
Dimorphos is the target of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) on September 26, that will see a $330 million spacecraft smashed into the 170-metre diameter rock. And it’s all in the name of global defence.
The ultimate aim is to change the asteroid’s trajectory. The theory is that if this experiment works – on an asteroid that poses no threat to Earth – then the technology could then be used in the future to target space rocks or comets that could be seen as potential hazards to our world.
“These objects are hurtling through space and have scarred the moon and, over time, also on Earth have had major impacts that have affected our history,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. A series of new missions that we put in place are actually helping us understand and quantify those threats in an unprecedented fashion.
“DART is the first mission to try to really bump out of the way an object of threat in a direct experiment.”
Dimorphos is actually a moon which orbits the near-Earth asteroid Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The probe will carry a sophisticated guidance, navigation, and control system, called Small-body Manoeuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation (SMART Nav), which will enable it to identify and distinguish between the two asteroids.
The DART impact should adjust the orbit of Dimorphos, cutting its circuit by perhaps 10 minutes. Scientists will be spending weeks after the impact measuring the actual change in the moonlet’s orbit to compare with their predictions.
“This isn’t just a one-off event,” said Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. “We want to know what happened to Dimorphos, but more important, we want to understand what that means for potentially applying this technique in the future.”
The mission is considered to be extremely difficult according to deputy mission system engineer Evan Smith, who revealed the spacecraft will only be able to see Dimorphos itself about an hour and a half before impact.
“This is incredibly challenging,” he said. “This is a par-one course, so we’re going in for the hit this time.”
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