NASA officials announced on Tuesday that its spacecraft successfully knocked off an asteroid out of its orbit in September and signaled the first attempt to alter a celestial body’s motion. Developed throughout the course of seven years, the USD 330 million proof-of-concept mission marked the world’s first planetary defense system test engineered to foil a potential doomsday meteorite collision with the planet.
On 26th of September, the test flight of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft achieved its sole objective of changing an asteroid’s direction by kinetic force. Based on astronomical measurements, the target asteroid was bumped slightly closer to the larger parent asteroid it orbits in space. NASA scientists also confirmed that the asteroid’s orbital period was shortened by 32 minutes.
The impact of the previous month’s test was 6.8 million miles (10.9 million km) from Earth and monitored in real time from the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland.
Dimorphos, an egg-shaped asteroid, was DART’s celestial target, a moonlet considered one of the smallest astronomical objects named by NASA and among the 27,500 known asteroids orbiting Earth. It was roughly the size of a football stadium, orbiting once every 11 hours and 55 minutes a parent asteroid, Didymos, which was about five times bigger. The DART impactor vehicle, which was about as big as a refrigerator, flew directly into Dimorphos at approximately 14,000 miles per hour (22,531 kph). This created enough force to shift the moonlet’s orbital track closer to its larger companion.
DART program scientist for NASA, Tom Statler, said that the collision made Dimorphos “wobble a bit” but further observation is required to confirm it. Meanwhile, director of NASA’s planetary science division, Lori Glaze, affirmed that the outcome of the test showed NASA’s capability to deflect a potentially hazardous asteroid, and that early detection is vital to achieving this goal. The scientists added that a Dimorphos-sized asteroid, while not a threat to the planet, could damage a major city with a direct hit. They also estimate that many more asteroids remain undetected near the planet’s vicinity.
