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Asteroids that pass relatively close to our planet are a common phenomenon. At some point in our future as a species, Earth will surely be threatened by a space rock large enough to eliminate civilizations, so the US Space Agency is working on a plan to protect the planet.
As part of that plan, NASA will launch a spacecraft next year to conduct the first test of a strategy to stop an asteroid by hitting it while it is still far enough away to alter its orbital course.
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This is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), under which a spacecraft will launch on the smaller of two orbiting asteroids. Even if there is a slight change in the orbit of the smallest object, it will be a decisive indicator to assess whether it has successfully drifted, National Geographic reports.
The first step in deflecting a threatening asteroid is to locate it. “There are literally hundreds of thousands of asteroids out there, and we want to separate them from the ones we should be watching and monitoring more closely over time,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, told reporters.
The DART mission is slated to launch in July 2021. The refrigerator-sized spacecraft will approach an asteroid about 800 meters wide called Didymos in October 2022 at a distance of 11.5 million kilometers from Earth. .
Hitting the moon
Didymos is orbited by a 150-meter-wide full moon, which is DART’s primary objective. The effects of the impact in terms of changes in the duration of its orbit around the asteroid will be measured with ground-based telescopes.
Just before DART crashes into the moon at a speed of 23,500 kilometers per hour, a shoebox-sized camera will be launched from the spacecraft to observe the impact, subsequent debris spraying, and possibly even the resulting crater. .
According to Johnson, the collision could decrease the moon’s 12-hour orbit by up to seven minutes, although a change of just 70 seconds will be considered a huge success.
“By changing the moon’s orbit, we don’t change the orbit of [Didymos]”Johnson explained.” Didymos is a potentially dangerous asteroid, so we really don’t want to affect its orbit. We don’t want to accidentally push it in the wrong direction, “he said.
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