The mission’s testing a vital defense mechanism.
In a plan that’ll sound remarkably familiar to anyone who caught the 1998 blockbusters Armageddon and Deep Impact, NASA is set to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid at 7:14 p.m. ET on Monday, September 26.
The DART — Double Asteroid Redirection Test — mission hopes to determine whether it might be possible to deflect an asteroid on course for Earth. It’s rare that a chance to test the method on a non-threatening asteroid comes along, and per NBC, Bruce Betts, the chief scientist at the Planetary Society, says its “a big step forward for humanity.”
“The thing that makes this natural disaster different is that if we do our homework, we can actually prevent it,” he said. “That’s a huge difference compared to a lot of other large-scale natural disasters.”
Speaking to The Wrap last year, Armageddon director Michael Bay joked that the movie came pretty close to predicting the DART mission, saying: “Our plan was not far off. Thank God they’re doing something because these things [asteroids], they’re lethal. They come in 24,000 miles an hour, if I remember correctly – it’s an airburst to the ground.”
The target of DART’s probe is a space rock named Dimorphos, measuring 525 feet across. Dimorphos orbits a far larger 2,500-foot-wide asteroid called Didymos. The probe will hit Dimorphos at 15,000 mph, hoping to knock it off its 12-hour orbit. In a real-life scenario in which a large asteroid threatened Earth, even changing its course a fraction could make the difference between survival and obliteration.
If all goes well, the mission, which will be monitored by telescopes on the ground, will see a car-sized probe smash into Dimorphos. Following about 25-50 miles behind it will be the tiny LICIACube satellite, which hopes to get “close enough to get good images of the impact and ejecta plume, but not so close LICIACube could be hit by ejecta.”
The $325 million DART mission, which was built and managed for NASA by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, isn’t just a valuable chance to test out a potentially vital defense mechanism. It’s also a great chance to raise awareness about the need to have such methods at Earth’s disposal.
As Andrea Riley, a program executive in NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office told NBC, even “if it misses, it still provides a lot of data.”
