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posted by mrpg on Sunday July 02 2017, @11:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-closest-frontier dept.

NASA will impact a small asteroid with a spacecraft and measure changes in its orbit around a larger asteroid:

The first-ever mission to demonstrate an asteroid deflection technique for planetary defense -- the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) -- is moving from concept development to preliminary design phase, following NASA's approval on June 23.

"DART would be NASA's first mission to demonstrate what's known as the kinetic impactor technique -- striking the asteroid to shift its orbit -- to defend against a potential future asteroid impact," said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This approval step advances the project toward an historic test with a non-threatening small asteroid."

While current law directs the development of the DART mission, DART is not identified as a specific budget item in the Administration's Fiscal Year 2018 budget.

The target for DART is an asteroid that will have a distant approach to Earth in October 2022, and then again in 2024. The asteroid is called Didymos -- Greek for "twin" -- because it's an asteroid binary system that consists of two bodies: Didymos A, about one-half mile (780 meters) in size, and a smaller asteroid orbiting it called Didymos B, about 530 feet (160 meters) in size. DART would impact only the smaller of the two bodies, Didymos B.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65803_Didymos

Related: https://www.nas.nasa.gov/publications/articles/feature_asteroid_simulations.html


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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday July 03 2017, @05:31PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Monday July 03 2017, @05:31PM (#534504) Homepage

    It's the smaller body that's going to be hit.

    Anyway, it'd be just as likely to miss Earth thanks to this test as it would be to hit if left alone.

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