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takyon writes:

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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