NASA: DART Mission Proves Kinetic Impact Can Save Earth From Incoming Asteroids
NASA's DART mission was a smashing success:
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test ended last year with the spacecraft colliding with an asteroid known as Dimorphos. NASA announced in the following weeks that DART had altered the asteroid's trajectory, and now we have four peer-reviewed papers that explore just how successful the mission was. The news is good — NASA has confirmed that DART validates kinetic impact as a viable way to deflect dangerous asteroids.
[...] Scientists are working to reconstruct the impact to evaluate DART's autonomous targeting ability. The authors of this study concluded that a DART-like mission to redirect a dangerous asteroid could theoretically do so without an advanced reconnaissance flight. [...]
Another of the four studies confirmed via two different measurement techniques that Dimorphos' orbit shifted by 33 minutes. NASA had expected the impact to push the asteroid by at least seven minutes, but the recoil effect of ejecta blasted off the surface had a greater effect than predicted. [...]
A separate study looked at the momentum transfer from the impact. The researchers found that DART instantly altered Dimorphos' orbit, slowing it by 2.7 millimeters per second. [...] The final study discusses what we can learn from DART beyond the planetary defense angle. Dimorphos it's now an "active asteroid" surrounded by a cloud of dust. The authors say analysis of this comet-like tail could help us learn more about the natural processes at work on asteroids.
Luckily, there are no known asteroid threats for at least the next century, but our catalog of near-Earth objects is incomplete. We could discover an asteroid with a high chance of impact tomorrow. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. For decades, kinetic redirection was seen as a potential way to save Earth from those rare but inevitable events, but no one knew if it would work. Now we do — humanity has the tools to prevent at least one kind of doomsday.
NASA's DART Asteroid-Smashing Mission Changed the Course of Planetary Defense
Earth is no longer the same helpless planet, thanks to a genius NASA mission and some very good aim:
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a winner of the 2023 Gizmodo Science Fair for crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid and altering its orbit, in a pioneering test of planetary defense.
[...] There were two big questions at the start of the mission. "The first was, do we really have what it takes to be able to take a spacecraft and intentionally slam it into a small asteroid?" said Terik Daly, instrument lead for the spacecraft's DRACO camera. "The second question was, how is the asteroid going to respond?"
"We thought it was going to work," said Andy Cheng, DART investigation team lead from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "We convinced ourselves, but we also convinced NASA, and that's why we got the chance to try." The team sought to learn the degree to which a kinetic impactor could influence the orbital trajectory of Dimorphos, but they also strove for a quick deployment. "You have to expect that, in a real emergency, you're going to have to move quickly, which we also considered a part of the test," he explained.
[...] The $308 million DART experiment worked, and to a degree that surprised the scientists themselves. They hoped to change Dimorphos's orbital period by around 72 seconds. They achieved a whopping 32-minute alteration.
[...] "We can rehearse and we can rehearse and we can rehearse, but then, what if everything goes wrong?" Daly said. A distinct possibility was that, because we had never seen these objects from up-close, DART's navigation system would get confused and crash into the wrong asteroid.
"The things that really kept me up at night were various interactions between the subsystems that we hadn't anticipated," said Adams. "I'll just tell you this: In July 2022 our probability of impact was about 50%. That is not a high number, and not a high number for any mission."
Thankfully, the mission was a resounding success.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday March 07, @11:10AM
... to protect us from nearby Gamma Ray Burst...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @04:24PM
Former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart was one of the big "influencers" who pushed the DART program. Here's his description of the problem, written sometime before the success of DART:
https://www.rustyschweickart.com/interests [rustyschweickart.com]
Well worth a few minutes to read -- very sobering and at the same time very hopeful.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 07, @04:39PM
Bruce Willis has been dealing with serious health problems lately, so sending him to deal with asteroids is no longer an option.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.