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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

NASA Invites Media to Witness World's First Planetary Defense Test [nasa.gov]

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the world's first mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards, will impact its target asteroid—which poses no threat to Earth—at 7:14 p.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 26.

Among other activities, NASA will host a televised briefing beginning at 6 p.m. on Sept. 26 from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. APL is the builder and manager of the DART spacecraft for NASA.

This test will show a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it to change the asteroid's motion in a way that can be measured using ground-based telescopes. DART will provide important data to help better prepare for an asteroid that might pose an impact hazard to Earth, should one ever be discovered.

Bonus: NASA's Juno Will Perform Close Flyby of Jupiter's Icy Moon Europa [nasa.gov]

On Thursday, Sept. 29, at 2:36 a.m. PDT (5:36 a.m. EDT), NASA's Juno spacecraft will come within 222 miles (358 kilometers) of the surface of Jupiter's ice-covered moon, Europa. The solar-powered spacecraft is expected to obtain some of the highest-resolution images ever taken of portions of Europa's surface, as well as collect valuable data on the moon's interior, surface composition, and ionosphere, along with its interaction with Jupiter's magnetosphere.

[...] The close flyby will modify Juno's trajectory, reducing the time it takes to orbit Jupiter from 43 to 38 days. It will be the closest a NASA spacecraft has approached Europa since Galileo [nasa.gov] came within 218 miles (351 kilometers) on Jan. 3, 2000. In addition, this flyby marks the second encounter with a Galilean moon [nasa.gov] during Juno's extended mission [nasa.gov]. The mission explored Ganymede [nasa.gov] in June 2021 and plans to make close approaches of Io in 2023 and 2024.

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