Watch NASA Launch DART, an Asteroid Impact Mission


NASA is about to launch a spacecraft with a simple mission: crash into an asteroid at 15,000 miles per hour.

The mission, the Dual Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART, leaves Earth early Wednesday to test whether striking a spacecraft with an asteroid could drag it into a different orbit. If successful, the test’s results will come in handy when NASA and other space agencies need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and prevent a catastrophic impact.

The DART spacecraft is scheduled to take off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 01:20 ET (or 10:20 pm local time) Wednesday.

NASA plans to broadcast the launch live on its platform. Youtube channel It starts at 12:30 on Wednesday.

If bad weather around the Vandenberg launch site causes a delay, the next takeoff opportunity will be in approximately 24 hours.

NASA is crashing DART into an asteroid to test for the first time a planetary defense method that could one day save a city, or perhaps the entire planet, from a catastrophic asteroid impact.

“DART is like a remake of Bruce Willis’ ‘Armageddon,’ but it was purely fictional,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview.

If all goes as planned with DART, NASA will have an approved weapon in its planetary defense arsenal. If a different asteroid were on a collision course with Earth, the world’s space agencies would count on an asteroid missile like DART to launch the space rock.

After launch, the spacecraft will make nearly one full orbit around the sun every 11 hours and 55 minutes before intersecting paths with Dimorphos, a football field-sized asteroid closely orbiting a larger asteroid called Didymos. Astronomers refer to these two asteroids as a binary system, where one is a mini-moon relative to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years.

Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, and the mission is essentially target execution. The impact of DART will occur in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, about 6.8 million miles away.

Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, officially called the kinetic impactor, will autonomously orient itself directly at Dimorphos for a head-on collision at 15,000 miles per hour. An onboard camera will capture photos in real time up to 20 seconds before impact and send them back to Earth. A small satellite from the Italian Space Agency, deployed 10 days before the impact, will come as close as 34 miles to take an image of the asteroid every six seconds in the moments before and after DART’s impact.

Telescopes on Earth will fix their lenses at the crash site, showing the two asteroids as tiny dots of reflected sunlight. To measure whether the impact of DART changed Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos, astronomers will track the time between one flicker of light (which indicates Dimorfos passing in front of Didymos) and another that shows Dimorfos orbiting behind Didymos.

If Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos extends by at least 73 seconds, DART will have successfully completed its mission. But mission managers expect the impact to extend the asteroid’s orbit for another 10 to 20 minutes.



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