- Title: How will NASA crash a spacecraft into an asteroid?
- Date: 24th November 2021
- Summary: HERTFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND, UK (NOVEMBER 24, 2021) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) MATTHEW STUTTARD, HEAD OF R&D AND TECHNICAL STRATEGY AT AIRBUS SPACE UK, SAYING: "What does it actually take to deflect an asteroid? Well, you need a propulsion system, you've got to get really close to it and you need a fantastic guidance and navigation system because you're travelling so f
- Embargoed: 8th December 2021 12:35
- Keywords: Airbus Space Dart Don't Look Up NASA asteroid doomsday asteroid launch lift-off space spacecraft timelapse
- Location: CALIFORNIA & MARYLAND, UNITED STATES / HERTFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND, UK / ANIMATION / VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- City: CALIFORNIA & MARYLAND, UNITED STATES / HERTFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND, UK / ANIMATION / VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- Country: USA
- Topics: Science,Space Exploration,United States
- Reuters ID: LVA002F4YKZ0N
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: A spacecraft that must ultimately crash to succeed was launched late on Tuesday (Nov. 23) from California on a NASA mission to demonstrate the world's first planetary defense system, designed to deflect an asteroid from a potential doomsday collision with Earth.
The DART spacecraft's payload, about the size of a vending machine, was released from the booster a few minutes after launch to begin a 10-month journey into space, some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.
Matthew Stuttard is head of R&D for Airbus Defence and Space Ltd in the Space Systems division. He explained to Reuters the significance of the mission.
"Actually hitting an asteroid dead on with a direct hit is something that has never been done before, so it would be a first human achievement," Stuttard said.
"You need a fantastic guidance and navigation system because you're travelling so fast and the asteroid is travelling so fast towards you... It's a very small target, even though it's the size of a pyramid, it's a very small target in the vastness of space to go and rendezvous with and to hit dead on."
DART will fly under the guidance of NASA's flight directors until the last hours of its odyssey when control will be handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system.
The mission's finale will test the spacecraft's ability to alter an asteroid's trajectory with sheer kinetic force, plowing into it at high speed to nudge the space boulder off course just enough to keep our planet out of harm's way. "There is a high potential of missing," cautioned Stuttard.
Cameras mounted on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft to be released from DART about 10 days beforehand will record the collision and beam images of it back to Earth.
The asteroid that DART is aiming for poses no actual threat and is tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs. But scientists say smaller asteroids are far more common and of greater theoretical concern in the near term.
"Very large asteroids can cause extinction scale events. But that's kilometre and above-sized asteroids. We know where all of those asteroids are, and we know that none of them are dangerous in the next hundred years or more," added Stuttard.
"The danger really comes from asteroids in the sort of 10 to a few hundred metre type size. And the asteroid that is on this mission is in that sort of order. So it's the right size for us to be testing against."
DART's target is an asteroid "moonlet" the size of a football stadium that orbits a chunk of rock five times larger in a binary asteroid system named Didymos, the Greek word for twin.
The team behind DART, short for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, chose the Didymos system because its relative proximity to Earth and dual-asteroid configuration make it ideal for observing the results of the impact.
The plan is to fly the DART spacecraft directly into the moonlet, called Dimorphos, at 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph), bumping it hard enough to shift its orbital track around the larger asteroid.
The DART team expects to shorten Dimorphos' orbital track by 10 minutes but would consider at least 73 seconds a success. A small nudge to an asteroid millions of miles away would be sufficient to safely reroute it.
DART is the latest of several NASA missions of recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago.
The DART spacecraft, cube-shaped with two rectangular solar arrays, is due to rendezvous with the Didymos-Dimorphos pair in late September 2022.
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