Inside NASA's plan to launch a spacecraft to smash into an asteroid
-- Science fiction books and films have frequently featured the threat of a giant asteroid colliding with our planet and making humans go the way of the dinosaurs. But smaller space rocks also pose threats, and they tend to be harder to spot in advance.
"It will be the first-ever asteroid deflection test," said Megan Bruck Syal, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and member of the DART team. She points out that there could be tens of thousands of asteroids as big as DART's target, and the majority of them haven't been discovered, let alone tracked, yet.
Didymos' moonlet matches the size of typical asteroids that could be especially hazardous to Earth."As you get smaller, there are many more asteroids, but as they get smaller, they carry less energy," said Donovan Mathias, an aerospace engineer at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. Based on his team's models, asteroids between 100 and 200 meters across have the highest probability of striking the Earth and causing substantial damage.
Before DART's suicide mission comes to an abrupt end, LICIA, a small Italian-made satellite, will separate from the spacecraft and take photos of the impact and any flying debris or crater it creates. European Space Agency astronomers plan to launch a spacecraft called Hera as well, and it will arrive a couple years after the collision to study the aftermath, probing the surface and interior of the asteroid and remeasuring the orbit, to see how effectively DART deflected it.
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