NASA's DART spacecraft will crash into an asteroid tonight: Watch live
atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Nov. 23, 2021, and has since been traveling the 7 million miles to Didymos and Dimorphos.
As DART approaches Dimorphos, it will use its sole instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation , to autonomously navigate to its impact zone. Considering that scientists estimate Dimorphos has a diameter of just 560 feet , that's no easy task. "Dimorphos is a tiny asteroid," Tom Statler, the mission's program scientist at NASA, said during the news conference."We've never seen it up close, we don't know what it looks like, we don't know what the shape is. And that's just one of the things that leads to the technical challenges of DART. Hitting an asteroid is a tough thing to do."
For context, Elena Adams, DART mission systems engineer at JHUAPL, said that DRACO won't even spot Dimorphos until about an hour before impact, at which point it'll be just one pixel in DRACO's field of view."At three minutes prior to impact, two minutes prior to impact, it is 42 pixels in size," Adams said during the news conference.
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NASA will crash a spacecraft into an asteroid on Monday and you can watch it through telescopes onlineSpace.com contributing writer Stefanie Waldek is a self-taught space nerd and aviation geek who is passionate about all things spaceflight and astronomy. With a background in travel and design journalism, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University, she specializes in the budding space tourism industry and Earth-based astrotourism. In her free time, you can find her watching rocket launches or looking up at the stars, wondering what is out there. Learn more about her work at www.stefaniewaldek.com.
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