If you’ve ever been worried about objects flying across space with Earth as its final destination, NASA has a few ideas to ease your mind.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission involves ramming a spaceship into an oncoming threat against Earth and Monday night, they made history by doing their first practical test by crashing .
Dr. Paul Wiegert, a professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at UWO , says that it was a very impressive finale to a very interesting mission.
“There’s a lot of ideas out there for ways of deflecting asteroids and this is maybe the most obvious one,” says Wiegert. “You just smack it with something and change its course.”
IMPACT SUCCESS! Watch from #DARTMIssion’s DRACO Camera, as the vending machine-sized spacecraft successfully collides with asteroid Dimorphos, which is the size of a football stadium and poses no threat to Earth. pic.twitter.com/7bXipPkjWD
— NASA (@NASA) September 26, 2022
He says that while we don’t have much to worry about an extinction level event like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, small asteroids do hit the planet on a regular basis.
“Less than a decade ago, a 20 meter asteroid came in over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk,” says Wieber. “It didn’t hit the ground but the shockwave broke windows and injured people.”
The explosion caused by that meteor when it hit Earth’s atmosphere carried 20 to 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Here are the pictures taken by @LICIACube of the world's first planetary defense mission.
This is exactly where the #NASA #DartMission ended.
An incredible emotion, the beginning of new discoveries.Thanks to those who made it possible.@ASI_spazio @mediainaf #LICIACube pic.twitter.com/uPqOXH3azs
— Argotec (@Argotec_Space) September 27, 2022
NASAs decision to launch the spaceship towards Diamorphos, a minor planet-moon in orbit around the near-Earth asteroid Didymos that’s over 11 million kilometers from Earth, was mostly a matter of safety he says.
“The asteroid pair is far from the earth,” says Wieber. “It’s not dangerous and regardless of the outcomes of this test it really couldn’t become dangerous.”
But it was also chosen because of practicality.
“In order to measure this small deflection, it’s not that easy. We’re looking at the asteroid from millions of kilometers away,” says Wieber. “They had a clever idea to hit the smaller object, which is orbiting the larger one, and see how much it changes the amount of time it takes to go around the larger one. The smaller asteroid orbits the larger one about once every twelve hours and that will maybe change by only a few seconds.”
He says this can allow them to make even greater changes in the case of a practical test in the future by applying the same concept to larger objects.
Wieber estimates that it could take weeks, if not months, to see the final results of the impact.
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