How NASA’s DART Experiment Could Help Protect The Earth from Future Asteroid Impacts?

NASA’S DART Mission is a testament to mankind’s perseverance in making efforts to defy the next mass extinction since dinosaurs. Double Asteroid Redirection Test, shortened to DART, is NASA’s one hell crazy effort or an experiment, to be precise, performed to deflect or change the path of an asteroid by crashing a spacecraft on it.

Did DART make it?

Yes, it made it! The experiment is already live on various channels. NASA’s homemade DART spacecraft successfully collided with an asteroid moonlet named Dimorphos, known to be orbiting a bigger asteroid called Didymos.

DART’s target asteroid, Didymos is roughly 780 meters in diameter, and the smaller moonlet, Dimorphos, is approximately 160 meters in diameter. The DART mission’s success eventually gave us an affirmation that we can steer a spacecraft to deliberately collide it with an asteroid, with the purpose of deflecting it, a technique termed kinetic impact.

Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos pose any threat to the Earth. The duo was merely a target to test if mankind can redirect or change the course of an asteroid coming toward the Earth in future.

NASA’s DART MISSION- From the beginning!

This so-called SAVE-THE-WORLD experiment was set in motion when NASA’s DART, propped over SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, plunged into space on November 2021 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. After 10 months of space flight, DART, claiming to be the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration, successfully hit its asteroid target on Monday, that’s 26th September 2022.

The so-called “Near-Earth Objects”

Every now and then an asteroid or a comet makes close contact with the Earth. Such objects that come close to the Earth are termed as Near-Earth Objects or simply NEO.

Are NEAR-EARTH objects a reason to worry?

NASA has its powerful telescopes and antennas pointing toward the sky all the time, in order to keep a close watch on all the Near-Earth Objects. But, what if any Near-Earth Object poses a threat to the Earth? That is where we must be prepared, and that is where NASA’s DART mission, one of several deflection techniques and technologies to help protect the Earth, comes into the picture.

Earth has a long history of collisions with objects from space. As a matter of fact, thousands of meteorites, a kind of space rock smaller than the asteroids, hit the earth’s surface every year. Fortunately, these space rocks rarely survive the friction due to Earth’s atmosphere. Result! Most of them simply burned into dust and ashes.

DART Mission — Post-collision

Soon after DART’s kinetic impact over Dimorphos, a team of scientists and investigators will proceed in analysing how much the impact has altered the asteroid’s motion in space. The researchers will correlate Dimorphos’ kinetic impact with DART’s findings with in-depth computer simulations of kinetic impacts on asteroids.

By doing this, it will be possible to analyze the efficiency of this mitigation strategy, how well it can be applied to potential planetary defense scenarios, and how well the computer simulations represent the behavior of an actual asteroid.

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Originally published at http://amolmishraforreal.wordpress.com on September 27, 2022.