DART is the first-ever
mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid
deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact.
This method will have DART deliberately collide with a target asteroid—which poses
no threat to Earth— in order to change its speed and path. DART’s target is the
binary, near-Earth asteroid system Didymos, composed of the roughly 780-meter
(2,560-foot) -diameter “Didymos” and the smaller, approximately 160-meter
(530-foot)-size “Dimorphos,” which orbits Didymos. DART will impact Dimorphos
to change its orbit within the binary system, and the DART Investigation Team
will compare the results of DART’s kinetic impact with Dimorphos to highly
detailed computer simulations of kinetic impacts on asteroids. Doing so will
evaluate the effectiveness of this mitigation approach and assess how best to
apply it to future planetary defense scenarios, as well as how accurate the
computer simulations are and how well they reflect the behavior of a real
asteroid.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test
(DART), the world’s first full-scale mission to test technology for defending
Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards, launched on 23 November 2021
at 1:21 a.m. EST on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East
at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Source: DART in the News | NASA
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