NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, or DART, is a futuristic project designed to test a technique to deflect an asteroid in order to scale up the planetary defense, with the help of the “kinetic impactor” method.
The DART mission will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 somewhere between November 24 2021 and February 2021, as per a NASA statement. However, the delayed launch timeline will not hamper its original scheduled arrival time at its target that is set for September 2022, according to NASA officials.
Making Earth a safer place
DART’s target is a binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos and its moonlet named Dimorphos. The mission will mark the first planetary defense mission to test asteroid deflection methods, as per The Planetary Society.
DART will collide with the moonlet Dimorphos at speeds of eye-popping 23,760 kph. The impact should be able to impact the orbital speed of the moonlet by a fraction of a percent, notes NASA. The slight change in speed would be enough to change the orbital period by several minutes.
As per the space agency, the change in Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos will be observed and measured by telescopes on Earth, to see whether the mission is successful or not. Detecting near-Earth asteroids at an early stage is the first step in planetary defense. Around 30 new near-Earth asteroids are discovered every week. DART will be the first mission to test an asteroid deflection technique.
Preparing for potential threats
The mission is led by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) and its target is the binary asteroid system Didymos, which means “twin” in Greek. The system features a near-Earth asteroid (65803) that is 780 meters across and its moonlet Dimorphos measures 160 meters across.
Though the pair isn’t a threat to our planet, they make for ideal candidates for the mission as Dimorphos is around the same size as an asteroid that could pose threat to Earth, according to NASA. Their orbit around the Sun is also close enough to our planet for ground-based telescopes to observe and measure any differences after the collision.
