NASA Launches Probe to Check Threats of Asteroid Collisions with Earth

A NASA’s mission is to help humanity defend itself from asteroids.

This test “will be historic,” said Tom Statler, a US space agency scientist who is involved in the Binary Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, at a press conference.

“For the first time, humanity will change the movement of a natural celestial body in space,” he said.

This is just a dress rehearsal, the target asteroid poses no threat to Earth, but NASA is taking the mission very seriously.

The US space agency has now listed more than 27,500 asteroids of various sizes close to Earth, and “none of them pose a threat in the next 100 years,” said NASA Science Director Thomas Zurbuchen.

According to experts, only 40% of asteroids have a diameter of 140 meters or more.

The mission, dubbed DART (dart, in simple translation), will be transferred from Vandenberg Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10:21 pm today (06:21 am Wednesday, Lisbon).

The spacecraft is smaller than a car and has two long solar panels. Next fall, about 10 months later, it should collide with an asteroid the size of a football field (about 160 meters in diameter), which will be located 11 million kilometers from Earth.

The asteroid is called Dimorfos and is a satellite that orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos (780 meters in diameter).

It takes Dimorfos 11 hours 55 minutes to get around the largest asteroid. Scientists hope to shorten the orbit in about 10 minutes.

“This is a very small change, but it might be all it takes to deflect an asteroid from colliding with Earth. […]”- said Tom Statler.

The results will be used in calculations to help determine in the future how much weight must be projected onto a particular type of asteroid in order to cause deflection.

The asteroid will not appear in images transmitted by the probe, as it is only available two minutes before the impact.

The images will be available from a satellite developed by the Italian Space Agency, which will be launched 10 days before the collision and will use its propulsion system to slightly deflect its own path.

Three minutes after the collision, the satellite will fly over Dimorphos to see the effect of the collision and possibly a crater on the surface.

The orbit of the asteroid Didymos around the Sun may also be slightly altered due to the gravitational relationship with its moon, which deprives it of a potential path to Earth.

The total cost of the mission – the first interplanetary rocket launched by Elon Musk for NASA – is $ 330 million (about € 293 million).

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