Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Later this month, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will use a spaceship to hit an asteroid to test planetary defenses that could save the Earth from asteroid impacts in the future.

NASA's twin asteroid redirection test (DART) mission will take place on September 26, EDT, when a test spacecraft weighing about 550kg collided with an asteroid Dimorphos, not far from Earth, to test ways to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.

"although this asteroid poses no threat to Earth, this is the first time in the world that kinetic energy impact technology has been tested, using kinetic energy generated by spacecraft impact to deflect the asteroid's trajectory and complete planetary defense," NASA said on Thursday. "

In November 2021, a Falcon 9 rocket owned by SpaceX was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a DART test spacecraft.

Ten months later, DART will now chase the target asteroid by performing three orbital correction manoeuvres in the next three weeks. Each maneuver will reduce the margin of error for a spacecraft to hit an asteroid, scientists say.

NASA said that after the last manoeuvre on September 25, 24 hours before the planned impact, the navigation team will determine the exact location of the asteroid Dimorphos, which is only 2 kilometers from the spacecraft. The DART spacecraft will then automatically guide it to collide with the asteroid.

Recently, the DART task force has observed the double asteroid system Didymos for the first time, and the target asteroid Dimorphos is one of the small moons.

Didymos images taken from 2000 million miles (32.18 million kilometers) away are still very blurred. However, astronomers can combine a series of images to determine the exact location of the target asteroid Dimorphos.

"after seeing the image of the Didymos twin asteroid system for the first time, we can determine the best settings for the spacecraft and fine-tune the software," said Julie Bellerose, director of DART mission navigation at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "in September, we will further improve DART's target information by locating the DART more accurately."

If the DART spacecraft can hit Dimorphos at 15000 miles (24140 kilometers) an hour, it will be able to test whether the planetary defense theory of kinetic energy hitting asteroids works.

Andy Rifkin, a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, said: "the kinetic energy impact system means that a spacecraft hits an asteroid that might hit Earth and then changes its original orbit around the sun."

The DART mission will not change the orbit of the Didymos system, but its goal is to change the speed of the small satellite Dimorphos. Ground-based telescope and spacecraft monitoring data will eventually tell scientists whether the project is successful or not.

The Didymos twin asteroid system revolves around the sun at a speed of 20 miles per second. Rifkin explained that if the kinetic energy impact method is used to change the orbit of the small satellite Dimorphos, the engineers only plan to change the speed of the satellite around the main star slightly, say a few centimeters per second.

This is why the DART task chose the Didymos system for testing. Didymos orbits the main star at a speed of about 30 centimeters per second, making it easier for scientists to detect the impact.

If this method works, the idea for scientists is to apply the same technology to larger and smaller planets. Before this mission, scientists could only simulate impact events in the laboratory. The DART mission will provide more data for scientists to improve their planetary defense plans.

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