O Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart, for its acronym in English) successfully took off this November 24th at 07:21 (Spanish Peninsula time) aboard a Falcon 9 rocket of the SpaceX company from Vandenberg space base in California (USA).
DART is the first planetary defense test mission, scheduled to collide with the asteroid Dimorphos in late 2022 and study how its orbit deviates.
This initiative of the NASA and the Johns Hopkins APL Laboratory is the first test mission of planetary defense programmed to change the course of a asteroid. When deliberately hitting a ship against it, it will be studied whether this method is effective in deflecting it.
DART will travel 11 million kilometers, autonomously and powered by solar panels, until reaching a binary asteroid system composed of Didymos – the biggest – and Dimorphos, the smallest and against which the ship will impact to try to alter its orbit.
prepare for the future
While neither asteroid poses a danger to Earth, the mission will help NASA test planetary defense capabilities in the event that an asteroid on a collision course with our planet needs to be deflected in the future.
It is planned that end of 2022 the ship collided with Dimorphos at a speed of about 6.6 kilometers per second. As if it were a small billiard ball colliding with a bigger one, the objective is to move it.
the camera DRACO which carries DART, in addition to aiding in spacecraft navigation and orientation, will transmit images in real time before impact. for your part, LICIACube, a small Italian Space Agency satellite will image the collision and the crater that is generated on the surface of Dimorphos.
Those responsible for the mission and other scientists will also use spotting scopes to analyze the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos before and after this Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
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