![]() ![]() The final reason is that it comes unusually close to us in 2022. "If you did this at a single asteroid, you would actually need a second spacecraft ," Dr Cheng said. It was also chosen because changes to its orbit can be observed from Earth-bound telescopes as it passes in front of its companion Didymos, causing dips in light. "There is no prospect that by doing the experiment, no matter what happens, that we would make it into an asteroid that might hit the Earth." ![]() "There are buildings that are bigger than this asteroid." "It's half the height of the Eiffel Tower," said Dr Cheng, who first proposed the mission to NASA. The spacecraft is heading out to an asteroid called Didymos, which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, about 11 million kilometres away from us.ĭidymos is orbited by a smaller asteroid called Dimorphos, which is about 160 metres in diameter.ĭimorphos is the smallest thing NASA has ever attempted to hit, says DART mission lead Andy Cheng of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. What is the spacecraft going to crash into? Here's what's happening in the real scenario. The lead character isn't played by Bruce Willis, but a $US313.8 million ($431 million) spacecraft the rock isn't the size of Texas and there are no plans to blast it apart with a nuclear bomb. ![]() defend the Earth, we will want to know by how much a real kinetic impactor moves a real asteroid."Īlthough this might sound like a flashback from the 1998 movie Armageddon, there are some key differences. "If we're ever in a situation where we need to. "Even though it's unlikely that an asteroid will hit us during our lifetimes, it's one of those things that can happen. "We're trying to make sure that a rock from space doesn't send us back to the Stone Age," said Thomas Statler, from NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. It's the first time NASA has attempted a trial of what it calls the "kinetic impact" technique - aka smashing a spacecraft into a space rock - as a planetary defence strategy. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) has begun its 10-month journey to nudge a space rock out of its orbit. NASA's one-way mission to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid has blasted off. ![]()
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