NASA reported that the impact occurred on 27th of September 2022, at 7:14 p.m. ET and was greeted by cheers from the mission team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. At the time of impact, the asteroid pair Didymos and Dimorphos were relatively close to Earth approximately 11 million kilometres away.
While the target of the mission, asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a small body just 530 feet (160 meters) in diameter that orbits a larger, 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid called Didymos, was not at risk of impacting Earth, this demonstration was designed to determine how to deflect space rocks that could pose a threat to our planet in the future. Another goal of the spacecraft, in addition to impact, was to affect the motion of an asteroid in space. That being said, DART team members say it will take about two months for scientists to determine if the asteroid’s orbit changed.
DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet if one were discovered.
The investigation team will continue to observe Dimorphos using ground-based telescopes to confirm that DART’s impact altered the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos. Researchers expect the impact to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%, or roughly 10 minutes; precisely measuring how much the asteroid was deflected is one of the primary purposes of the full-scale test.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson mentioned that this mission is an unprecedented success for planetary defence, but it is also a mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity.
This one-way space trip confirmed NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact.
“We’re embarking on a new era of humankind, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous, hazardous asteroid impact,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “What an amazing thing. We’ve never had that capability before.”
You can read more about this here: nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-dart-mission-hits-asteroid-in-first-ever-planetary-defense-test.
