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Originally written Sunday: NASA is going to crash a satellite into a 175 yard asteroid at 14,000 miles an hour Monday in an attempt to change its orbit by a centimeter. The satellite, which weighs in at 360-570 kg depending on the source, is hopefully going to slow the asteroid by a centimeter a second. Hopefully by the time you read this, the experiment will have ended successfully almost 7,000,000 miles away..<\/p>\n
While Dimorphos is about one-and-a-half times the size of a football field, this test is a dress rehearsal for the really \u201cbig one<\/a>\u201d that could potentially smash into Earth someday. So, DART\u2019s goal is to collect as much data as possible during the test. Mission engineers hope to alter the speed of incoming objects by a centimeter per second. \u201cThat\u2019s not very fast, but if you do it enough seconds in advance, you can cause it to miss the Earth entirely,\u201d according to the mission overview<\/a> by Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yahoo News<\/a><\/p>\n
If we have a planet-buster rock headed to us from Moon-orbit distances, we are hosed. Not enough time to react, not enough space to deflect big fragments from impact. But like when you are on the firing line and a tiny fraction of misalignment causes a bullet to miss the target? If we can push the rock a tiny bit from a very long distance, over millions of miles those tiny deflections can add up significantly. Just using the above – linear math says if that rock was headed our way, 7 million miles being 11.2 million kilometers, that one centimeter might make a (11,200,000 km x1000 meter\/mile x .01 meter)\u00a0 change , which might cause a certain hit to become a near miss. Admittedly, for a big target we need more than the anticipated refrigerator-sized DART to make a difference, but we have a surfeit of nukes, right?.<\/p>\n
The mission demonstrates the high level of international collaboration that is needed for such an ambitious mission. Though the DART mission is managed by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory<\/a> , scientists and engineers from around the world have come together to contribute.<\/p>\n
“We’ve worked really closely with our European colleagues and colleagues all over the world,” Ellen Howell, a senior research scientist at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and a co-investigator for DART, told Space.com. Though DART is a test, a similar level of international cooperation would be essential in the case of a real impact, she said.<\/p>\n
Though the threat from asteroid<\/u><\/a> impacts is small, it is a threat nonetheless, and something we should be prepared for. We only need to look at past impact events such as the massive Chicxulub<\/a> asteroid impact that is credited with the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, to see the catastrophic effects an impact can have on life on Earth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n