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Science

NASA to launch “Armageddon”-style mission to deliberately crash into an asteroid’s moon and test “planetary defense”

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NASA’s upcoming mission might resemble a scene from a sci-fi disaster movie. The agency announced Sunday that it’s sending spacecraft above the Earth to crash into an asteroid’s moonlet to change the body’s trajectory. 

The mission, a Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will be the first agency’s use of the kinetic impactor technique, in which a large, high-speed spacecraft is sent into an asteroid’s path to change its motion. NASA is set to conduct the mission, what it calls “the first test for planetary defense,” on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, to hit the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet, Dimorphos. 

The asteroid is roughly 780 meters across — about 2,559 feet, according to NASA. Its moonlet is about 525 feet, which according to NASA, is “more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to Earth.” 

The DART spacecraft will crash into the moonlet nearly head-on at about 6.6 kilometers per second, a speed that’s faster than a bullet and rapid enough to change the speed of the moonlet by a fraction of 1%, NASA says. Though it appears like a small change, this impact will change the orbital period of the moonlet by several minutes. 

DART will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but it’s not going to crash into the asteroid’s moon for another 10 months. NASA said that it will be cruising in space until September 2022, when the Didymos system is within 11 million kilometers of Earth. 

The mission is reminiscent of the 1998 sci-fi action movie “Armageddon,” in which the space agency deploys a team of civilians to land on an asteroid and detonate it before it destroys Earth. While the basic idea to the movie is similar, however, NASA has said that neither Didymos nor Dimorphos pose a threat to Earth. This particular mission, the agency says, is so that scientists can calculate how effective DART missions can be. 

The distance from Earth that the asteroid and its moonlet will be at the time of the collision is close enough that telescopes will be able to observe what happens. 

Li Cohen

Li Cohen is a social media producer and trending reporter for CBS News, focusing on social justice issues.



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Science

NASA plans ‘Armageddon’-style mission to crash into asteroid’s moon

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NASA is a taking page out of the action flick “Armageddon” – by launching a spaceship to wallop an asteroid’s moon in a test to deflect a space rock threatening our planet.

The space agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is set to lift off at 1:20 a.m. EST on Nov. 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The planetary defense mission is anticipated to make impact between Sept. 26 and Oct. 2, 2022 – striking its target at nearly 15,000 mph, 6.8 million miles away from Earth, officials said.

Live coverage of the launch will be shown on NASA TV, the agency’s app and its website.

“DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique, which involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an asteroid in space to change its motion,” NASA said.

“Its target is the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet,” it added.

DART will be sending satellites to hit the asteroid Didymos and its moonlet.
NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
DART team members inspecting one of the spacecrafts that will be used in the launch.
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman

The Planetary Defense Coordination Office manages the mission, which involves sending a pair of satellites out to the relatively nearby Didymos, which is about 2,600 feet in diameter, and its 525-foot-wide moonlet, according to Tech Crunch.

“Up until now, we haven’t had too many options for what we might do if we found something that was incoming,” Johns Hopkins planetary astronomer Andy Rivkin told Vice News recently.

“DART is the first test of how we might be able to deflect something without having to resort to a nuclear package, or sitting in our basements, waiting it out and crossing our fingers,” he added.

The Italian Space Agency is collaborating with the Light Italian CubeSat for Imagine Asteroids, or LICIACube, which will observe “the mess we make,” as Rivkin put it.

The satellites are scheduled to make an impact in late 2022.
NASA

Earthbound humans also will be able to catch the action with very powerful telescopes. 

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NASA’s ‘Armageddon’-style asteroid deflection mission takes off in November – TechCrunch

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NASA has a launch date for that most Hollywood of missions, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which is basically a dry run of the movie “Armageddon.” Unlike the film, this will not involve nukes, oil rigs or Aerosmith, but instead is a practical test of our ability to change the trajectory of an asteroid in a significant and predictable way.

The DART mission, managed by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (!), involves sending a pair of satellites out to a relatively nearby pair of asteroids, known as the Didymos binary. It’s one large-ish asteroid, approximately 780 meters across — that’s Didymos proper — and a 160-meter “moonlet” in its orbit.

As the moonlet is more typical of the type likely to threaten Earth — there being more asteroids that are that size and not easily observed — we will be testing the possibility of intercepting one by smashing into it at nearly 15,000 miles per hour. This will change the speed of the moonlet by a mere fraction of a percent, but enough that its orbit period will be affected measurably. Knowing exactly how much will help us plan any future asteroid-deflection missions — not surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of existing science on ramming your spacecraft into space rocks.

A companion spacecraft, called the Light Italian CubeSat for Imagine Asteroids, or LICIACube, just had the finishing touches put on it last week and will be launched shortly before the operation and will attempt to fly by at the very moment of impact and capture “the resultant plume of ejecta and possibly the newly-formed impact crater.”

A very exciting and interesting mission to be sure, but had to be delayed past its original launch window of this summer, and November 23 marks the first day of the new launch window. DART is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg in Southern California at 10:20 PM on that date, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9.

With Osiris-Rex and Japan’s Hayabusa-2 missions, Earth authorities are getting pretty good at reaching out and touching asteroids. We’ll know more about the plan of attack on the Didymos binary in the run-up to launch.

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