2023 BU will pass over the southern tip of South America on January 26. Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech
An asteroid is on its way to Earth, but don’t worry—the end is not here. The asteroid, dubbed 2023 BU, is about the size of a box truck and is not projected to impact our planet during its flyby on Thursday. However, it will be “one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded,” according to a NASA scientist.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab said in a release on Wednesday that 2023 BU is about 11.5 to 28 feet (3.5 to 8.5 meters) wide, which is small enough to mostly burn up in our atmosphere if it were to hit us. But NASA doesn’t expect 2023 BU to slam into the planet; instead the asteroid will pass about 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) above the southern tip of South America on Thursday, January 26, at 4:32 p.m. PST. NASA was able to calculate the position and trajectory of the asteroid using Near Earth Asteroid Scout, a hazard assessment system.
“Scout quickly ruled out 2023 BU as an impactor, but despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who developed Scout. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”
2023 BU is passing closer to us then some of the satellites orbiting our planet, and Earth’s gravity is changing the asteroid’s path around the Sun from circular to more elongated. The asteroid was discovered by Gennadiy Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea on January 21. Since then, observatories across the planet have also detected 2023 BU, leading to robust models of the asteroid’s path and potential hazard.
Astronomers’ detection of and prompt study of 2023 BU shows how robust humanity’s asteroid detection workflow is becoming. Our ability to eventually defend our planet is advancing, too, after the successful DART test mission to deflect asteroid last October.
The HAARP facility’s antenna array includes 180 antennas spread across 33 acres.Photo: HAARP
A group of researchers is attempting to bounce radio signals off a 500-foot-wide asteroid during its close flyby of Earth on Tuesday.
The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is aiming its antennas at asteroid 2010 XC15, a space rock that’s categorized as a near-Earth potentially hazardous asteroid. The effort is a test run to to prepare for a larger object, known as Apophis, that will have a close encounter with our planet in 2029.
“What’s new and what we are trying to do is probe asteroid interiors with long wavelength radars and radio telescopes from the ground,” Mark Haynes, lead investigator on the project and a radar systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. “Longer wavelengths can penetrate the interior of an object much better than the radio wavelengths used for communication.”
HAARP is a research facility in Gakona, Alaska (one that’s been the subject of plenty of conspiracy theories). It’s made up of 180 high-frequency antennas, each standing at 72 feet tall and stretched across 33 acres. The facility transmits radio beams toward the ionosphere, the ionized part of the atmosphere that’s located about 50 to 400 miles (80 to 600 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. HAARP sends radio signals to the ionosphere and waits to see how they return, in an effort to measure the disturbances caused by the Sun, among other things.
The facility launched a science campaign in October with 13 experiments, including one that involved bouncing signals off the Moon. At the time, HAARP researchers were considering sending a radio signal to an asteroid to investigate the interior of the rocky body.
During today’s experiment, the HAARP antennas in Alaska will transmit the radio signals to the asteroid, and then scientists will check if the reflected signals arrive at antenna arrays at the University of New Mexico Long Wavelength Array and California’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array.
HAARP will transmit a continually chirping signal at slightly above and below 9.6 megahertz; the chirp will repeat at two-second intervals. At its closest approach on December 27, the asteroid will be twice as far as the Moon is from Earth.
Tuesday’s experiment is to prepare for an upcoming encounter with an asteroid in 2029. That potentially hazardous asteroid, formally known as 99942 Apophis, is around 1,210 feet (370 meters) wide, and it will come to within 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) of Earth on April 13, 2029. The near-Earth object was thought to pose a slight risk to Earth in 2068, but NASA ruled that out.
Still, HAARP wants to probe the asteroid to prepare for potential risks in the future from space rocks. “The more time there is before a potential impact, the more options there are to try to deflect it,” Haynes said.
In September, NASA’s DART spacecraft smacked into a small asteroid and successfully altered its orbit. Such a strategy could be one way to divert a space rock that threatens Earth.
Today’s test shows the potential of using long wavelength radio signals to probe the interiors of asteroids. “If we can get the ground-based systems up and running, then that will give us a lot of chances to try to do interior sensing of these objects,” Haynes said.
More: A Powerful Recoil Effect Magnified NASA’s Asteroid Deflection Experiment
I aimed a 1,500-foot iron asteroid traveling at 38,000 miles per hour with a 45-degree impact angle at Gizmodo’s office in Midtown, Manhattan.Screenshot: Gizmodo/Neal.Fun
Hundreds of thousands of asteroids lurk in our solar system, and while space agencies track many of them, there’s always the chance that one will suddenly appear on a collision course with Earth. A new app on the website Neal.fun demonstrates what could happen if one smacked into any part of the planet.
Neal Agarwal developed Asteroid Simulator to show the potentially extreme local effects of different kinds of asteroids. The first step is to pick your asteroid, with choices of iron, stone, carbon, and gold, or even an icy comet. The asteroid’s diameter can be set up to 1 mile (1.6 kilometers); its speed can be anywhere from 1,000 to 250,000 miles per hour; and the impact angle can be set up to 90 degrees. Once you select a strike location on a global map, prepare for chaos.
“I grew up watching disaster movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon, and so I always wanted to make a tool that would let me visualize my own asteroid impact scenarios,” Agarwal said to Gizmodo in an email. “I think this tool is for anyone who loves playing out ‘what-if’ scenarios in their head. The math and physics behind the simulation is based on research papers by Dr. Gareth Collins and Dr. Clemens Rumpf who both study asteroid impacts.”
Once you’ve programmed the asteroid and launched it at your desired target, Asteroid Simulator will walk you through the devastation. First, it’ll show you the width and depth of the crater, the number of people vaporized by the impact, and how much energy was released. It will then walk you through the size and effects of the fireball, shock wave, wind speed, and earthquake generated by the asteroid.
NASA has its eyes on more than 19,000 near-Earth asteroids. While no known space rock poses an imminent threat to Earth, events like the 2013 Chelyabinsk impact in Russia remind us of the need for robust planetary defense. Just this year, NASA tested an asteroid deflection strategy via its DART spacecraft, to resounding success.
Composite image of the Didymos-Dimorphos system taken on November 30, showing its new ejecta tail. Image: Magdalena Ridge Observatory/NM Tech
Scientists continue to pore over the results of NASA’s stunningly successful DART test to deflect a harmless asteroid. As the latest findings suggest, the recoil created by the blast of debris spewing out from Dimorphos after impact was significant, further boosting the spacecraft’s influence on the asteroid.
NASA’s fridge-sized spacecraft smashed into the 535-foot-long (163-meter) Dimorphos on September 26, shortening its orbit around its larger partner, Didymos, by a whopping 33 minutes. That equates to several dozen feet, demonstrating the feasibility of using kinetic impactors as a means to deflect threatening asteroids.
A stunning side-effect of the test were the gigantic and complex plumes that emanated from the asteroid after impact. The Didymos-Dimorphos system, located 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, even sprouted a long tail in the wake of the experiment. DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, had a profound impact on Dimorphos, kicking up a surprising amount of debris, or “ejecta,” in the parlance of planetary scientists.
Animated image showing changes to the Didymos-Dimorphos system in the first month following DART’s impact. Gif: University of Canterbury Ōtehīwai Mt. John Observatory/UCNZ
Dimorphos, as we learned, is a rubble pile asteroid, as opposed to it being a dense, tightly packed rocky body. This undoubtedly contributed to the excessive amount of ejected debris, but scientists weren’t entirely sure how much debris the asteroid shed as a result of the impact. Preliminary findings presented on Thursday at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in Chicago are casting new light on this and other aspects of the DART mission.
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Not only did DART kick up tons of ejecta, it also triggered a recoil effect that further served to nudge the asteroid in the desired direction, as Andy Rivkin, DART investigation team lead, explained at the meeting. “We got a lot of bang for the buck,” he told BBC News.
Indeed, had Dimorphos been a more compact body, the same level of recoil likely wouldn’t have happened. “If you blast material off the target then you have a recoil force,” explained DART mission scientist Andy Cheng from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, who also spoke at the meeting. The resulting recoil is analogous to letting go of a balloon; as the air rushes out, it pushes the balloon in the opposite direction. In the case of Dimorphos, the stream of ejecta served as the air coming out of the balloon, which likewise pushed the asteroid in the opposite direction.
Planetary scientists are starting to get a sense as to how much debris got displaced. DART, traveling at 14,000 miles per hour (22,500 km/hour), struck with enough force to spill over 2 million pounds of material into the void. That’s enough to fill around six or seven rail cars, NASA said in a statement. That estimate might actually be on the low side, and the true figure could possibly be 10 times higher, Rivkin said at the meeting.
The scientists assigned DART’s momentum factor, known as “beta,” a value of 3.6, meaning that the momentum transferred into Dimorphos was 3.6 times greater than an impact event that produced no ejecta plume. “The result of that recoil force is that you put more momentum into the target, and you end up with a bigger deflection,” Cheng told reporters. “If you’re trying to save the Earth, this makes a big difference.”
That’s a good point, as those values will dictate the parameters for an actual mission to deflect a legitimately dangerous asteroid. Cheng and his colleagues will now use these results to infer the beta values of other asteroids, a task that will require a deeper understanding of an object’s density, composition, porosity, and other parameters. The scientists are also hoping to figure out the degree to which DART’s initial hit moved the asteroid and how much of its movement happened on account of the recoil.
The speakers also produced another figure—the length of the tail, or ejecta plume, that formed in the wake of the impact. According to Rivkin, Dimorophos sprouted a tail measuring 18,600 miles (30,000 km) long.
“Impacting the asteroid was just the start,” Tom Statler, the program scientist for DART and a presenter at the meeting, said in the statement. “Now we use the observations to study what these bodies are made of and how they were formed—as well as how to defend our planet should there ever be an asteroid headed our way.”
Last week, NASA’s DART spacecraft intentionally crashed into Dimorphos, a petite moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. Now, a telescope on the ground in Chile has imaged the massive plume created by the impact in the days following the encounter.
The crash was a planetary defense test; NASA is seeking to know if a kinetic impactor can change the trajectory of an Earth-bound space rock, should we ever spot a large one on a collision course with us. The space agency’s Center for Near Earth Objects exists to monitor the status of these objects and their orbits.
NASA is still sifting through the data of the collision to determine if the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, altered Dimorphos’s orbital trajectory around its larger companion, but images of the impact are coming thick and fast from all the telescopic lenses turned towards the historic event.
The latest images come from the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope in Chile, operated by NOIRLab. The SOAR telescope is located in the foothills of the Andes, an arid environment with clear, light-free skies that make the region ideal for ground-based telescopes.
The expanding dust trail from the collision is clearly visible, stretching to the right corner of the image. According to a NOIRLab release, the debris trail stretches about 6000 miles (10,000 kilometers) from the point of impact. Said Teddy Kareta, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who was involved with the observation, in the release: “It is amazing how clearly we were able to capture the structure and extent of the aftermath in the days following the impact.”
NASA scientists have yet to come out with their determination on DART’s success, but the impact is a success in itself. Soon to come are further findings about the event: exactly how much material from Didymos was expelled, how pulverized the material was, and how fast it may have been kicked up. The data could shed important light on the effect that kinetic impactors might have on “rubble pile” asteroids, which Dimorphos appears to be. Rubble pile asteroids feature loosely bound conglomerations of surface material, which could explain these dramatic post-impact views of the moonlet.
Nearby in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s sky survey will soon begin. Among its charges are assessing potentially hazardous objects near Earth—though considering the recent test, perhaps the asteroids should be worried about us.
More: Ground Telescopes Capture Jaw-Dropping Views of DART Asteroid Impact
An artist’s depiction of the DART Spacecraft approaching the asteroid. Illustration: NASA
The demise of DART is finally upon us, as the NASA spacecraft is on a collision course with the tiny Dimorphos asteroid. Here’s how you can watch this hugely important experiment to deflect an asteroid.
Short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the DART mission is the first test of kinetic impactor technology as a means of deflecting asteroids that could be headed towards Earth. Although Didymos means no harm to our planet, the epic crash could one day protect our planet from an Earth-bound asteroid. A lot is resting on this astronomical encounter, and here’s how you can watch the action live.
The DART spacecraft is scheduled to impact its target asteroid on Monday at 7:14 p.m. ET. NASA will live stream the event at the space agency’s YouTube channel, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. Or you can stay right here and tune into the NASA broadcast through the feed below.
DART’s Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos (Official NASA Broadcast)
Live coverage of the mission will begin at 6 p.m. ET, and it will feature audio from NASA’s mission control, live commentary, as well as images beamed down by the spacecraft’s onboard high-resolution camera, DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation).
Excitingly, NASA is also providing a silent live feed from DRACO that’s set to begin at 5 p.m. ET on NASA’s media channel. DRACO will keep rolling until it finally smashes into Dimorphos, relaying one image per second back to ground controllers on Earth. You can also tune in to the DRACO feed through the live stream below.
Watch a Live Feed from NASA’s DART Spacecraft on Approach to Asteroid Dimorphos
DART is careening towards the asteroid at speeds reaching 14,000 miles per hour (22,530 kilometers per hour). There may be a slight lag between these images and what’s happening in the control room as it takes about eight seconds for the images to appear on the screen after they’ve been received and processed by mission control, NASA officials told reporters during a press briefing on Thursday. So even if mission control declares “impact ” or “loss of signal,” it may take a few seconds to see that reflected in NASA’s coverage. And by “see it happen” we assume that’ll be the sudden appearance of a blank screen, signifying the destruction of the spacecraft.
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Alexa? Has an 8″ HD touchscreen which can let you watch shows, stream things, or even make video calls thanks to the 13 MP camera, you can also use it to control other smart devices in your home with ease, and even display photos if you want to as a digital photo frame.
DART is NASA’s first planetary defense test mission. Its target is a tiny asteroid known as Dimorphos, a mini-moon that orbits a slightly larger asteroid called Didymos. The 1,376-pound DART probe is going to smash into Dimorphos in an attempt to alter its orbit around its larger counterpart. The purpose of the test is to experiment with kinetic impactor technology as a means of deflecting asteroids that could be headed towards Earth.
NASA keeps a close watch on 28,000 nearby asteroids. Although none of those asteroids currently pose a threat to Earth, we do need a plan in place should a massive space rock be headed towards our planet in the future. Didymos and its tiny companion Dimorphos pose no threat to Earth, and the test won’t cause the system to threaten our planet. The pair is roughly 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth.
NASA will use ground-based telescopes to monitor Dimorphos’s orbital trajectory after being smacked by the spacecraft, and to also measure the physical effects of the impact itself. At the scene, Europe’s LICIACube will monitor the event with its two onboard cameras, LUKE and LEIA. The Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb Space Telescope, and a camera onboard the Lucy spacecraft, will also attempt to monitor the event.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is planning a follow-up mission to the pair of space rocks; the space agency is scheduled to launch its Hera mission in 2024, which will rendezvous with Didymos by 2026 to study the impact crater left behind by DART, and any other changes made to the asteroid.
For now, DART’s POV will hopefully provide a breathtaking view of Dimorphos as it heads directly into the asteroid. It’ll be a sad end to the spacecraft, but data from the mission could eventually result in the tools needed to deflect a legitimately dangerous asteroid.
Additional reporting by George Dvorsky.
More: NASA’s DART Mission Is Going to Really Mess Up This Tiny Asteroid
In a first-of-its-kind mission, NASA is planning to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid on September 26 (Earth time), and you’ll be able to stream it live.
Humanity’s first experiment in diverting harmful asteroids from our planet, the mission called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is meant to change the asteroid Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%. Dimorphos is not on a collision course with Earth, but if the 520-foot space-rock were headed towards us, we’d be in bad shape, so NASA is using it as a test case for diverting a hypothetical future killer asteroid.
Where to watch NASA’s asteroid collision
The spacecraft-smashing-into-a-space-rock is happening about seven million miles from Earth, but NASA sent a camera-bearing craft out there to capture all the action. The space agency plans to stream the mission’s climax to the official NASA website,Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel.
When will NASA’s craft crash into Dimophos?
The DART mission began nearly a year ago, and the climactic crash landing will happen on September 26 at 7:14 p.m. ET. The live coverage of the event begins at 6 p.m. ET.
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What’s the point of NASA crashing a ship into an asteroid, anyway?
Space rocks hurtle into Earth regularly, but most are burned up in the atmosphere, and most that land are too small to do major damage. But if a large enough asteroid were to hurtle toward us, it would be cataclysmic. The dinosaurs were likely wiped out by an asteroid that hit earth about 66 million years, so NASA is taking the first steps to preventing a similar catastrophe from befalling humans.
“We don’t want to be in a situation where an asteroid is headed toward Earth and then have to be testing this kind of capability. We want to know about both how the spacecraft works and what the reaction will be…before we ever get in a situation like that,” Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer for NASA, told USA Today in November.
No one is really sure whether the spacecraft’s momentum will be enough to divert the asteroid, but the scientific data NASA gathers might help in future killer-space-rock scenarios (even if it leads to the conclusion that there’s nothing we can do about it.)
How much should we worry about being killed by an asteroid?
Whether we should not worry at all about a space rock hitting earth or worry about it constantly depends on your point-of-view. There are over 27,000 near-Earth objects in our solar system. As far as we know, none of them pose a threat to our planet, but we also know that millions of meteorites bombard Earth every day, although most of them are too small to make it though the atmosphere without burning up. Eventually, our luck is going to run out, though. There’s no telling how long it will be until an extinction-level meteor hits Earth again—it could be in 18 million years, or it could be next month. So go ahead and have an extra piece of cake.
Artist’s impression of Dimorphos shortly after being struck by NASA’s DART spacecraft. China’s proposed kinetic impaction test would likely use a similar strategy. Image: ESA
The global effort to protect Earth from dangerous asteroids is set to become stronger, as China has announced its intentions to test an asteroid redirect system as early as 2025.
Speaking to China Central Television on Sunday, Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), described China’s preliminary plans to embark on the planetary defense project, according to Chinese state-owned news agency Global Times. Wu’s comments coincided with Space Day, an annual event that commemorates the 1970 launch of China’s first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, in 1970.
For the proposed test, Wu said a probe would closely survey a near-Earth object prior to smashing into it. Known as kinetic impaction, the idea is to alter the orbital trajectory of a threatening asteroid by directing a large, high-speed spacecraft into the object. NASA is currently running a similar test, known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, which seeks to deliberately crash a space probe into Dimorphos—a tiny asteroid—later this year.
The Global Times says the CNSA project is in its infancy and is still being reviewed for approval. The Chinese space agency is targeting 2025 or 2026 to conduct the test, a timeline that coincides with the end of China’s 14th Five-year plan period, according to Wu.
In addition, Wu said the CNSA hopes to develop a ground-based monitoring and warning system to analyze and catalog potentially dangerous near-Earth objects. No further details were given, but the system will likely emulate NASA’s Sentry-II monitoring system, which autonomously evaluates asteroid impact risks. Software designed to simulate the risks posed by asteroids and tabletop exercises to rehearse the defense process are also planned, according to the Global Times, adding that China is “shouldering the responsibility as a major global power in safeguarding the Earth with other countries.” The proposed monitoring and warning system would precede the asteroid mitigation test, Wu said.
Having more eyes on the sky is a good thing. My hope is that CNSA, NASA, and other space agencies and astronomical groups will pool their resources to make sure no threatening asteroids are missed and to coordinate these efforts in meaningful ways. NASA says it’s currently tracking 28,000 near-Earth objects and that roughly 3,000 are being added to the list each year.
The proposed CNSA program and kinetic impaction test is welcome news and another sign of China’s ongoing ambitions in space and space exploration. The country’s space-based initiatives are advancing quickly, as evidenced by its robotic lunar and Martian missions and its nascent space station, which is being made available to foreign astronauts, including space tourists.
NASA wants to propel a shoebox-sized spacecraft to an asteroid using a solar sail, the first deep space mission by the agency to use such a mechanism.
The Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout) is a small craft called a CubeSat, and it will be one of 10 secondary payloads on the upcoming Artemis I uncrewed test flight (currently slated for March 2022). The satellite is only about the size of a shoebox, but the reflective sail that will haul it through space unfolds to 925 square feet. Gas thrusters will put the CubeSat on a trajectory for the nearby asteroid target, but the solar sail will do the propulsion work for the rest of the two-year journey.
Solar sails harness the momentum of the Sun’s photons to propel spacecraft forward. Because rocket fuel is a considerable factor in the weight of spacecraft and their lifetimes in space, it pays to need as little of it as possible. The bigger the solar sail, the more sunlight the craft can capture. By changing the position of the sail to the angle of sunlight, the NEA Scout can alter its trajectory.
The scout will be heading to an asteroid called 2020 GE, which was first seen in March 2020 (hence its name.) The asteroid is less than 60 feet across, and because asteroids its size have not been explored up close before, it’s a great research target. Smaller rocks can still have damaging impacts if they hit Earth, such as the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013.
“Although large asteroids are of most concern from a planetary defense perspective, objects like 2020 GE are far more common and can pose a hazard to our planet, despite their smaller size,” said Julie Castillo-Rogez, the principal science investigator for the NEA Scout mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an agency release. “2020 GE represents a class of asteroid that we currently know very little about.”
The CubeSat has a camera on board to gather information on the makeup, size, and properties of 2020 GE. It could be a solid rock, or an amalgamation of dusty and smaller rocks glommed together, like asteroid Bennu. Asteroids continue to be a point of interest for NASA; the Lucy mission to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids launched in October 2021 and the Psyche mission is set to launch this August.
Asteroids aside, the NEA Scout is also paving the way for two other solar sail missions: the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, to launch no earlier than mid-2022, according to the NASA website, and the Solar Cruiser, which will head toward the Sun in 2025 with a whopping 18,000-square-foot sail. The future for sail technology in space is bright.
More: NASA Funds Interstellar Probe and Space Habitats Made From Fungi
If you’re a fan, like I am, of not being crushed to death by a rock that falls from the sky, then you should be interested in the mission NASA launched today with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft in the nose of that rocket is called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), and that spacecraft is going to smack right into the asteroid Dimorphos in hopes of redirecting its path.
Now, I’m happy to say this is being done not because Dimorphos is actually threatening to hit the Earth but because it makes for a good test subject. See, Dimorphos is part of a binary pair of asteroids and orbits around the asteroid Didymos, so NASA can tell if the impact of DART into Dimorphos affected its orbit around Didymos. It can then use that information to calculate how a similar strike to an asteroid potentially headed to Earth could be deflected.
The spacecraft is small and boxy, and it will hit Dimorphos at an impressive 14,760 mph, sped along by its NEXT xenon ion thruster engine, which converts solar energy into gradual but persistent thrust.
Illustration: NASA
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An onboard camera and autonomous navigation software will guide DART to its self-sacrifice into the asteroid, which will change the speed of the asteroid’s orbit around the main asteroid by a fraction of a percent. But that should affect the orbital period by several minutes, all of which will be confirmed by observations from Earth.
Illustration: Ted Lopez / Johns Hopkins APL
DART won’t arrive at the asteroid pair until next September or so, which means you have plenty of time to figure out how to get close if you want a ringside seat.
The ability to deflect an asteroid could one day prove to be absolutely crucial to the safety of everything living on Earth. While, so far, NASA does not predict an asteroid of significant size hitting Earth in the next century or so, there have been 1,200 meteor impacts to Earth from asteroids over three feet in length since 1988, and only 0.42 percent of those—five—were actually predicted in advance.
So, it’s not exactly like we have a really solid handle on this whole asteroid-prediction thing, and figuring out a way to be ready to deflect something would really be a great idea. Ideally, if this test works, a similar deflecting spacecraft will be made available and be ready to go, should the situation arise in the future.