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Space: the DART mission, launched by NASA to strike an asteroid, has taken off

2021-11-24T06:46:51.782Z


A probe, responsible for hitting an asteroid, as long as a football field, takes off this Wednesday morning. NASA hopes, through "te


NASA sees it as a “historic test”.

The space agency launched Tuesday from California in the United States its first defense mission to try to deviate the trajectory of an asteroid.

By carrying out this very first test to deflect an asteroid, NASA hopes to learn from it and be ready the day when an object of this type really threatens our planet.

The mission, dubbed DART, took off from Vandenberg base aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, at 10:21 p.m. local Tuesday, or at 7:21 a.m. French time on Wednesday, according to images broadcast by NASA live.

Asteroid Dimorphos: we're coming for you!



Riding a @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, our #DARTMission blasted off at 1:21 am EST (06:21 UTC), launching the world's first mission to test asteroid-deflecting technology.

pic.twitter.com/FRj1hMyzgH

- NASA (@NASA) November 24, 2021

“For the first time, humanity will change the movement of a natural celestial body in space,” said Tom Statler, NASA scientist participating in this mission, at a press conference.

This is just a dress rehearsal.

If the target asteroid does not represent a threat to Earth, the objective is still taken very seriously by the US space agency.

An asteroid the size of a football field

It now lists a little more than 27,500 asteroids of all sizes close to Earth and "none of them represents a threat in the next hundred years", reassured Thomas Zurbuchen, director for scientific missions at NASA.

But experts estimate that they know only 40% of asteroids measuring 140m and larger - those capable of devastating an entire region - with the majority yet to be discovered.

The idea is therefore to develop a technique to protect against it in the event of a future threat.

The ship is smaller than a car, flanked by two long solar panels.

It is due to strike next fall, in about ten months, an asteroid the size of a football field, which will then be located eleven million kilometers from Earth.

The asteroid is called Dimorphos and is in fact a moon, orbiting a larger asteroid, named him Didymos, 780 meters in diameter.

Concretely, to go around the large asteroid, Dimorphos currently takes 11 hours and 55 minutes.

Scientists expect to reduce its orbit, by about… 10 minutes.

"It's a very small change but it might be all we need to deflect an asteroid having a collision course with Earth, if we ever had to, provided we discovered this asteroid soon enough." , explained Tom Statler.

Read also Space: DART, this kamikaze probe that will strike an asteroid

The exact effect that the impact will have is not known at the moment because it depends in particular on the composition of the asteroid.

Is Dimorphos made of solid or more porous rocks?

Scientists do not know, and the asteroid will not appear in images transmitted by the ship until just an hour before the collision.

Its shape, round or oblong, will only be clear 2 minutes before.

Then the explosion, and radio silence.

Three minutes after the collision, a small satellite developed by the Italian Space Agency will fly over Dimorphos, in order to observe the effect of the shock and, with a little luck, the crater on the surface.

Source: leparis

All tech articles on 2021-11-24

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