Sunday, 13 Oct, 2024
By: Yash Gupte
The space agency in its recent press release announced that the DART spacecraft that NASA deliberately crashed into an asteroid last month succeeded in forcing the rocky moonlet out of its natural orbit. Image Source: IANS
The project, which took seven years to plan and cost about $330 million (€339 million), was also the first attempt in history to test a method for preventing an impending doomsday meteorite impact with Earth
Much attention was caught by the American Space agency- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s DART mission since the launch of the spacecraft last month which had been launched with the primary objective of changing the direction of asteroid Dimorphos through sheer kinetic force. The space agency in its recent press release announced that the DART spacecraft that NASA deliberately crashed into an asteroid last month succeeded in forcing the rocky moonlet out of its natural orbit. The launch vehicle used for the mission was SpaceX Falcon9.
NASA chief Bill Nelson said that this is the first time humanity has altered the orbit of a celestial body and this is a watershed moment for planetary defense and humanity too. Upon the success of the mission, Nelson marked that NASA is ready for whatever the universe throws at humanity. NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory are working together on the DART project (APL). The project received funding from NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is overseen by the Marshall Space Flight Center's Planetary Missions Program Office.
Scientists had intended to reduce the asteroid's orbit by 10 minutes, but according to Bill Nelson, the collision cut the rock's travel time in half, to around 32 minutes. He claimed that DART has reduced the orbit from 11 hours 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided with Dimorphos, an asteroid with a diameter of about 160 meters (525 feet), on September 26. Dimorphos orbits Didymos, a bigger asteroid with a diameter of around 780 meters. The duo of asteroids orbits our sun every 2.1 years and does not endanger the earth. Because of this, researchers decided to use the pair in the world's first-ever attempt to move a celestial body. The project, which took seven years to plan and cost about $330 million (€339 million), was also the first attempt in history to test a method for preventing an impending doomsday meteorite impact with Earth. The mission's objective was to fly the DART impactor vehicle, which was about the size of a vending machine, directly into Dimorphos at a speed of about 14,000 miles per hour (22,531 kmph). This would generate enough force to move the moonlet's orbit closer to that of its larger companion.
The Didymos system takes 2.11 years (770 days) to make one full orbit around the Sun. Its elliptical orbit stretches from beyond Mars (about 2.27 astronomical units [AU], or Earth-Sun distances) to just outside Earth’s orbit (about 1 AU).
A sun sensor, a star tracker known as SMART Nav software (Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation), and a 20 cm (7.9 in) aperture camera known as Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) were all incorporated in DART's navigation sensors. The optical component of DRACO consisted of a Ritchey-Chrétien telescope with a telephoto lens having a 0.29° field of vision and a 2620.8mm focal length (f/12.60). The camera uses a CMOS image sensor with a resolution of 2,560 by 2,160 pixels. The detector captures wavelengths between 0.4 and 1 micron (visible and near infrared). The 500 kg DART spacecraft collided with the ground at 6.6 km/s, imparting an energy of around 11 gigajoules, or about three tons of TNT.
The Hera mission of the European Space Agency is scheduled to conduct thorough surveys of both Dimorphos and Didymos in about four years, with a special emphasis on the crater caused by DART's crash and a precise determination of Dimorphos' mass.
According to astronomers, there are approximately 25,000 near-Earth asteroids close to 500 feet (140 meters) or larger in size, big enough to cause regional devastation if they were to hit Earth. This underscores the need to both discover and track near-Earth objects, as well as perform real-world tests of potential asteroid deflection. Therefore, the mission launched by NASA is a landmark progress made in the history of space exploration.
