“It is really hard to hit a very little object in space, and we’re going to do it,” Adams said. Then it will adjust its flight path, ending in a glorious collision. And so your system has to be very, very precise in how it’s controlling the spacecraft.”ĭART’s camera will not spot Dimorphos as a separate dot from Didymos until about an hour before the crash. “And at that point, you cannot really send any commands. “You’re moving extremely fast,” said Elena Adams, the DART mission systems engineer. A distance of about 0.6 miles separates the two, with Dimorphos completing one orbit around Didymos every 11 hours, 55 minutes.ĭART will essentially be a self-driving suicidal spacecraft, guiding itself to its demise with people at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland largely just spectators. The mission’s target is Dimorphos, a small asteroid that is about 500 feet in diameter and orbits a larger object, a half-mile-wide asteroid named Didymos. Rather, the mission is a proof-of-principle demonstration that hitting an oncoming asteroid with a projectile can nudge it into a different orbit.įor a dangerous oncoming asteroid, that nudge could be enough to change the trajectory from a direct hit to a near miss.
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The DART mission isn’t like the movie “Armageddon.” Blowing up an asteroid generally would not be a good thing to do. While the agency is searching the heavens for deadly space rocks, it also is developing methods for responding to a threat, should one emerge. But Congress never gave NASA much money to perform that task, so it remains more than half unfinished, with about 15,000 more of such asteroids to discover. In 2005, Congress set a mandate for NASA to find, by 2020, 90% of near-Earth asteroids that are big enough to destroy a city - those that are 460 feet or wider in diameter. NASA isn’t just wasting an expensive, sophisticated spacecraft for fun. If all you want to watch is a stream of photos from the spacecraft as it closes in on the asteroid, NASA’s media channel will begin broadcasting those at 5:30 p.m. NASA Television will broadcast coverage of the end of this mission beginning at 6 p.m. DART is set to crash into Dimorphos at 14,000 mph at 7:14 p.m.
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