27/09/2022
NASA’s DART 🎯 Mission Hits ☄️ in First-Ever Planetary Defence Test.
The world's first planetary defence technology demonstration, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which had been in space for ten months, successfully impacted its asteroid target on Monday. This was the agency's first attempt to move an asteroid in space.
At 7:14 p.m. EDT, mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, declared the impact to have been successful.
DART's collision with the asteroid Dimorphos provides evidence of a workable mitigation approach for defending the world from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, should one be identified. This mitigation strategy is part of NASA's larger planetary defence strategy.
Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, stated that DART "represents, at its core, an extraordinary success for planetary security, but it is also a mission of unity with a meaningful benefit for all humanity." NASA is studying.
The international partnership "converted science fiction into science fact, revealing one strategy to defend Earth" as NASA examines the cosmos and our home planet.
DART focused on the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a tiny rock with a diameter of only 530 feet (160 metres). It revolves around the bigger Didymos, a 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid. There is no danger to Earth from either asteroid.
Credit: NASA/DART
