NASA Just Tested the Live - Action Version of ARMAGEDDON
- y10anand
- Oct 1, 2022
- 2 min read
By Yash Anand, 28th September, 2022
Everyone must have watched Armageddon at least once. It's the story of a massive asteroid heading towards Earth and was gonna cause cataclysmic scale of damage but was stopped by 12 astronauts who hitchhiked a ride to the asteroid, drilled a hole and placed a massive nuke that split the asteroid in half, thus saving the Earth. Well NASA just tested a live action version of Armageddon. No it didn't send astronauts to space to drill a hole on an asteroid. No an asteroid wasn't going to crash into Earth. Let me Explain.
On September 26, at approximately 4:44am IST, when most of the world or at least most of India was peacefully sleeping, NASA successfully tested their first planetary defense test. In this test, the spacecraft i.e. NASA's Dart (Double Asteroid Rendezvous Test) probe, slammed into a small asteroid approximately 11 million kilometers away from Earth.
The probe slammed into Dimorphous, a small 163 m wide piece of rock that orbits a bigger asteroid called Didymos, with neither asteroids posing a threat to Earth at a speed of more than 22,000 kmph. The probe wasn't what you would call a large spacecraft, with it's size being approximately the size of a golf cart, yet it was able to achieve its mission, which was to change the orbit of the space rock.
"As far as we can tell, our first planetary defense test was a success " said Elena Adams, DART's mission systems engineer at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory after the successful test. " i think Earthlings should sleep better. I would"
There is small but real risk of an asteroid doing catastrophic damage on Earth. Recent reports at NASA indicated that more than 40% of asteroids more than 500 m wide could pose a threat to Earth. Even though NASA has started designing telescopes that would be specifically designed to find hazardous asteroids in the solar system, we desperately needed a method to counter the asteroids in case one was detected. Thus, Andy Cheng, chief scientist for planetary defense at JHUAPL came up with the DART concept in 2011. 10 years and 313 million dollars later, the DART mission was launched on November 23, 2021.
This mission confirmed that NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid to deflect it with a technique known as kinetic impact. The investigation team will now observe the asteroid using Ground Based Telescopes to confirm that the impact altered the orbit around Didymos. Researches say the impact should shorten the orbit by about 1% or roughly 10 minutes.
This mission is fairly important as it will determine how future missions will be decided and and is crucially important to the success of any future planetary defense efforts of which DART is just the first step.
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