![]() ![]() ![]() It doesn’t sound like much, but, in a more perilous scenario, a small shift could turn a certain hit into a near miss.Īsteroids are everywhere, circling the sun along with us. Stickle’s team has predicted that the collision will shrink Dimorphos’s 12-hour orbit around Didymos by about 10 minutes. Now that the impact is over with, astronomers will spend the coming days and weeks checking data from telescopes to see how the little asteroid’s path changes. The spacecraft spent months cruising toward Dimorphos, which is both an asteroid and a moon it orbits another, larger asteroid, known as Didymos. The DART mission launched last year, just before Thanksgiving. ![]() Other natural disasters may end human civilization, but now, at least, we’re one step closer to preventing the kind of calamity that ended the dinosaurs. When the probe struck, the impact slowed down the space rock, shortening its orbit-we’ll find out by how much in the coming days. And so far, it seems to be working the DART spacecraft, about the size of a vending machine, smacked right into the center of Dimorphos tonight. In a grander sense, this is the first time human beings have attempted to alter the orbit of another celestial body in our solar system at all. The mission-known as Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, for short-is the world’s first planetary-defense test. But someday, a mission like this “could save millions of lives,” Angela Stickle, a planetary scientist at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and leader of the team that planned this impact, told me. None of the known asteroids near Earth do-or at least they won’t in the next century. The asteroid at the heart of the mission-a small one, about 525 feet (160 meters) across-doesn’t pose a hazard to Earth. This is a test run, but a future version of this mission could save Earth from a catastrophic impact by deflecting an asteroid on a collision course. The agency dispatched the spacecraft with the explicit hope of crashing it and changing the asteroid’s trajectory. NASA did not send this probe to observe this asteroid or even scoop some samples from its surface to bring back to Earth, as other missions have done. The spacecraft crashed into the asteroid, its fancy cameras and all the rest of its delicate machinery smashed to bits. Three seconds out, the asteroid filled the whole view-bright and beautiful, the landscape so rich with texture that you could almost feel the craggy rock against your fingertips.Īnd then, nothing. A few minutes out, it began to look distinctly asteroid-like, lumpy and gray. Many scientists suspect an asteroid seeded Earth with life's building blocks eons ago, and 1999 RQ36 looks to be packed full of such carbon-based molecules.The space probe came barreling in at thousands of miles per hour, its mechanical eyes locked on its target-an asteroid named Dimorphos.Ībout an hour out, the asteroid looked to the probe’s cameras like nothing more than a faint speck in the darkness of space, slightly larger than a single pixel on your screen. Researchers will study the bits of 1999 RQ36 for clues about the solar system's origin and, possibly, how life may have begun on our planet. Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft successfully returned tiny grains of the asteroid Itokawa to Earth in June 2010. ![]() Osiris-Rex will be the United States' first asteroid sample-return effort and only the second mission in history to retrieve samples from an asteroid. The $800 million Osiris-Rex mission - its name is short for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer - should arrive at 1999 RQ36 in 2020 and return some samples of the asteroid to Earth by 2023. Researchers give 1999 RQ36, which is 1,837 feet (560 meters) wide, a 1-in-1,000 chance of slamming into Earth in 2182. Occasionally, the cyclical asteroid encounters are a little too close for comfort. ![]()
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