The world's first planetary defense test mission: NASA successfully launches the DART spacecraft to actively crash into an asteroid next September
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The mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, tests whether smashing a spacecraft into an Asteroid can alter its orbit. The results could come in handy if humanity ever needs to alter the orbit of an asteroid to save earth.
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The DART spacecraft lifted off at 1:21 EST on November 24 from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. After the rocket reaches space, it sends its reusable boosters back into the ocean to land on a SpaceX drone ship. It takes about an hour to deploy the spacecraft in orbit, and after a few hours it will deploy its solar panels to power the craft's journey. After launching into space, the spacecraft will orbit the sun for nearly a full orbit before rendezvousing with Dimophus, an asteroid the size of a football field, which orbits a larger asteroid called Didimus every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Astronomers call the two asteroids a binary star system, one of which is a satellite of the other. Together, the two asteroids orbit the sun once every two years. Dimophus is not a threat to Earth, and this mission is basically target exercise. DART's impact will occur in late September or early October next year, when the two asteroids will be at their closest point to Earth, about 6.8 million miles away. Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, formally known as the Kinetic Impactor, will autonomously turn toward Dimofus and hit the asteroid head-on at 15,000 miles per hour, IT Home has learned. An onboard camera will capture the pre-impact scene in real time and send pictures back to Earth up to 20 seconds before impact. In addition, a small satellite of the Italian Space Agency, which will be deployed 10 days before impact, will come 34 miles closer to the asteroid, taking images every six seconds in the moments before and after DART impact. The mission would be considered a success if Dimophus's orbit around Didimos had been extended by at least 73 seconds, but mission managers expect the impact to extend the asteroid's orbital period even further, by about 10 to 20 minutes.It's also worth noting that SpaceX has successfully recovered the First stage of a Falcon 9 rocket from the DART mission, marking the 95th successful recovery of a Falcon 9 rocket.
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