"It's just not scientifically possible, just because of momentum conservation and other things." "There is no scenario in which one or the other body can become a threat to the Earth," says Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA. NASA officials stressed that there was no way their test could have turned either of these space rocks into a menace.
It's about 525 feet across and orbits another, larger asteroid. She says the collision is just a nudge that's similar to "running a golf cart into the Great Pyramid." Tweaking a space rock's orbitĭimorphos is around 7 million miles away and poses no threat to Earth. This isn't going to blow up the asteroid," Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said earlier. "This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption. It will be about two months, scientists said, before they will be able to determine if the impact was enough to drive the asteroid slightly off course. The impact was the culmination of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a 7-year and more than $300 million effort which launched a space vehicle in November of 2021 to perform humanity's first ever test of planetary defense technology. "As far as we can tell our first planetary defense test was a success," said Elena Adams, the mission systems engineer, who added that scientists looked on with "both terror and joy" as the spacecraft neared its final destination.
#COMET HEADING TOWARDS EARTH FULL#
In images streamed as the impact neared, the egg-shaped asteroid, called Dimorphos, grew in size from a blip on screen to have its full rocky surface come quickly into focus before the signal went dead as the craft hit, right on target.Įvents transpired exactly as engineers had planned, they said, with nothing going wrong.
That's just what NASA did on Monday evening, when a spacecraft headed straight into an asteroid, obliterating itself. Movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon rely on nukes, delivered by stars like Bruce Willis, to save the world and deliver the drama.īut planetary defense experts say in reality, if astronomers spotted a dangerous incoming space rock, the safest and best answer might be something more subtle, like simply pushing it off course by ramming it with a small spacecraft. That's the go-to answer for incoming space objects like asteroids and comets, as far as Hollywood is concerned. This illustration shows the DART spacecraft approaching the two asteroids, Didymos and Dimorphos, with a small observing spacecraft nearby.Ĭredit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben
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