Engineers at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio have spent years shooting...
This illustration from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA depicts NASA’s DART probe, foreground right, and Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube, bottom right, at the Didymos system before impact with the asteroid Dimorphos, left. DART is expected to zero in on the asteroid on Monday, intent on slamming it head-on at 14,000 mph. The impact should be just enough to nudge the asteroid into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space rock.
“The impact’s at very high speed, and the spacecraft will be completely destroyed, but it will also form a crater in the moon of this asteroid,” Walker said last week. “The intent is to measure how much we change the speed of that asteroid.”For Walker, the “interesting fact” is that the crater formation throws debris in the direction that the spacecraft came from.
“I hope that we never see this as a problem,” Walker said. “But what’s different about this one compared to smaller-scale tornadoes or larger-scale hurricanes is that there’s actually something we can do about this one, if we had warning.” “Didymos and Dimorphos are not on a path to intersect with Earth,” Walker said. “But if an asteroid were on a path, the idea would be not to destroy it but just to deflect it so that it missed. That’s the easiest thing to do. That’s the nudge there.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That would mean that a hypervelocity impactor is … an efficient way to deflect an asteroid because it delivers a lot more momentum than it carries with it.” Now, after the spacecraft made a 10-month flight around the Sun and toward the Disymos asteroid system, the engineers are eager to witness the collision on NASA TV.
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