Efforts to punch the face of an asteroid that could destroy an area the size of the island of Java

Pasadena, Gatra.com- An explosive new mission launches on November 23, 2021. NASA has announced a launch date for an upcoming mission to punch the asteroid in the face with its high-speed spacecraft. Live Science, 07/10.

The mission, called the Dual Asteroid Diversion Test (DART), is scheduled to launch at 10:20 p.m. PST (19:20 a.m. EST) on November 23, and it could help the world’s space agency figure out how to divert a potentially lethal asteroid if it hits Earth, according to the statement. NASA.

DART will test an asteroid defense plan called the kinetic impactor technique – which is to fire one or more large spacecraft into the path of an approaching asteroid to alter the motion of the space rock. The target is a binary asteroid (two space rocks moving together) called Didymos, which consists of a larger asteroid about 2,600 feet (780 meters) in diameter and a smaller “moon” measuring about 525 feet (160 m). ).

NASA will aim at the moon, and hopes the direct impact of its fist will slow the rock’s orbit so Earth-based telescopes can study the effect in detail. “This will confirm for us the feasibility of the kinetic impactor technique to divert the asteroid’s orbit and determine that it remains a viable option, at least for smaller asteroids, which are hazardous and impact the most frequently,” Lindley Johnson, NASA Planetary Defense Officer, told the site brother Live Science, Space.com earlier this year.

The DART spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, riding a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket through the atmosphere. Once the DART craft separates from its launch vehicle, it will sail through space for about a year, traveling nearly 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth before finally hitting Didymos in late September 2022, according to NASA.

If all goes according to plan, the DART probe will punch the Moon’s surface at about 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 km/h), obliterating the spacecraft on impact. This high-speed collision would barely change the asteroid’s phase, causing it to lose a fraction of its speed, according to NASA.

However, the small change would slow the moon’s orbital period by a few minutes, allowing astronomers to study the impact of the mission. A companion spacecraft operated by the Italian Space Agency, called Light Italian CubeSat for Imagine Asteroids (LICIACube), will try to fly nearby and get a close look at the action.

NASA is closely monitoring all known near-Earth objects that could come within 1.3 astronomical units (1.3 times the distance between Earth and the sun) from our planet. So far, the agency has detected more than 8,000 near-Earth asteroids with diameters greater than 460 feet (140 m) – or rocks large enough to annihilate the entire island of Java if they landed a direct hit on Indonesia. However, neither of these objects poses an immediate threat to Earth in the next century, NASA officials previously told Space.com.