The first planetary defense mission
The first planetary defense mission
Souce from NASA Archives Royalty Free.
On September 26, we hit an asteroid with every intention of damaging it, in fact, it is partly because of the dinosaurs, because we know that one of the causes of their extinction, if not the main one, was the impact of a huge asteroid in what is now Mexico Yucatan.
The plan was to send a probe to an asteroid with the sole purpose of colliding with it at a very high speed, it is called a kinetic impact, to find out how much we can alter its orbit, by the way, Dark, which stands for redirection test double asteroid also means dart which makes a lot of sense because hitting a moving asteroid 11 million kilometers away with a tiny probe weighing just over half a tonne sounds like a very well shot dart that hit the smallest target in the history.
Souce Image just before impact
With surgical precision he traveled for 9 months in interplanetary space to meet the binary system of asteroids Didimos, binary means that it is made up of two, Didimos is an asteroid 780 meters in diameter that has a small dimorphic companion that orbits it like a small moon
Souce Image just before impact
A few hours before the impact, the automatic tracking mode was activated, which is not very different from the technology used in anti-ballistic missiles that are capable of intercepting and destroying enemy missiles in the air before reaching their target, in this case It would be responsible for keeping the ship on course to hit the asteroid right in the center, while traveling at 6.6 kilometers per second.
Souce twiiter ATLAS Project
LiciaCube the other little spacecraft was able to capture all this from behind, the volume of material ejected by the impact is greater than what scientists had predicted, the debris was in fact seen by several ground-based telescopes such as the one above located in Hawaii.
Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about #science, #planet, #politics, #rights #crypto, #traveling and discovering secrets and beauties of the #universe, feel free to Follow me as these are the topics I write about the most. Have a wonderful day and stay on this great platform :) :)
! The truth will set us free and science is the one that is closest to the truth!
0
0
0.000
Thanks for your contribution to the STEMsocial community. Feel free to join us on discord to get to know the rest of us!
Please consider delegating to the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned).
You may also include @stemsocial as a beneficiary of the rewards of this post to get a stronger support.