The asteroid Story - Well Done NASA

Photo Credit: NASA

The asteroid that you see in the picture, a small NASA spacecraft crashed into it today. This is the picture taken just before that.

Stumbled but on purpose. Why do you think this is done? The reason may be that you have seen in various movies so far - if an asteroid is approaching to destroy the earth, can we remove it? To test it, NASA's vending machine-sized spacecraft weighing 570 kg traveled in space for 10 months and 2 days and hit the asteroid at a speed of 6.26 kilometers per second.

The asteroid that hit is Dimorphos (discovered in 2003). It is actually a moonlet, meaning small moon, about the size of a small football stadium, 160 meters long; Called a small moon, it orbits another large asteroid, Didymos (discovered in 1996), Greek for 'twin'. The larger asteroid is 5 times larger than the smaller one. Both asteroids are located at a distance of 10 million kilometers from Earth.

The researchers expect that this shock should shorten the orbit of the small asteroid by 1%, which means that the orbit time around the large asteroid should decrease by 10 minutes. In fact, we will have to wait for a month to know what the result is.

It is said to be the world's first planetary defense technology demonstration, and this small spacecraft is called DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Its mission control was at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, USA.

Thanks to a mini-satellite called LICIACube provided by the Italian Space Agency, we will get pictures of this expedition. In 2026, a Hera mission from the European Space Agency will send spacecraft back to this dimorphous asteroid, for a detailed follow-up.

These two asteroids are not heading towards Earth, but this mission is just for testing.