NASA's spacecraft has successfully hit the asteroid Dimorph, 10.9 million km from Earth. The mission, called DART, is to determine whether the impact can be used to knock the asteroid off course. Ilon Musk's space company SpaceX sent the first-ever complex into space to test a system to protect the Earth from asteroids in November 2021.
The NASA spacecraft (mission DART, from Double Asteroid Redirection Test) successfully crashed into the asteroid Dimorph at a distance of 10.9 million km from Earth. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched DART in November 2021 with the specific aim of colliding with a football stadium-sized asteroid at 22,526km/h to knock it off course, Bloomberg reports.
"In case you're keeping score: humanity 1, asteroids 0," NASA spokeswoman Tahira Allen said during a live broadcast, just after the impact. The mission is the first aimed at protecting Earth from the possibility of a dangerous asteroid collision. If measurements show that the asteroid's course has changed even slightly, the agency will consider the mission a success.
A camera aboard the DART spacecraft captured a close-up of the asteroid minutes before impact: Dimorph filled the entire frame, showing boulders and intricate detail just as NASA lost the signal from the spacecraft. A separate spacecraft launched from DART before the impact also captured images. The agency said it would share these images in the coming days. The impact was also monitored by NASA telescopes, including the James Webb Hubble Space Telescopes.
The spacecraft hit the asteroid just 17 metres from its centre. "We will get a much better idea of where we are from the impact images, which the research team will now analyse for quite some time," said DART mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins University Elena Adams at a press conference after the impact. "Our first planetary defence test was successful," she noted.
The DART spacecraft was launched into space on November 24 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. DART weighs 610kg. All the while, it was flying towards the asteroids Didim and Dimorph. Dimorph is smaller than Didymph and is comparable in size to the pyramid of Cheops. The DART mission will cost NASA about $330 million. $69 million of that was the cost of the contract with SpaceX, the company won it in 2019. This is the first launch for Ilon Musk's company to another celestial body outside Earth's orbit.
