The DART Mission: NASA Tests Space Defense Capabilities
On a mission to test humanity’s space defense capabilities, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission attracted numerous viewers on NASA’s official Twitch channel. The mission involved a live collision between the spacecraft and the asteroid Diomorphos.
This $330 million mission marked humanity’s first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or celestial body in space. Launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on November 23, 2021, the DART spacecraft has traveled approximately 7 million miles to Didymos and Dimorphos over the past 10 months.
Yesterday, at 6.14 pm CT, the DART mission was declared a success. The team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, overseeing the mission operations center announced, “We have impact.” The DRACO Camera successfully captured the satellite colliding with the football stadium-sized asteroid.
Following the impact, NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy expressed, “NASA works for the benefit of humanity. So for us, it’s the ultimate fulfillment of our mission to do something like this – a technology demonstration that, who knows, someday could save our home.”
Whether the mission achieved its goal will require another month of ground-based telescope observations of the asteroid to determine the results.
The impact of the DART satellite on the Dimorphos asteroid was so significant that it was captured by the ATLAS telescope in South Africa.
NASA has been engaged in various asteroid missions, with DART being the most recent one. In 2021, NASA launched a probe to study the Trojan asteroid clusters near Jupiter. In 2020, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully collected samples from the Bennu asteroid and is currently on its return course to Earth.