“Never in my life would I think I would take a few hundred million dollar spacecraft and crash it into an asteroid,” said Michelle Chen, SmartNav team leader at APL. The DART spacecraft will guide itself using a technology called SmartNav, which uses a computational algorithm to locate the asteroid Dimorphos and direct the craft toward it. So we demonstrated asteroid deflection in this dual asteroid system,” Nancy Chabot, head of DART coordination at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), said in a briefing. This will actually bend its path around the larger asteroid. So you can see this is not going to destroy the asteroid. “The DART spacecraft, its main body is about 100 times smaller than Dimorphos, the asteroid it is targeting. DART will impact Dimorphos and seek to match its trajectory, with results observed by Earth-based telescopes, as quoted by Digital Trends. While neither of these asteroids poses any real danger to Earth, it will be an exercise to find out what could happen if an asteroid threatens the planet.

DART will head for a pair of asteroids: One larger body is called Didymos, and another smaller body is called Dimorphos. With the development of technology, scientists are getting better at recognizing potential threats.īut, what do we do if we see a boulder heading towards planet Earth? The DART project is a test of a planetary defense concept that involves crashing a plane into an asteroid. While most of the asteroids seen are streaking without imagining passing by Earth, a small number of so-called Potentially Hazardous Objects can impact the planet. But, that’s what NASA has in mind for the upcoming Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. SAN FRANCISCO, iNews.id – Most space missions do not intend to crash their spacecraft. Asteroid Field - Star Wars Wiki Guide Never Tell Me the Odds Star Wars: The Empire Strikes.

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