NASA Spacecraft will Crash into an Asteroid at 15,000 mph

The engineers over at NASA are out to prevent global destruction. Nobody wants to wait until the last moment when an asteroid really is on a collision course with planet Earth to start thinking up solutions. That’s why the rocket scientists are doing a test run this November.

NASA announces launch date

The big launch date has been set by NASA for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test project. Mark November 23 at 7:20 p.m. EST down on your calendar. While the launch is expected to be as spectacular as always, the main event happens far out in space, next year “in late September, 2022.”

This satellite is on a suicide mission. The basic idea is to “punch an asteroid in the face with a high-speed spacecraft.”

The concept behind DART is to “help the world’s space agencies figure out how to divert potentially lethal asteroids from impacting Earth.” At least, that’s what the official NASA press statement says. The idea works along the lines of a game of cosmic billiards. Physics 101 teaches that force equals mass times acceleration. That’s why you don’t step in front of a moving semi.

In order to bank an asteroid called Didymos into the corner pocket, the satellite cue ball has to be moving really fast to make up for its light weight in relation to the target.

The way the big brains at NASA explain it, “DART will test an asteroid defense plan called the kinetic impactor technique.” Oh, boy. That means “essentially, shooting one or more large spacecraft into the path of an oncoming asteroid in order to change the space rock’s motion.”

In this particular case, the “target is a binary asteroid (two space rocks moving in tandem) called Didymos, which consists of one larger asteroid measuring about 2,600 feet in diameter and a smaller ‘moonlet’ measuring about 525 feet across.” A rock half a mile wide won’t be easy to nudge into a different trajectory. That’s why they’re aiming for the little one.

Aim for the moonlet

Isaac Newton, inventor of both calculus and the cat-flap, also gets credit for working out the rules of kinetic motion. Einstein is a little more accurate for astronomers but Newton gets the job done in the real world and his laws can’t be bent, much less broken.

NASA knows they have no choice of deflecting the main rock so they will “aim for the moonlet, hoping that a direct impact will slow the rock’s orbit just enough that Earth-based telescopes can study the effects in detail.”

Lindley Johnson, Planetary Defense Officer for NASA explains that after they collect some hard data from a real world test, it should “confirm for us what the viability of the kinetic impactor technique is for diverting an asteroid’s orbit.”

At the very least they can “determine that it remains a viable option, at least for smaller-sized asteroids, which are the most frequent impact hazard.”

DART will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, “riding a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket through the atmosphere” thanks to privatization of space research. “Once the DART craft separates from the launch vehicle, it will cruise through space for about a year, traveling nearly 7 million miles.” If all goes according to NASA plans, “the DART craft will crash into the moonlet’s surface at a speed of roughly 15,000 mph.”

That will obliterate “the spacecraft on impact.” At first it will be hard to tell if it even worked. “This high-speed crash will barely phase the asteroid, causing it to lose a fraction of a percent of its velocity.” A little bit a long way away can still have the desired effect. “that minor alteration should slow the moonlet’s orbital period by several minutes, allowing astronomers to study the impact of the mission.”