![]() Later, scientists will use the high-resolution close-up images of Dimorphos’ surface to understand what effect DART had on the rock.īut the small satellite LICIACube caught the event, too, from afar. Although it pulverized upon impact, it streamed the kinetic impact back to Earth in real time. As a demonstration mission, DART doesn’t have a rich suite of instruments - just a basic camera and a couple of CubeSats to give a helping hand in documenting the crash.įirst, there was the DRACO camera, or Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation, onboard DART. Its total mass was roughly 1,260 pounds at impact. This space rock is the smaller member of a binary system it’s a moonlet of the much larger asteroid Didymos.ĭART is (now was) a box-shaped spacecraft (3.9 × 4.3 × 4.3 feet) with two large solar-array wings. In the coming days and weeks, NASA will have a better idea of what the crash did to the 525-foot-wide asteroid named Dimorphos. ![]() It’s still too early to tell the exact details of the encounter, which happened 6.8 million miles away, and how significantly the crash shifted the course of the asteroid. It’s NASA’s first flight mission for planetary defense. ![]() But behemoths can overcome our atmosphere’s erosive nature and smack into our planet with, at times, drastic consequences.ĭART, or Double Asteroid Redirection Test, targeted a small moon of a larger asteroid. The Solar System is littered with rocks, many of which burn up before striking Earth’s surface. The experiment - which wrapped up on Monday night shortly after 7 pm EST with the total obliteration of the spacecraft - will yield results that could help humans ward off dangerous colliders from space in the future. NASA’s DART mission smacked into an asteroid on Monday, for science.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |