The DART spacecraft will have to separate from the rocket and reach the Didymus-dImorph double asteroid in the fall of 2022, collide with the smaller of them - Dimorph, and change its orbit
WASHINGTON, October 6. /TASS/. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will test the protection of the Earth from potentially dangerous asteroids for the first time. As the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, the US Space Agency plans to launch a rocket with a special probe to one of these objects in November, which will have to collide with an asteroid and change its orbit.
Launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle with the DART probe (Double Asteroid Redirection Test - "Experiment to change the orbit of a double asteroid") From the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California is scheduled for November 24 at 01:20 East Coast time (09:20 Moscow time).
The DART spacecraft will have to separate from the rocket and reach the Didymus-dImorph double asteroid in the fall of 2022. The probe is expected to collide with the smaller of them - a Dimorph - at a speed of about 25 thousand km per hour. As a result, the orbit of the Dimorph, which orbits the larger Didymus, will have to deviate "by a fraction of a percent". Scientists expect that this will be enough for them to be able to record the deviation using telescopes from Earth.
The Didymus-dImorph binary asteroid orbits the Sun and currently does not pose a threat to our planet, although it periodically approaches the Earth. The purpose of the experiment is to work out a technique by which, in the future, in the event of the appearance of asteroids that are really dangerous to the planet, specialists could change the trajectory of their movement.
In 2016, NASA created the Office for the Coordination of Measures to Protect the Earth from Asteroids. Within the framework of this program, asteroids and comets that could threaten the Earth are being searched in near-Earth space within 48 million km from Earth, data is being collected on their sizes, orbits and chemical composition, as well as an analysis of the possible consequences of their fall to Earth.
