Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – NASA will soon begin The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. This is a mission to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid that threatens Earth.
The DART mission will launch on November 24 or February 2022 at the latest. The goal is to deflect the asteroid so that it is no longer heading towards Earth. The target is Dimorphos, an asteroid the size of a stadium orbiting a much larger asteroid called Didimos.
This mission takes a year to reach the Dimorphos target. A mission from the European Space Agency arrived five years later, called Hera, to check whether the mission was a success.
“We did this to have the capability to prevent a truly catastrophic natural disaster,” said Tom Statler, DART program scientist at NASA headquarters.
In a preliminary simulation report led by Harrison Agrusa of the University of Maryland, when DART hits Dimorphos, the energy of the impact would be comparable to a three-ton TNT explosion, sending thousands of spewed pieces of debris out into space.
The force of the impact won’t cause an immediate change from the Dimorphos spin, but in a few days things will start to change. The collision will unbalance Dimorphos’ rotation.
There are still many things that are not known from the action of crashing a spacecraft into this asteroid. The arrival of Hera’s mission will be the only way of knowing for sure what will happen to Dimorphos because DART will be destroyed by impact and Dimorphos is too small to be seen in detail from Earth.
“It’s not as simple as just crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid,” said astronomer Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario. “There’s a lot of physics that we need to understand.”
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