A press conference is also scheduled for about 45 minutes after the impact during which mission managers will discuss what happened. Nasa is livestreaming the mission with video and commentary on its website and social media channels. How will we know if the mission is successful? Children of the 1980s will recall the popular video game Asteroids in which the objective was to change the direction of menacing space rocks (and then destroy them, which is not the goal of Dart).
The plan is that the 15,000mph (24,140km/h) impact of the Dart spacecraft will be enough to nudge Dimorphos from its current trajectory and on to a different path. Nasa wants to know if it has the capability to protect us if such a scenario ever occurs. Why is the mission taking place?Īnybody who has watched the recent Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up will be familiar with the threat, however remote, of an asteroid big enough to be world-ending hurtling towards, and one day colliding with Earth. The object's name is displayed by hovering over its encounter date. The Widget displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. The asteroid and its moon were chosen for their proximity of about 6.8m miles away, but neither pose a threat to our planet before or after the collision. The Asteroid Watch Widget tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The agency has targeted the near-Earth asteroid Didymos, more specifically its 525ft (160 metre) diameter moon Dimorphos, into which it will crash a small car-sized spacecraft at 7.14pm EST (12.14am BST, 9.14am AEST). Learn about past and future missions, tracking and predicting orbits, and close. Explore the 3D world of Asteroids, Comets and NEOs. The current known asteroid count is: 1,113,527. The acronym stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the first “planetary defense” experiment conducted by the US space agency, in association with scientists at Johns Hopkins University, to see if it can alter the trajectory of an asteroid in deep space if one ever comes close enough to threaten Earth. Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets, are rocky, airless remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Here’s what’s happening, and why: What is the Nasa Dart mission?
0 kommentar(er)
