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9 Things to Know About NASA’s Armageddon Mission to Deflect an Asteroid - Gizmodo
Nov 22, 2021 1 min, 38 secs
NASA’s DART mission to redirect a non-threatening asteroid is set to launch later this week.

Built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the car-sized DART spacecraft will attempt to alter the speed of Dimorphos—a tiny asteroid—by smashing right into it.

This asteroid is junior member of a binary asteroid system known as Didymos.

DART will not survive, but that’s okay; NASA is testing the technologies required to prevent a potentially dangerous asteroid from smashing into Earth.

When DART arrives at Didymos in 11 months, the spacecraft will be 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth, according to NASA.

The moonlet, also known as Didymoon, is in orbit around Didymos, circling it once every 11.9 hours.

As it stands, no known asteroid the size of Dimorphos or larger has a significant chance of hitting Earth within the next 100 years.

Both the solar panels and the ion thruster will be demonstrated during the mission, and DART is not wholly dependent on these systems to reach Didymos.

The autonomous targeting system is called SMART Nav, and it will allow DART to distinguish between Didymos and Dimorphos and then set a course directly towards the latter.

Developed by the Italian Space Agency, this spacecraft will separate from DART 10 days before impact and capture images of the encounter, which it will do with two cameras named LUKE and LEIA.

includes NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Center, Langley Research Center, Glenn Research Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, Kennedy Space Center, Launch Services Program, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SpaceX, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Auburn University, University of Colorado, Johns Hopkins University, Lowell Observatory, University of Maryland, New Mexico Tech with Magdalena Ridge Observatory, Northern Arizona University, and Planetary Science Institute.

Learning about our solar system and searching for signs of life are obviously very important, but developing the capacity to prevent an asteroid from smashing into Earth would be a massive accomplishment, as it could someday save us from potential extinction

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