With movies like “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” and, more recently, “ Don’t Look Up,” Hollywood has long been fascinated with the prospect of disaster raining down from the cosmos.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, or DART, slammed into a small asteroid, demonstrating technology that could protect Earth from a space rock in the future. “Wow, that was amazing, wasn’t it?” said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at the laboratory who works on the mission, during the NASA webcast. There was one more partial image, but the data never made it back to Earth. “But in this case, it was the ideal outcome.” “Normally, losing signal from the spacecraft is a very bad thing,” Dr. The mission’s engineers were on their feet, cheering. Then, the pile of celestial rubble grew bigger and bigger, until the picture of the asteroid’s surface strewn with boulders filled the screen. In its last moments, the spacecraft sent back a series of photographs of the asteroid, Dimorphos, as it approached at more than 14,000 miles per hour.ĭART had spotted Dimorphos only about an hour earlier, as a dot of light. For an asteroid headed toward Earth, that could be enough to change a direct hit to a near miss.
Hitting an asteroid with a high-speed projectile nudges its orbit. The laboratory managed the mission for NASA.
“For the first time, humanity has demonstrated the ability to autonomously target and alter the orbit of a celestial object,” Ralph Semmel, director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said during a news conference after the crash. A sped-up replay of the final moments of the DART spacecraft as it passed the asteroid Didymos and crashed into its moon, Dimorphos.
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