A NASA spacecraft is about to clobber a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away.
This illustration made available by Johns Hopkins APL and NASA depicts NASA's DART probe, foreground right, and Italian Space Agency's LICIACube, bottom right, at the Didymos system before impact with the asteroid Dimorphos, left. DART is expected to zero in on the asteroid Monday, Sept. 26, 2022, intent on slamming it head-on at 14,000 mph. The impact should be just enough to nudge the asteroid into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space rock.
Cameras and telescopes will watch the crash, but it will take months to find out if it actually changed the orbit.The asteroid with the bull’s-eye on it is Dimorphos, about 7 million miles from Earth. It is actually the puny sidekick of a 2,500-foot asteroid named Didymos, Greek for twin. Discovered in 1996, Didymos is spinning so fast that scientists believe it flung off material that eventually formed a moonlet.
NASA insists there’s a zero chance either asteroid will threaten Earth — now or in the future. That’s why the pair was picked.Johns Hopkins took a minimalist approach in developing Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — given that it’s essentially a battering ram and faces sure destruction. It has a single instrument: a camera used for navigating, targeting and chronicling the final action.
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