A NASA spacecraft named Dart will zero in on an asteroid Monday, intent on slamming it head-on at 14,000 mph. It's the first save-the-world experiment of its kind to demonstrate that if a killer asteroid ever heads our way, we'll stand a fighting chance.
This illustration depicts NASA's DART probe, foreground 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.
A spacecraft named Dart will zero in on the asteroid Monday, 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 — demonstrating that if a killer asteroid ever heads our way, we’d stand a fighting chance of diverting it.
“This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption," said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University, which is managing the effort."This isn’t going to blow up the asteroid. It isn’t going to put it into lots of pieces.” Rather, the impact will dig out a crater tens of yards in size and hurl some 2 million pounds of rocks and dirt into space.
The size of a small vending machine at 1,260 pounds , the spacecraft will slam into roughly 11 billion pounds of asteroid. “Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a Great Pyramid,” said Chabot.
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