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The early hours of Wednesday morning will witness the launch of SpaceX’s mission to crash into an asteroid (on purpose). The mission is the first-of-its-kind, planetary defense mission called Double Asteroid Redirection Test (or DART) mission.
“We’re smashing into an asteroid,” NASA’s Launch Services Program senior launch director Omar Baez said during a press conference. “I can’t believe we’re doing that”
The mission will travel millions of miles out into the solar system to crash into an asteroid, altering its orbit around a larger space rock to practice in the event of a rogue Earth-bound asteroid. The mission is set to lift off from Space Launch Complex-4 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California early Wednesday, November 24, at 1:20 AM ET.
The DART mission will cost NASA about $330 million in a total of which SpaceX won a $69 million contract in 2019 for the launch.
DART is a 610-kilogram spacecraft that will spend 10 months traveling to a pair of asteroids, which are named Didymos and Dimorphos. Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland built DART, while space company Redwire contributed to the spacecraft’s navigation and solar arrays that will power it.
The spacecraft, flying at 15,000 miles per hour, will hit the smaller asteroid, Dimorphos. The mission will analyze the change in the asteroid’s trajectory on the impact.
The space agency is trying to learn “how to deflect a threat that would come” toward Earth, NASA associate administrator of the science mission directorate Thomas Zurbuchen said.
(With inputs from CNBC)
Picture Credits: Space.com