The following asteroid collision is only a test. (oh really?) DART vs. Didymos

The sobering message after the terrorist attacks 20 years ago this September and the spread of the deadly coronavirus a year and a half ago is this: Plan for the unexpected. Don’t be a prisoner of your lack of imagination.

Well, you now can breathe a $69 million sigh of relief.

NASA and a cadre of the world’s leading engineers and space scientists are at work on a plan to avoid the destruction of Earth by an errant asteroid like the one 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs, created a cloud of dust so impenetrable that it blocked out the sun, and plunged the planet into a prolonged winter that sent half of all plant life into extinction.

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Sometime between Thanksgiving week (perhaps as soon as the evening of Nov. 23) and February 2022, the team behind DART will launch it from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft will, if all goes according to plan, travel 6.8 million miles to reach and collide with Didymos’s moonlet, Dimorphos, which is 525 feet in diameter.

DART will also ferry a shoebox-sized spacecraft contributed by the Italian Space Agency. Several days before DART’s impact with Dimorphos, that little craft, the LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids), will separate from DART to capture images of the impact.

[link to www.bostonglobe.com (secure)]

Last Edited by StellaBlue on 07/05/2021 11:04 PM