“Impact confirmed for world’s first planetary defense test mission,” NASA said. Immediately beforehand, their camera-equipped probe “DART” crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos at more than 20,000 kilometers per hour, as shown in live images.
DART on target
The cube-shaped probe for the experiment “Ddouble Asteroid Redirection Test” (double asteroid diversion test) was launched from California in November 2021 with the help of a “Falcon 9” rocket. Now it hit the asteroid as planned at 01:14 a.m. CEST on Tuesday morning. The NASA control center in Laurel in the state of Maryland broke Engineers and scientists cheered as video transmission ended after the collision.
NASA boss Bill Nelson congratulated his team: “You did a really good job.” The mission made history, emphasized his leading colleague Lori Glaze. With the approximately 330 million dollar mission, NASA wants to test whether and how it can protect the earth from approaching celestial bodies. The aim was to slightly change the trajectory of Dimorphos through the impact of the probe. Whether this was successful is now being investigated. Now the real scientific work begins, said Glaze.
No danger
Dimorphos – around 160 meters in diameter – is a type of moon of the asteroid Didymos. It is around eleven million kilometers from Earth and, according to NASA calculations, poses no danger.
There is currently no known asteroid that could be heading straight for Earth any time soon – but researchers have identified around 27,000 asteroids near our planet, around 10,000 of them with a diameter of more than 140 meters. An asteroid impact around 66 million years ago is considered by scientists to be the leading theory as to why the dinosaurs went extinct.
wa/fab (afp, dpa)
