In 2021, a spacecraft was launched on a first-ever suicide mission to try to deflect an asteroid on impact in space in the revolutionary planetary defense experiment. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, known as DART, was designed to test whether a spacecraft could change the movement of an asteroid by hitting it. DART was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Its target was Dimorphos, a small moonlet orbiting the asteroid Didymos. The asteroid system was not a threat to Earth. The spacecraft reached Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, and deliberately collided with it to measure the change in its orbit.
How NASA’s DART mission was planned? In 2021, a spacecraft was launched on a first-ever suicide mission to try to deflect an asteroid on impact in space in the revolutionary planetary defense experiment. The mission was called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART. NASA designed it to test whether a spacecraft could change an asteroid’s movement by hitting it at high speed.
The mission was a test of a planetary defense method called a kinetic impactor. The idea is direct. A spacecraft travels toward an asteroid and collides with it. The force from the collision can change the asteroid’s speed and path.
DART was developed and led for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office sponsored the mission. The spacecraft was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The launch took place on November 23, 2021, at 10:21 p.m. PST. Because of the time difference, the launch was November 24 at 1:21 a.m. EST. The mission had two science targets in one system. They were the asteroid Didymos and its smaller moonlet, Dimorphos. The planned impact was carried out on September 26, 2022.
Why NASA selected Didymos and Dimorphos? Didymos is a binary asteroid system. The name Didymos means twin in Greek. The system contains a larger asteroid and a smaller asteroid moonlet. Didymos has a diameter of about
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