From The DART Mission, NASA Proves The Impact Of Kinetics Can Successfully Destroy Hazardous Asteroids

Asteroid illustration. (dok photo. NOIRLab/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab NSF)

JAKARTA - NASA's Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) team and its astronomers have just outlined the success of the Double Asteroid Transfer Test (DART), where the spacecraft collided with an asteroid known as Dimorphos.

Described in four peer-reviewed papers exploring how successful the mission was, then NASA confirmed in a blog post, DART validated the impact of kinetics as a viable way to deflect dangerous asteroids.

DART was launched at the end of 2021 on a rocket belonging to SpaceX, Falcon 9 and traveled a long way to the asteroid Didymos-Dimorphos pair.

Didymos has a larger size, with a diameter of about 765 meters orbited by Dimorphos, a smaller measuring 150 meters. This makes Dimorphos the ideal NASA target for a collision test for orbiting Didymos every 11.9 hours.

NASA explains that kinetic crasher technique, which author APL Ajai Raj defines as an effective way of destroying things into other objects for planetary defense.

DART did launch in 2021, but only hit the asteroid on September 26 last year, changing the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos for 33 minutes.

After hitting Dimorphos, DART produced debris from the asteroid at the impact point, known as the ejecta. The recoil effect of the debris was found to have contributed more to the change in asteroid momentum than its own impact.

"These findings add to our fundamental understanding of asteroids and build the foundation of how humanity can defend the Earth from potentially dangerous asteroids by changing its path," said NASA association administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Nicola Fox.

For information, the four papers were published in the journal Nature. The paper describes the results and conclusions of the DART mission.

In another paper, the author in APL reported, if there was a Dimorphos-like asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile, it could now be successfully deflected by that method.

So there is no need for reconnaissance missions first.

However, authors warn Earth's population should be warned beforehand. Ideally a few decades earlier or at least a few years.

"That's to reduce such threats," the Verge said on Saturday, March 4.