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On Wednesday December 1st of 2021, NASA launched it's Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission (DART). In a year, a spacecraft of 324 million dollars, funded with American taxpayer dollars, will slam into an asteroid (dimorphos) around the size of the pyramid of Giza at a velocity of 15,000 miles per hour.
In 2005, congress gave NASA, an agency founded with the primary goal of exploration, the responsibility of protecting the planet from external threats which entails the tracking of tens of thousands of asteroids. DART is NASA's latest initiative in embracing this responsibility— the mission’s objective is to quantify NASA’s ability to divert the trajectory of incoming asteroids.
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The success of the launch mission will prove a remarkable feat of engineering. DART will be the first mission that actually tests whether we have the capability to divert threatening celestial objects from our planet as previous studies have been a compilation of simulations. The DART space probe is scheduled to land on two asteroids in September and October of 2022 respectively. The two asteroids orbit the sun every two years, in an elliptical path that stretches past Mars at its peak. Due to the fact that Dimorphos is incredibly small, the probe must land on the object at when it’s orbit is closest to Earth. This stipulates a complex procedure that must be executed four hours before the impact of the spacecraft. Ten days before the probe’s landing, a small satellite called the LICIACube which contains two cameras will be released to document the probe’s impending destruction. DRACO, the spacecraft’s onboard camera, will be responsible for taking photographs of the asteroid and streaming them up uptil 20 seconds before impact.
If Dimophos’ orbit speeds up by 73 seconds, the mission will be a success. This will be determined by measuring the relative orbits of the two asteroids immediately following the impact. As both asteroids appear as tiny specks of light in the telescopes, scientists can determine the change in speed by documenting the time elapsed between the flicker of lights which indicates that Dimophos has overtaken the other asteroid.