Roll-Out Solar Arrays and APL-developed Transformational Solar Array concentrators generated the spacecraft’s solar power. The spacecraft was developed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), whose experts equipped the probe with the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) and the Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real time Navigation (SMART Nav) algorithms leveraged from missile guidance technologies order to direct DART toward its target. journey leading to the historic, first-ever asteroid strike. 24, 2021, from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to begin a 470 million mi. The $330 million mission was launched on Nov. “We are showing that planetary defense is a global endeavor, and it is very possible to save our planet,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said moments after the strike. DART, about the size of a golf cart and with a mass of 1,260 lb., struck its target at a velocity of more than 14,000 mph and within 55.8 ft. The Didymos pair orbit the Sun every 770 days in an elliptical orbit that extends just beyond Mars to just outside the orbit of the Earth. Pre-mission predictions were that the Dimorphos orbital period will be slowed by between 73 sec. The change will represent a measure of whether a “kinetic impact” capability belongs in the Earth’s future planetary defense arsenal. orbital period of the estimated 530-ft.-wide (160 m) Dimorphos around the 2,560-ft.-wide (780 m) Didymos. Ground-based observatories on all seven of the Earth’s continents as well as the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope will be watching in the coming weeks to assess how much the DART strike changed the 11-hr. Neither of the objects posed a threat of impact with the Earth, NASA stressed. EDT, as Dimorphos orbited its parent asteroid, Didymos, some 6.8 million mi. 26 to demonstrate a kinetic impact strategy as a potential means of shielding the Earth from a disastrous collision with an asteroid or comet.Ĭontact occurred as predicted at 7:14 p.m. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission probe slammed into a targeted Near Earth Object, the asteroid Dimorphos, on Sept.
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