Nasa to slam spacecraft into asteroid in mission to avoid future Armaggedon
On Wednesday, Nasa will launch a mission to deliberately slam a spacecraft into an asteroid to try to alter its orbit – the first time humanity has tried to interfere in the gravitational dance of the solar system. The aim is to test drive a planetary defence system that could prevent us from going the same way as the dinosaurs, providing the first real data about what it would take to deflect an Armageddon-inducing asteroid away from Earth.
More: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/22/nasa-slam-spacecraft-into-asteroid-to-avoid-armaggedon
NASA boffins seem to think we're worth saving from fiery asteroid death so they're shooting a spaceship at one
NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory's (APL) Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is under way following a successful launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9.
It was the third flight for this particular booster, and launch was from Vandenberg Space Launch Complex in California at 0620 UTC. The booster went on to make SpaceX's usual crowd-pleasing landing on a drone-ship.
As for DART itself, the mission is a demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid. The targets, a binary near-Earth asteroid dubbed Didymos, and Dimorphos, its moonlet, will be intercepted by the spacecraft next September.
More: https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/24/double_asteroid_redirection_test/
...and much more from various sites that covered the launch.
Oh dear ! Asteroids have been sorting out their orbits for billions of years so I hope this won't lead to some catastrophic butterfly effect ...
They've slammed a comet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)) in the past. Not sure how much effect that had on the target's orbit. I guess slamming objects a good distance away from Earth is slightly less crazy than smashing satellites to smithereens. There's a whole lot more emptiness out there, for a start.
NASA DART Imagery Shows Changed Orbit of Target Asteroid
Analysis of data obtained over the past two weeks by NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) investigation team shows the spacecraft's kinetic impact with its target asteroid, Dimorphos, successfully altered the asteroid's orbit. This marks humanity's first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object and the first full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology. Images such as the below helped scientists understand the orbit change resulting from DART's impact.
More: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-dart-imagery-shows-changed-orbit-of-target-asteroid
Early results from NASA's DART mission
Since NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft intentionally slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on Sept. 26—altering its orbit by 33 minutes—the investigation team has been digging into the implications of how this planetary defense technique could be used in the future, if such a need should ever arise.
This has included further analysis of the "ejecta"—the many tons of asteroidal rock displaced and launched into space by the impact—the recoil from which substantially enhanced DART's push against Dimorphos.
More: https://phys.org/news/2022-12-early-results-nasa-dart-mission.html