NASA’s Dart spacecraft completed its mission on Monday after intentionally colliding with an asteroid – Dimporphos – in a defense test against space objects. Video recorded by Dart’s on-board camera and uploaded by the US space agency shows the spacecraft approaching the target asteroid moments before impact. The spectacular sight of Dart hurtling at 14,000 mph (22,500 km/h) toward a harmless asteroid is humanity’s first attempt to shift the position of any other natural object in space. Collision overview in five points:
The impact of the impact with the asteroid, located 9.6 million kilometers away, was expected by the scientists to “cut a crater and change the trajectory of the asteroid”. They said it will take some time to reveal how much the asteroid’s path has changed. The mission cost $325 million to hit a 525-foot (160-meter) asteroid named ‘Dimorphos’. It is the moon Didymos, Greek for twin, a fast-spinning asteroid five times its size that ejected the material forming the younger partner.
The collision occurred 10 months after the Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft – about the size of a vending machine – navigated to its target using technology created by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. After the crash within minutes, Dimorphos was alone in the images with boulders and debris on the surface. The last image on the screen froze as the radio transmission ended. Photos of the impact were captured by a mini-satellite – Italy’s Cubesat – launched from Dart two weeks ago.
Fewer than half of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth objects within a lethal range of 460 feet (140 meters) have been discovered, according to NASA. And less than 1 percent of the millions of smaller asteroids capable of widespread injury are known to humans.
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