DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), a NASA spacecraft, is expected to crash with the asteroid Dimorphos in September at a speed of 24,140 kilometers per hour. After traveling 109.43 million kilometers, DART has now arrived at the asteroid Dimorphos.
On November 21, 2021, NASA successfully launched DART. For over a year, DART has been on its way to the asteroid Dimorphos. DART’s mission has always been focused on colliding with the asteroid Dimorphos.
After confirmation from a telescope at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, it seemed quite probable that DART’s mission would be a complete success.
“We don’t need to modify course since it’s already on target,” stated Andy Rivkin, DART Investigation Team of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, United States.
Just that, because to the asteroid’s threat to Earth, DART’s planned collision with Dimorphos was aborted. Because Dimorphos and Didymos, two other asteroids, are not on a course that poses an immediate or future threat to Earth.
These identical pairs of asteroids are so well-known that they aren’t even featured in NASA’s Sentry Table of Impact Risk. On November 4, 2132, at a distance of around 5.8 million kilometers, this asteroid duo will have its closest approach to Earth in its orbit.
That’s still far away; it’s nearly 15 times farther than the distance between the Moon and Earth. To evaluate the effects of the kinetic deflection of this collision process, NASA selected the asteroid Dimorphos as the collision target for the DART mission.
