Although celebrating the destruction of a spacecraft sounds strange but NASA did it two weeks ago on September 26 after execution of the final stage of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART),
In this a spacecraft is intentionally collided with an asteroid Dimorphos in order to find out if such smashing could deflect an Earth-bound stellar object. NASA has officially determined the DART mission a success in a press conference today. Planetary defence researchers expected the transfer of kinetic energy from the spacecraft to the asteroid causing a change in its path.
The method could be used to protect Earth from an incoming asteroid. For success of the mission crashing of DART with Dimorphos’ was required to execute a change nearly 12-hour orbital period of Dimorphos around Didymos by at least 73 seconds. Observations after two weeks of the collision made the team reveal a change of 32-minute in Dimorphos’ orbital period.
Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division Lori Glaze explained in a press release “This result is one important step toward understanding the full effect of DART’s impact with its target asteroid. As new data come in each day, astronomers will be able to better assess whether, and how, a mission like DART could be used in the future to help protect Earth from a collision with an asteroid if we ever discover one headed our way.”
The Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube satellite imaged the collision in close range that clearly shows debris scattering into space from the impacted asteroid. The European Space Agency’s Hera mission is scheduled to survey Dimorphos in about four years.
Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which managed the mission for NASA said: “DART has given us some fascinating data about both asteroid properties and the effectiveness of a kinetic impactor as a planetary defence technology”. Though we don’t have a full-fledged planetary defence system the success of this experiment can be considered as the first step towards the above mentioned development.