The spacecraft will crash into a moon of the asteroid to see how it affects the movement of the rock on its space travel.
Beginning at 5:30 p.m. in Miami, Florida, on that day, You can follow the events in a live broadcast with the images captured by the spacecraft on the NASA website. The impact is expected to occur around 7:14 p.m. Miami time.
The mission targets Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Didymos.
The asteroid system poses no threat to Earth, NASA officials said. For this reason, it is a perfect target for testing a kinetic impact, which might be necessary if an asteroid is headed for the planet.
The project will be the space agency’s first large-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology that can protect the planet.
“For the first time we will measurably change the orbit of a celestial body in the universe,” said Robert Braun, head of the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that place them within 30 million miles of Earth.
Detecting the threat of near-Earth objects, or NEOs, that could cause serious damage is a primary goal of NASA and other space organizations around the world.
Astronomers discovered Didymos more than two decades ago.
Means “twin” in Greek, a nod to how the asteroid forms a binary system with the smaller asteroid or moon. Didymos is almost 0.8 kilometers in diameter.
The spacecraft recently captured its first view of Didymos using an instrument called the Optical Navigation and Reconnaissance Camera, or DRACO.
On impact day, images taken by DRACO will reveal the first sight of Dimorphos.
During the event, these images will be beamed back to Earth at a rate of one per second, providing a “pretty impressive” look at the moon, said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and DART coordination lead at the Applied Physics Laboratory.
At the moment of impact, Didymos and Dimorphos will be relatively close to Earth, about 11 million kilometers away.
Its goal is to collide with Dimorphos to change the asteroid’s motion in space, according to NASA. This collision will be recorded by LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids), a companion cube satellite provided by the Italian Space Agency.
The briefcase-sized CubeSat traveled with DART into space.
The project is reminiscent of the film “Armageddon” (1988), with Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler.
Directed by Michael Bay, this sci-fi movie classic is about a group of oil rig drillers who are sent by NASA to a huge asteroid that threatens planet Earth. NASA’s goal in that fiction is to drill into its surface and destroy it with a nuclear bomb.
Fuente: https://www.ambito.com/