A NASA spacecraft is about to clobber a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away. Here's why.
An important test that's happening today will determine if NASA can nudge an asteroid. FOX 4's Tisia Muzinga has details on the mission.In the first-of-its kind, save-the-world experiment, NASA is about to clobber a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away.
Cameras and telescopes will watch the crash, but it will take months to find out if it actually changed the orbit.The asteroid with the bull's-eye on it is Dimorphos, about 7 million miles from Earth. It is actually the puny sidekick of a 2,500-foot asteroid named Didymos, Greek for twin. Discovered in 1996, Didymos is spinning so fast that scientists believe it flung off material that eventually formed a moonlet.
NASA insists there's a zero chance either asteroid will threaten Earth -- now or in the future. That's why the pair was picked.Johns Hopkins took a minimalist approach in developing Dart -- short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test -- given that it's essentially a battering ram and faces sure destruction. It has a single instrument: a camera used for navigating, targeting and chronicling the final action.
Unless Dart misses -- NASA puts the odds of that happening at less than 10% -- it will be the end of the road for Dart. If it goes screaming past both space rocks, it will encounter them again in a couple years for Take 2.Little Dimorphos completes a lap around big Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The impact by Dart should shave about 10 minutes off that. Although the strike itself should be immediately apparent, it will take months to verify the moonlet's tweaked orbit.
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