Update time: November 24, 2021 / 7:00 pm / CBS News

SpaceX is targeting distant asteroids. It launched a small NASA probe into space early on Wednesday and carried out a 15,000 mph head-on impact in September next year to test how long a threatening object might hit the earth. The feasibility of pushing it off track.

Tom Statler, a mission project scientist at NASA Headquarters, said that the $330 million Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is the first test flight in NASA's planetary defense program and "will be of historical significance." "Humanity will change the movement of natural celestial bodies in space for the first time."

The DART mission, located on top of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, was launched from the Vandenberg Space Force base in northwest Los Angeles at 10:21 PM PST (Wednesday 1:21 AM Eastern Standard Time) as a booster 1.7 million pounds of thrust illuminates the night sky as it climbs.

Flying south over the Pacific Ocean, Falcon 9 successfully took off from the dense lower atmosphere and into space. Fifty-five minutes after lift-off, after the rocket's second-stage engine fired twice—and the spectacular airborne camera view of the Earth receding in the background—the DART spacecraft was released and flew on its own.

This launch marks SpaceX's 26th flight so far this year, its 129th Falcon 9 flight, and its 18th takeoff from California. As usual, SpaceX's first-stage booster flew itself to an offshore drone for precise landing after completing its third flight, laying the foundation for the company's 95th successful recovery.

But for DART, the task has just begun. It takes 10 months for the spacecraft to reach its target. This is a 525-foot-wide asteroid called Dimorphos, orbiting a half-mile-wide parent body called Didymos. No matter before or after encountering DART, it will not pose any threat to the earth.

But the dual asteroid system provides an attractive target for DART, because it is easier to measure the impact of the probe from the earth by accurately timing how the orbital period of the satellite around Didymos changes due to the collision.

What kind of collision will this be.

The 1,210-pound DART spacecraft is expected to hit Dimorphos at an astonishing speed of 15,000 mph and break down on impact as it digs a new crater, during which the body will travel at a speed of 1 inch per second Slow down.

The detector is programmed to return high-resolution images every second in the final stage of its kamikaze method, covering the last 1,000 miles in just 4 minutes.

A small Italian hitchhiking spacecraft named LICIACube was released from DART 10 days before the impact and will attempt to photograph the collision and the debris being blown back into space. At the moment of impact, Didymos and Dimorphos were approximately 6.8 million miles from Earth.

Unlike Hollywood thrillers such as "The End of the World" and "Deep Impact" that imagine pilots carrying nuclear bombs flying to deflect or destroy targets, DART's goals are much simpler and less destructive.

Although nuclear devices may be the last resort in some doomsday scenarios in the future, deflection rather than destruction will still be the goal.

"You just don't want to blow it up, because it won't change the direction of all materials," NASA's "Planetary Defense" officer Lindley Johnson told CBS News. "It's still hitting you, it's just lead bullets, not rifle bullets."

"All you want to do is slightly change the speed of all this movement. Over time, this will change the position of the asteroid and its orbit."

If the high-speed impact of DART works as expected, the orbital speed of Dimorphos will change slightly, which is about a few minutes shorter than the current 11 hours and 55 minutes required to complete a circle of Didymos. The minimum change in mission success is 73 seconds.

"Now this is a very small change, but if we need to do this, as long as we discover asteroids early enough and we have enough time to prepare, we can deflect asteroids that collide with the Earth," Staterer Say.

Early detection is critical, because when trying to deflect, the farther the threatening object is, the less force is required to push it off the course. DART is NASA's first so-called "planetary defense mission", and its main purpose is to test the "kinetic shock" method.

"DART is just the first step towards being able to potentially prevent asteroids from hitting the Earth in the future," Chabot said

Astronomers believe that there are approximately 25,000 near-Earth asteroids 500 feet in size or larger.

From a perspective, the celestial body that blew up the meteor crater in Arizona was about 150 feet wide, and the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 injured more than 1,600 people and caused an estimated loss of 30 million U.S. dollars. The diameter is only 60 feet.

APL chief planetary scientist Nancy Chabot (Nancy Chabot) said: "We are now most concerned about things that are a few hundred meters (span), that is because we have found less than half of the population." "So we are not sure. Where are they all."

"So, in addition to finding these asteroids, figuring out where they are, tracking them, and ensuring that we are safe, we also want to be prepared to prevent them from hitting the earth in the future."

From a "several hundred meters" point of view, Chabot said such an impact "will cause devastating effects within tens to hundreds of kilometers, much worse than any nuclear bomb ever used on Earth."

"We are not actually talking about global extinctions, but regional destruction in the area, which may destroy a city or even a small country," she said. "So this is a real problem. This is a real threat."

Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, initially serving as the head of the Cape Canaveral bureau of United News International, and now serving as a news consultant for CBS. He has participated in 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2 flew over Neptune, and dozens of commercial and military launches. Harwood works at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of "Communication Inspection: The Last Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia."

First released on November 24, 2021 / 3:11 AM

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