Original title: US spacecraft “deliberately” hit near-Earth asteroid to test Earth’s defense technology
Xinhua News Agency, Los Angeles, September 26 (Reporter Tan Jingjing) NASA’s “Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)” spacecraft hit a near-Earth asteroid on the 26th in an attempt to change the asteroid’s orbit. NASA said it was the world‘s first test mission aimed at defending Earth from the threat of an asteroid strike.
The live broadcast of NASA shows that at 19:14 US Eastern Time on the 26th (7:14 Beijing Time on the 27th), the DART spacecraft collided with a smaller asteroid in a near-Earth binary asteroid system, DART Spaceflight The camera onboard recorded the footage of the impact. According to NASA, when the impact occurred, the DART spacecraft was traveling at a speed of about 22,530 kilometers per hour, and the asteroid was about 11 million kilometers away from Earth.
This is NASA’s first mission to test asteroid orbit-shifting technology aimed at improving defenses against asteroids hitting Earth. The asteroid that was hit was the smaller of a near-Earth binary asteroid system with a diameter of about 160 meters. It orbits another asteroid about 780 meters in diameter. Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth.
NASA said that the main goal of this test mission is to test the spacecraft’s ability to autonomously navigate to the target asteroid and deliberately collide with it, and to use ground-based telescopes to measure the extent to which the collision caused the asteroid to deviate from its orbit.
Equipped with high-resolution cameras and an automatic navigation system, the DART spacecraft was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, USA on November 24, 2021, and arrived near the target area after flying for about 10 months. NASA said the test mission of the DART spacecraft will provide researchers with important data to better prepare defenses should asteroids with potential impact hazards to Earth be discovered. In the future, the European Space Agency will launch the “Hera” mission spacecraft to study the impact of the impact in depth by measuring and collecting data on the double asteroid system, especially the impact crater and detailed measurement of the mass of the asteroid that was hit.