"Just a little nudge, a tap," said Adams. The goal is to bump the moonlet's orbit slightly closer to Didymos. An illustration of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft prior to impact against Dimorphos, a 525-foot-wide moonlet in the Didymos binary asteroid system. It has a moonlet of its own, and that's our target. The main asteroid, called Didymos, is about half-a-mile across. It took off last November on a mission to change an asteroid's path by crashing into it.ĭART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test because its target is, in fact, a double asteroid that orbits the sun. The easiest thing to do is to actually just change its direction slightly, and then it will miss Earth entirely."Īdams is the lead engineer on the DART mission, a joint venture of NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. And those chunks will still be going the same direction. "Because if you blow up an asteroid, you create a large number of chunks. "That's probably not the best way of doing it," said NASA's Elena Adams. Deep Impact (9/10) Movie CLIP - The Ultimate Sacrifice (1998) HD by
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