DART’s impact will both enhance and validate scientific computational models that are critical to predicting the effectiveness of a kinetic impactor. Scientists can create mini-impacts in a lab and build sophisticated computer models based on those results, but asteroids are complicated bodies with a range of physical properties, internal structures, shapes and geologic features.Ĭarrying out a real-world test on an asteroid with mostly unknown physical properties is a necessary next step to evaluate current models and advance them further to address potentially hazardous asteroids in the future. This mission also engages the international planetary science community in many ways, embracing worldwide cooperation to address the global issue of planetary defense. This method, called kinetic impact deflection, is just one of several proposed ways to redirect potentially hazardous asteroids, but it’s the one currently assessed as the most technologically mature.Īfter impact, the investigation team will measure how much the asteroid is deflected using telescopes on Earth. The DART spacecraft, which was built and is operated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at the direction of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), is designed to demonstrate that an asteroid that could cause regional devastation - one just a few hundred feet across - can be deflected by intentionally crashing a spacecraft into it. and international space agencies will perform before any actual need is present, better preparing our defenses should we ever discover an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. The DART mission is a key test that NASA and other U.S. Very few of the billions of asteroids and comets orbiting our Sun are potentially hazardous to Earth, and, for at least the next century, no known asteroid threatens our planet.
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