![]() ![]() The observatories will track the pair of asteroids as they circle the sun, to see if Dart altered Dimorphos’ orbit. Telescopes on all seven continents, along with the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and NASA’s asteroid-hunting Lucy spacecraft, may see a bright flash as Dart smacks Dimorphos and sends streams of rock and dirt cascading into space. Cameras on Dart and a mini tagalong satellite will capture the collision up close. Although the strike itself should be immediately apparent, it will take months to verify the moonlet’s tweaked orbit. ![]() The impact by Dart should shave about 10 minutes off that. ![]() Little Dimorphos completes a lap around big Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. If it goes screaming past both space rocks, it will encounter them again in a couple years for Take 2. Unless Dart misses - NASA puts the odds of that happening at less than 10% - it will be the end of the road for Dart. "Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a Great Pyramid," said Chabot. The size of a small vending machine at 1,260 pounds (570 kilograms), the spacecraft will slam into roughly 11 billion pounds (5 billion kilograms) of asteroid. The spacecraft’s navigation is designed to distinguish between the two asteroids and, in the final 50 minutes, target the smaller one. Managers are confident Dart won’t smash into the larger Didymos by mistake. Believed to be essentially a rubble pile, Dimorphos will emerge as a point of light an hour before impact, looming larger and larger in the camera images beamed back to Earth. It has a single instrument: a camera used for navigating, targeting and chronicling the final action. 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. NASA insists there’s a zero chance either asteroid will threaten Earth - now or in the future. It isn’t going to put it into lots of pieces." Rather, the impact will dig out a crater tens of yards (meters) in size and hurl some 2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of rocks and dirt into space. "This isn’t going to blow up the asteroid. "This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption," said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University, which is managing the effort. Dimorphos - roughly 525 feet (160 meters) across - orbits its parent body at a distance of less than a mile (1.2 kilometers). Discovered in 1996, Didymos is spinning so fast that scientists believe it flung off material that eventually formed a moonlet. It is actually the puny sidekick of a 2,500-foot (780-meter) asteroid named Didymos, Greek for twin. The asteroid with the bull’s-eye on it is Dimorphos, about 7 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) from Earth. (NASA/Johns Hopkins, APL/Steve Gribben) Asteroid target This illustration is of the DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system. ![]()
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