인류 첫 소행성 방어 실험 우주선 1천100만㎞밖서 충돌 성공
In space news.
NASA has moved a historic step closer to potentially protecting Earth from collisions with asteroids.
Lee Eun-jin reports.
The DART mission or Double Asteroid Redirection Test carried out by NASA and engineers of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, set out to hit an asteroid as a test to see if this method could serve as a planetary defense.
The first step of that has been a success, with DART crashing into the asteroid Dimorphos on Tuesday, possibly the first time humans have altered the dynamics of a solar system body in a measurable way.
Dimorphos was a small asteroid circling around a bigger asteroid called Didymos. Neither were headed toward Earth, but were chosen to test if the technology could make an impact and change an asteroid's trajectory in the case one is found headed toward Earth in the future.
The goal of the collision was for the DART spacecraft, roughly 100 times smaller than Dimorphos, not to obliterate the asteroid, but to change the speed and path of the asteroid.
"The first test is the test of our ability to build an autonomously guided spacecraft that will actually achieve the kinetic impact on the asteroid. The second test is the test of how the actual asteroid responds to the kinetic impact, because at the end of the day, the real question is how effectively did we move the asteroid? And can this technique of kinetic impact be used in the future if we ever needed to? "
While there currently are no asteroids on a direct course toward Earth, there are more than 27-thousand asteroids in all shapes and sizes classed as near-Earth.
Engineers of the DART mission are expecting images taken of the collision with Dimorphos and its aftermath in the next few days, but access to actual quantitative data of the impact will take another two months and a further survey of the impact site will be carried out by the European Space Agency's Hera mission set to launch in 2024 which will reach the asteroid system two years after that date.
It will be some weeks before scientists know for sure whether their experiment has worked,
but it can already be confirmed that something remarkable has been achieved.
Lee Eunjin, Arirang News.
#NASA #spacecraft #arirang_news
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2022-09-27, 14:00 (KST)
