What if an object like an asteroid were coming at us? We should have deterrence technology because in a few hours, a watershed moment, will judge whether humanity will be able, by gathering unprecedented data, to now design a planetary defense system that will help prevent a catastrophe from an asteroid on planet Earth .
Today’s experiment has historical significance. It is the first time that an attempt has been made to change the course of a celestial body by human intervention. This has never been done. Amateur astronomers with experience and valuable equipment should try to spot the “Dimorphos” and see if it will become brighter when the debris from the explosion is illuminated by the sun, and thus it will become brighter for several hours after the impact. !
It’s a big day. Tuesday morning at around 2:30 a.m. the DART spacecraft launched last year in November should hopefully hit this particular asteroid which, at about 160 meters, is the smaller of the two asteroids that are orbiting each other while at the same time… walking around the Sun, in the distance. Based on the latest data, everything is going as it should be, the camera carrying the DART is working normally and has even detected the larger of the two asteroids, which will guide it slowly, slowly towards the final goal. All this while the DART is going at a very high speed, 25,000 km/h.
Both for the DART program and for the European HERA that follows in the analysis. For DART and also for the European mission “Hera” (s.s. HERA) of the European Space Agency (ESA), we are experts in interpreting the so-called dynamic phenomena, i.e. the movements of bodies. We therefore do a detailed simulation of how it is in the system and moving before the DART hits it and what we expect to happen after it hits. Obviously once we get real data in a few weeks, we’ll have a better, smaller range of parameters to focus on over the next year or two to understand exactly what NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) did. Service (NASA), with its impact on the asteroid.
The importance of the mission and how, we can see live from the earth the “hit” of the anti-“Armageddon”.
It is important to show that we have the specific technology (which could potentially save the planet from a collision with a meteorite) and what will be done we can repeat it if necessary at some point. This particular experiment is not something you can do every day. You have a careful choice of the target, careful timing, a specific moment in time when everything must be done. Any project involves thousands of people working for about seven years and is critical to the success of the DART mission.
