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Agence France-Presse

In the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon, Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck race to save the Earth from being pulverised by an asteroid.
While the Earth faces no such immediate danger, Nasa plans to crash a spacecraft travelling at a speed of 24,000km/h (15,000mph) into an asteroid next year in a test of “planetary defence”.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) is to determine whether this is an effective way to deflect the course of an asteroid should one threaten the Earth in the future.
Nasa provided details of the Dart mission, which carries a price tag of US$330 million, in a briefing for reporters on Thursday.

Our #DARTMission, the world’s 1st #PlanetaryDefense test mission, will crash into an asteroid far away from Earth to slightly change its motion.

The spacecraft is fueled, final tests are underway, & liftoff is set for Nov. 24 UTC. Get up to speed: https://t.co/ggxChzeCTO pic.twitter.com/ikkXAxeXUV
— NASA (@NASA) November 4, 2021

“Although there isn’t a currently known asteroid that’s on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,” said Lindley Johnson, Nasa’s planetary defence officer.
“The key to planetary defence is finding them well before they are an impact threat,” Johnson said. “We don’t want to be in a situation where an asteroid is headed towards Earth and then have to test this capability.”
The Dart spacecraft is expected to be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10.20pm Pacific time on November 23 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
If the launch takes place at or around that time, impact with the asteroid some 11.9 million km (6.8 million miles) from Earth would occur between September 26 and October 1 of next year.
Asteroids may be on way, each with more kinetic energy than an atomic bomb
The target asteroid, Dimorphos, which means “two forms” in Greek, is about 160 metres (525 feet) in diameter and orbits around a larger asteroid named Didymos, “twin” in Greek.
Johnson said that while neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth they are ideal candidates for the test because of the ability to observe them with ground-based telescopes.
Images will also be collected by a miniature camera-equipped satellite contributed by the Italian Space Agency that will be ejected by the Dart spacecraft 10 days before impact.
Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the Dart spacecraft, said Dimorphos completes an orbit around Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes “just like clockwork”.
The Dart spacecraft, which will weigh 550kg (1,210 pounds) at the time of impact, will not “destroy” the asteroid, Chabot said.
“It’s just going to give it a small nudge,” she said. “It’s going to deflect its path around the larger asteroid.”
“It’s only going to be a change of about 1 per cent in that orbital period,” Chabot said, “so what was 11 hours and 55 minutes before might be like 11 hours and 45 minutes.”
The test is designed to help scientists understand how much momentum is needed to deflect an asteroid in the event one is headed towards Earth one day.
“We are targeting to be as nearly head on as possible to cause the biggest deflection,” Chabot said.
Nasa launches ‘Lucy’ probe to explore Jupiter asteroids
The amount of deflection will depend to a certain extent on the composition of Dimorphos and scientists are not entirely certain how porous the asteroid is.
Dimorphos is the most common type of asteroid in space and is some 4.5 billion years old, Chabot said.
“It’s like ordinary chondrite meteorites,” she said. “It’s a fine grain mixture of rock and metal together.”
Johnson, Nasa’s planetary defence officer, said more than 27,000 near-Earth asteroids have been catalogued but none currently pose a danger to the planet.
An asteroid discovered in 1999 known as Bennu that is 1,650 feet wide will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact is considered very slight.


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United States

Nasa to deflect asteroid in test of ‘planetary defence’

An artist’s illustration shows the Dart spacecraft from behind as it approaches the Didymos binary system. Image: Nasa/Johns Hopkins APL via AFP

Chinese scientists find evidence of most powerful asteroid strike humans ever experienced

The Yilan crater in Heilongjiang province. Photo: Heilongjiang

Extreme heat and pressure formed teardrop-shape particles of glasses. Photo: Chen Ming

A picture of Professor Chen Ming at the Yilan crater drilling site. Photo: Chen Ming

How 23 giant Chinese rockets could save the world from ‘doomsday’ asteroid

The so-called Assembled Kinetic Impactor within China’s Long March 5 (CZ-5) rocket. The country hopes this device, on more than 20 rockets, will deflect potentially lethal asteroids and avoid devastation on Earth. Photo: Handout.

This November 16, 2018 photo from NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, obtained December 3, 2018 courtesy of NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona, shows the asteroid Bennu from a distance of 85 miles (136 km). The image, which was taken by the PolyCam camera, shows Bennu at 300 pixels and has been stretched to increase contrast between highlights and shadows. - NASA's first-ever mission designed to visit an asteroid and return a sample of its dust back to Earth arrives on December 3, 2018 at its destination, Bennu, two years after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The $800 million mission, known as OSIRIS-REx, is targeted for a 12 pm (1700 GMT) rendez-vous with the asteroid, and will use its suite of five science instruments to study the asteroid for the next year and a half. (Photo by HO / NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona / AFP) / == RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - MANDATORY CREDIT "AFP PHOTO / NASA / Goddard/University of Arizona" / NO MARKETING / NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS / DISTRIBUTED

Nasa simulated an asteroid impact, couldn’t stop it hitting Europe

An artist’s illustration of an asteroid near Earth. Photo: Shutterstock

The predicted impact region for the asteroid 2021PDC on Day 2 of a NASA-led asteroid-impact simulation. NASA/JPL

FILE - In this Feb. 15, 2013 file photo provided by Chelyabinsk.ru, shows a meteorite contrail over the Ural Mountains' city of Chelyabinsk, about 930 miles east of Moscow, Russia. After a surprise meteor hit Earth at 42,000 mph and exploded over a Russian city in February, smashing windows and causing minor injuries, scientists studying the aftermath say the threat of space rocks hurtling toward our planet is bigger than they had thought. Meteors like the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk _ and those that are even bigger and more dangerous _ are probably four to five times more likely to hit Earth than scientists thought before the February mid-air explosion, according to three studies released Wednesday in the journals Nature and Science. (AP Photo/Chelyabinsk.ru, Yekaterina Pustynnikova, File)

(FILES) This file computer generated handout image taken on May 15, 2015 and released by the European Space Agency (ESA) on May 15, 2015 shows the impact of the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) projectile on the binary asteroid system (65803) Didymos observed by the AIM (Asteroid Impact Mission) satellite. The Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is a European Space Agency's mission, scheduled to be launched in 2020. AIM will travel to a binary asteroid system - the paired Didymos asteroids, which will come a comparatively close 11 million km to Earth in 2022. For a successful joint mission, one spacecraft, DART would impact the secondary of the Didymos binary system in October 2022 while AIM would first characterize the target asteroid (surface and internal properties), observe the impact event and measure any change in the relative orbit. / AFP PHOTO / EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY / Handout / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - MANDATORY CREDIT "AFP PHOTO / EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY " - NO MARKETING

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The mission involves crashing a spacecraft travelling at 24,000km/h into an asteroid to see if this is an effective way to change its course
Though there is currently no known asteroid on a collision course with Earth, the US$330 million test hopes to address future threats



The mission involves crashing a spacecraft travelling at 24,000km/h into an asteroid to see if this is an effective way to change its course.


Space

SpaceX