“Armageddon” project: NASA launches a satellite to deflect dangerous meteorites
Asteroids in their orbit around the sun sometimes get too close to Earth. When these space rocks come within 30 million miles of Earth, NASA calls them Near-Earth Objects (NEO), "Objectives close to the Earth". On November 23, the US space agency plans to launch a spaceship into Earth's orbit that will have to crash into an NEO asteroid in about a year, hoping to experience the first human-induced trajectory change.
NASA is currently preparing the launch of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft which will be brought into Earth's orbit via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on November 23rd. “Double” because the experiment will involve a group of two satellites.
NASA's "Earth planetary defense" Lindley Johnson wrote in a press release :
“ DART will be the first demonstration of the 'kinetic impact' technique in which a spacecraft deliberately collides with a known asteroid at high speed to change the asteroid's motion in space .
" This technique is believed to be the most technologically mature approach to mitigating a potentially dangerous asteroid and will help planetary defense experts refine computer models for the kinetic impacts of asteroids, providing insight into how we could deflect potentially dangerous near-Earth objects. in the future. "
The detection of potentially threatening NEOs is part of a large-scale "planetary defense" program that NASA plans to use the kinetic force of a spacecraft to deflect asteroids. It won't be as thrilling as the 1998 sci-fi thriller “Armageddon,” starring Bruce Willis, who landed a spaceship on an asteroid bound for Earth and detonated a nuclear bomb, saving all of humanity. However, the tiny 600kg-mass DART will collide with a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid, nicknamed Dimorphos, measuring about 120 feet in length, at 10,000km / h between September 26 and October 1, 2022.
NASA hopes the DART impact will slightly alter Dimorphos' trajectory, causing it to have a new orbit. The mission will cost $ 330 million. It would be a tap, but it should be enough to deflect the cosmic object.
China is also preparing its own planetary defense project based on the use of the Long March V missile.
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The article “Armageddon” Project: NASA launches a satellite to deflect dangerous meteorites comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/progetto-armagheddon-la-nasa-lancia-un-satellite-per-deviate-i-meteoriti-pericolosi/ on Sun, 07 Nov 2021 10:00:12 +0000.