Amazing scientific progress..NASA announces the success of the first experiment to defend the planet
Amazing scientific progress..NASA announces the success of the first experiment to defend the planet 1-18
An image from NASA of planet Earth
After 10 months in space, NASA 's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) , the world's first demonstration of planetary defense technology, successfully impacted an asteroid target on Monday, the agency's first attempt to move an asteroid into space.
According to what was published by NASA on its official website, the mission control center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 pm EST, as part of a comprehensive planetary defense strategy. For NASA, the DART effect with the asteroid Demorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique to protect the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if it is detected.
“At its core, DART represents an unprecedented success for planetary defense, but it is also a unit mission of real benefit to all of humanity,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “While NASA studies the universe and our home planet, we are also working to protect this home. This international collaboration has transformed the imagination scientific fact into scientific fact, showing one way to protect the Earth.
Amazing scientific progress..NASA announces the success of the first experiment to defend the planet 1586
DART targeted the lunar asteroid Dimorphos, a small object 530 feet (160 meters) in diameter orbiting a larger 2,560 feet (780 meters) asteroid called Didymos. Neither asteroid poses any threat to Earth.
The mission's one-way flight confirmed that NASA was able to successfully navigate a spacecraft to deliberately collide with an asteroid to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact.
The investigation team will monitor Demorphos using ground-based telescopes to confirm that the DART impact has altered the asteroid's orbit around Didymos, and researchers expect the impact to shorten Demorphos' orbit by about 1%, or about 10 minutes. .

“Planetary defense is a globally unified effort that affects every person living on Earth,” explained Thomas Zurbuchen, associate director of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We now know we can steer a spacecraft with the precision needed to impact even a small object in space. Just a change Simple in its speed is all that is needed to make a huge difference in the path the asteroid takes."
The spacecraft's only instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance Camera and the Asteroid Navigation Optical Camera (DRACO), combined with a sophisticated guidance, navigation and control system working in conjunction with SMART Nav real-time navigation algorithms, enabled DART to Recognize and distinguish asteroids and target smaller body.





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