If that happens within 100 million years, then the annual chance of being killed by an asteroid is at least 40 times greater than being killed by terrorists.
A planet killer careening into our planet would kill all eight billion of us. But DART is not just another government boondoggle, promoted by rocket jockeys who like to blow things up. That probably sounds pretty non-threatening. Indeed, planet killers are reckoned to come our way only about once every 100 million years. But of the roughly 18,000 known asteroids that might tangle with Earth, few are that massive. On the one hand are the “planet killers” – rocks similar in heft (about six miles across) to the one that snuffed the dinosaurs. But I view it like buying earthquake insurance: I might never need it, but if I do, I’ll really need it!>ĭART actually addresses a multi-headed threat, because space rocks come in various sizes. And sure, you could get a cheap coffee with that money instead. The DART mission costs $325 million, or about $2.25 per taxpayer. It’s to test out whether we could deflect an asteroid that was. Now the point of this bumper-car exercise is not to keep this double asteroid from hitting us it’s not headed our way. The orbital period is currently about 12 hours, and that might change by as much as 30 minutes. But calculations suggest that this high-tech fender bender could significantly alter the time required for Dimorphos to orbit Didymos. The latter weighs about 10 billion pounds, so you might think it would be completely unmoved by such a collision comparable to throwing a grape at a FedEx truck. The idea is to deliberately crash a 1,200-pound spacecraft into Didymos’ smaller orbiting companion – its “moon,” if you will – Dimorphos.
The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission, which lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on November 24, will spend ten months cruising to a target you’ve probably never heard of: the double asteroid Didymos, currently beyond Mars and about 300 million miles from downtown Mountain View. That’s why I’m happy that NASA is spending my tax dollars to whomp an asteroid with some high-tech hardware. In the case of the rock that hit our planet 66 million years ago, 75 percent of all animal species (including the dinosaurs) were erased. Unless we or our descendants take action, a large asteroid or comet will sooner or later slam into Earth, causing massive – if not catastrophic – damage.
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Knowing exactly how much will help us plan any future asteroid-deflection missions - not surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of existing science on ramming your spacecraft into space rocks.If someone (particularly anyone named Chicken Little) says the sky is falling, you can usually assume that the sky is not falling.īut, of course, the sky really is falling, and we really could be doomed. This will change the speed of the moonlet by a mere fraction of a percent, but enough that its orbit period will be affected measurably. It’s one large-ish asteroid, approximately 780 meters across - that’s Didymos proper - and a 160-meter “moonlet” in its orbit.Īs the moonlet is more typical of the type likely to threaten Earth - there being more asteroids that are that size and not easily observed - we will be testing the possibility of intercepting one by smashing into it at nearly 15,000 miles per hour. The DART mission, managed by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (!), involves sending a pair of satellites out to a relatively nearby pair of asteroids, known as the Didymos binary.
Meteorite aerosmith armageddon movie#
NASA has a launch date for that most Hollywood of missions, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which is basically a dry run of the movie “Armageddon.” Unlike the film, this will not involve nukes, oil rigs or Aerosmith, but instead is a practical test of our ability to change the trajectory of an asteroid in a significant and predictable way.
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