DART (No, not the game)

Have you ever wondered what would happen is an asteroid just like the one that wiped the mighty dinosaurs of the face of the planet were to be hurtling across space as you read and headed straight towards our home? Just like that one it would be the sixth extinction level event our planet would see.

But us humans have something that the reptiles did not have, science. That’s where the Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART comes into play.

DART was a NASA mission launched on November 24, 2021. It was designed to assess how much of a transfer of momentum takes place when a spacecraft collides with an asteroid head on. It’s target was Dimorphos, a minor planet ( an astronomical object in direct orbit around the Sun that is exclusively classified as neither a planet nor a comet) moon of the asteroid Didymos. On September 26, 2022 about 11 million kilometers from Earth the DART collided with Dimorphos.

The collision shortened it’s orbit by 32 minutes, compared to the pre-defined threshold of 73 seconds. The reason being the momentum transfer from the recoil of the debris which was larger then the original impact.

With the missions success the European Space agency is developing a follow-up called Hera that will be launched at Didymos in 2024.

It is safe to assume that with a few more such missions we can be confident enough that if a asteriod were to be on a colliding course with Earth we have the means to deflect it and save humanity as we know it.