Dart Mission: Fact or Fiction

A meteor shower destroyed Space Shuttle Atlantis in outer space. Now, an asteroid the size of Texas hurtles towards Earth and threatens to destroy life on the planet. Fact or fiction?

Fiction. This scene played out in the 1998 space movie Armageddon, where NASA works with oil-field drillers to blow up an asteroid before it strikes Earth.

An asteroid as large as a six-story building explodes over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The explosion creates shock waves that destroy building windows, injuring more than a thousand people. Fact or fiction?

Fact. About 20 miles above the city of Chelyabinsk, a meteor exploded when it hit Earth's atmosphere and released more energy than 20 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

Asteroid-Earth collisions like the one in Russia are extremely rare. Nevertheless, the US government and NASA have taken steps to detect asteroids and protect Earth against possible harm. Since 2005, NASA has closely watched near-Earth objects (NEOs), or asteroids and comets coming within 28 million miles of Earth's orbit around the Sun. NASA has worked on finding and identifying 90% of these potentially dangerous space rocks.

But, asteroid counting wasn't enough. So, in 2016, NASA established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to hunt asteroids that could threaten Earth before they become a problem. "You've got to find them [asteroids and other space objects] before you can get them, and you want to find them early,” Kelly Fast, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program, shared. “You want to find these things years or decades in advance."

The Planetary Defense Coordination Office also develops strategies to stop future asteroid-Earth collisions. The DART mission — short for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test — is their first attempt to attack an asteroid in outer space.

On November 23, 2021, NASA launched a small spacecraft aimed at an asteroid over 6 million miles from Earth. This spacecraft will travel for over ten months to meet Dimorphos, an asteroid measuring about 530 feet in diameter. NASA intends to crash the spacecraft into the small asteroid at a speed of 15,000 miles per hour to redirect the asteroid's orbit. Fact or science fiction? 100% fact.

Telescopes will observe the asteroid and measure the change in Dimorphos' course. If the asteroid-bump works, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office could use this strategy in the future to protect Earth.

SCIENTISTS BEHIND THE MISSION

The DART mission took teamwork from over one hundred scientists and engineers, each with unique skills needed to build, test, launch, and monitor DART. For example, Lindley Johnson is NASA's first planetary defense officer. Johnson is responsible for protecting the planet from NEO collisions. He also shares space threats with governmental agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that respond to natural disasters.

Brent Barbee and Maria Wyssling-horn worked as engineers on the DART mission. Barbee is an aerospace engineer. He designed computer simulations to test how asteroids react when struck by heavy objects, like the DART spacecraft. He determined how fast the spacecraft must collide with the asteroid, how heavy the spacecraft needs to be, and what would happen to the asteroid after the collision. Wyssling-horn works as an integration engineer. Her work also began long before DART launch day. She designed the spacecraft to meet the needs of the DART mission with a team of engineers.

Omar Baez is NASA's Senior Launch Director. He directed the launch of the DART spacecraft, which was sent into space on the top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. His job is all logistics. He works with governments and companies to reserve the launch date and collaborates with engineers and scientists to make sure take-offs go smoothly. Baez also manages launch countdowns. 5-4-3-2-1-blast-off!

DEVELOPING FUTURE DEFENSES

To be clear, DART is merely a test to see if NASA can move objects in space. The asteroid under attack, Dimorphos, is not a threat to Earth. But, scientists estimate that there are thousands of NEOs around the same size as Dimorphos that could cause damage if they hit Earth. That's why NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is developing technological weapons to defend against NEOs that could threaten Earth in the future.

“The results from the DART mission are going to inform our hypothetical work on planetary defense going forward,” said aerospace engineer Barbee. “It's going to be affecting the way we think about planetary defense mission design for many years to come, so the importance of the mission in that regard really can't be understated.”