It's not quite "Armageddon," but a planned NASA mission next month could be a significant step in the agency developing its plans to protect the planet from a hazardous asteroid.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or "DART," which is scheduled to launch on Nov. 23 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Southern California. DART's mission is to test the kinetic impactor technique, in which the agency launches a high-speed spacecraft into an asteroid’s path to change its motion.
"We've crashed spacecraft on the moon and on a comet, but we've never tried anything like this to try to knock a celestial body off course," Bing Quock, Assistant Director of the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, explained to KCBS Radio’s Eric Thomas and Patti Reising.
"This is gonna be very interesting," he added.
DART's target is a binary near-Earth asteroid named Didymos. Specifically, its 160-meter "moonlet," or secondary body.
That's not quite as big as the Texas-sized asteroid that threatened Earth in "Armageddon," the 1998 Michael Bay film in which Bruce Willis, playing a deep-core oil driller, trains a group of astronauts to drill a hole in the celestial body in order to detonate a nuclear bomb inside of it. But Didymos' moonlet is similar in size to the kind of asteroid that would pose a threat to Earth, according to NASA.
Willis, nor anyone else, will fly the unmanned spacecraft. Quock compared DART's size to that of a washing machine or a kitchen range, and its high speed (nearly 15,000 miles per hour) is expected to be enough to deflect the moonlet off its orbit around Didymos’ main body by a fraction of a percent.
That’s the plan, at least, but Quock explained a lot of variables remain.
"Is it solid rock, or is it just a pile of rubble? How fast is it moving?" Quock said of what astronomers are still trying to determine. "We have to know exactly where it is. And that's something that astronomers are really trying to keep track of right now because to find out whether this has an effect at all, if we've deflected it or not, we have to know where we expect it to be if nothing changes."
NASA said it anticipates DART making contact late in September 2022, when Didymos is within 7 million miles of Earth. Quock said the asteroid doesn’t get any closer than 4 million miles, and astronomers anticipate it will be a "long, long time" before an asteroid big enough to fear will be on a collision course with Earth.
Think of DART, then, as a proof of concept.
"You need to be able to figure out what you need to do," Quock said of planning for potential planetary defense. "You've got to build your spacecraft, and we don't know what this one is going to do. … We don't know what's gonna happen when it hits this asteroid. We've yet to learn that. So once we find out more and more of this kind of information, we'll be better prepared to deal with a potential hazard from an incoming asteroid."
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