Nasa DART mission - as it happened: Nasa successfully smashes spacecraft into asteroid in first major test

Nasa completes the first-ever planetary defence mission, an attempt to change the course of an asteroid by hitting it with a spacecraft

Asteroid strike: NASA craft successfully slams into distant space rock

Nasa‘s asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft successfully slammed into its target on Monday, 10 months after launch.

The test of the world’s first planetary defense system will determine how prepared we are to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth.

The cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, flew into the asteroid Dimorphos, about as large as a football stadium, and self-destructed around 7.14pm EDT (11pm GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.

The mission’s finale tested the ability of a spacecraft to alter an asteroid’s trajectory with sheer kinetic force, plowing into the object at high speed to nudge it astray just enough to keep our planet out of harm’s way.

It will be the first time humanity has changed the motion of an asteroid, or any celestial body. Nasa has a live stream of the event, which you can find at the top of our live blog below.

Key Points

• How to watch live
• When will crash happen? The key times

[27 September 2022 07:42 · Jon Kelvey]

Aftermath?

While the Atlas project has capture the ejecta flung from the asteroid Dimorphos by the impact of Nasa’s Dart mission, and more images are sure to follow from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, as well as the Italian space agency’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids, or LiciaCube, we may not know for some time just what become of Dart.

Nasa and Applied Physics Laboratory engineers say that while Dart was traveling fast at 14,400 miles per hour at the time of impact, that won’t be enough to vaporize the spacecraft, and bits and pieces could remain embedded in the crater it made on Dimorphos.

And just how big that crater is will depend on the consistency of Dimorphos. In the close up images Dart beamed just before it struck the asteroid, Dimorphos appeared be a loose pile of rubble. That could have allowed Dart to create a fairly large crater of more than 20 meters in diameter.

We may have to wait a bit for a full answer: The next large space craft to visit Dimorphos up close and personal isn’t scheduled to launch until 2024. That mission, the European Space Agency’s Hera, will visit Dimorphos in 2026.

[27 September 2022 08:22 · Jon Kelvey]

By the numbers

Nasa’s Dart successfully struck the small asteroid Dimorphos at 7.14pm EDT Monday evening, providing a basic proof of the concept of a kinetic impactor mission to divert hazardous asteroids away from the Earth.

The Dart spacecraft weighed about 1,260 pounds.

It’s not clear the mass of Dimorphos, but the asteroid is about 530 feet in diameter, or about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Dart slammed into  Dimorphos asteroid at 14,000 miles per hour. For comparison, a .50 caliber machine gun bullet may travel at around 2,000 miles per hour.

Dart traveled for 10 months to reach Dimorphos, striking the asteroid around 6.8 million miles from Earth.

Dart flew the final 56,000 miles of its journey entirely on its own — controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel Maryland were “hands off” for the spacecraft’s final approach, ready to jump in if something went wrong, but otherwise on their feet, watching the live feed of the rapidly growing face of Dimorphos from Dart’s camera like everyone else in the world.

[27 September 2022 09:00 · Jon Kelvey]

Virtual Telescope Project also captures Dart impact

Add to the Atlas Project the Virtual Telescope Project as one of those ground-based astronomy programs that has caught images of the Dart mission impact.

A network of robotic telescopes around the world open to professionals and amateurs alike, the Virtual Telescope Project images might be the first images of the Dart impact shared by non-professionals after the project tweeted an image sequence out on Monday evening.

[27 September 2022 10:28 · Andrew Griffin]

SpaceX congratulates Nasa on its success

SpaceX has congratulated Nasa on the success of the DART mission.

(Nasa is a client of SpaceX’s, using its rockets to take astronauts to the International Space Station, among other things.)

[27 September 2022 10:45 · Andrew Griffin]

When will we know whether DART successfully moved its asteroid?

Nasa did crash into the asteroid. But we might not know for absolutely sure how successful it was until 2026, when it will be visited by another spacecraft.

Thankfully, there’s some important times and work to be done in between.

You can read all about them here.

[27 September 2022 12:30 · Andrew Griffin]