9/23/2023 0 Comments Asteroid watch live![]() But that means we need to have advance warning that one is headed our way. Mike Daly, a professor at York University's Lassonde School of Engineering in Toronto and a co-investigator on DART, said one of the most popular concepts is deflecting asteroids before they become a real threat. That's why space agencies like NASA and the European Space Agency have been trying to develop ways to deflect or nudge a PHA so that its orbit changes and poses no threat to Earth. There are small chunks of debris that burn up in our atmosphere as meteors bigger ones, like Chelyabinsk and then even bigger ones that can be catastrophic - all left over from the formation of our solar system. (, Yekaterina Pustynnikova/The Associated Press)īasically, Earth flies through a shooting gallery in space. The Chelyabinsk asteroid, which was roughly 20 metres in diameter, exploded over parts of Russia, injuring about 1,000 people. In February 2013, a meteorite contrail was seen over Chelyabinsk, Russia, a city close to the Ural Mountains located about 1,500 kilometres east of Moscow. WATCH LIVE | NASA feed of DART's impact with asteroid Dimorphos So why target a binary asteroid system rather than a single asteroid to see whether you can change its orbit around the sun? This means that scientists will know within roughly 12 hours whether they were successful. The goal isn't to knock Dimorphos out of orbit but rather to change its 12-hour orbit around Didymos by 10 minutes. ET on Monday, the refrigerator-sized spacecraft will plunge itself into Dimorphos - a moonlet that orbits its larger companion, Didymos - at roughly 6.6 km/s. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is testing a way in which a spacecraft may be able to nudge an asteroid on a collision course with Earth out of its orbit.Īt 7:14 p.m. ![]() National Aeronautics and Space Administration want to be prepared should there ever be a threat. The good news is that there's no need to panic: The asteroid, which is part of a binary - or two-bodied - system, is not a threat to our planet, and there are no known ones that are headed our way for at least the next 100 years. On Monday, in what seems like a scene out of a science fiction movie, NASA will slam a spacecraft into a distant asteroid to see whether it can nudge its orbit - all in an effort to test a way to protect Earth from any potential future threats. (UPDATE: NASA's DART spacecraft struck Asteroid Dimorphos on Monday.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |