NASA smashes spacecraft into asteroid seven million miles from Earth in ‘planetary defence’ trial
NASA has successfully smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid seven million miles from Earth.
The last image from the “vending machine-sized” collider showed the surface of the asteroid Dimorphos seconds before impact.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is the first-ever trial of a “planetary defence system”.
If the orbit of an asteroid can be changed by an object sent into space, humanity may have a chance at protecting itself from the kind of disaster that did it for the dinosaurs.
NASA, and the international team of astronomers working with them, chose their target carefully. To prove success, they needed an asteroid they can carefully monitor following the collision. They also needed to make sure any impact wouldn’t send a previously harmless piece of rock spiralling towards Earth.
They picked a pair of asteroids: the 780 metre-wide Didymos, and its moon Dimorphos which is 160m wide – about the size of the Great Pyramid.
DART approaches Dimorphos
Because Dimorphos is already safely orbiting its bigger partner, they can study the change in its behaviour following the collision.
Dimorphos is also a fairly common size of asteroid. While significantly smaller than a kilometres-wide “planet killer”, it’s of a type easily big enough to destroy a city.
“What Dart is going up there to prove is that we actually do have a system for kinetic deflection, nudging these away and nudging them off course,” says Betsy Congdon, DART’s mechanical systems engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.
If you’ve seen Hollywood disaster movies Deep Impact, Armageddon or more recently Don’t Look Up, prepare yourself for mild disappointment.
Despite smashing a half-tonne spacecraft into Dimorphos at close to 15,000 miles an hour, the effect on the asteroid is expected to be tiny – checking its speed by just 0.4mm per second.
But over time, that should have a measurable effect on its orbit. An array of land and space-based telescopes including NASA and ESA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, will all study the asteroid to measure the outcome of the test.
An illustration of NASA’s DART spacecraft on a collision course with the asteroid Dimorphos. Pic: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
Although it’s only a modest objective, the engineering involved was a major undertaking. Didymos is far too small and far away for DART to be steered into it from Earth. The probe had to use an autonomous guidance system to target the asteroid which is so small it was only visible in DART’s cameras about 50 minutes before impact. But the sat-nav seems to have worked perfectly.
The hope is, that a tiny nudge might be enough – if the impact is sufficiently far away – to deflect a future asteroid on collision course with Earth off target.
Astronomers estimate they have tracked the orbits of 95% of asteroids large enough to destroy life on Earth and none is currently on a collision course. But there are many smaller ones. According to NASA, no known asteroid larger than 140m across is likely to hit Earth in the next 100 years. But they think they’ve only found about 40% of them.
The NASA team celebrates as DART impacts Dimorphos
Around 66 million years ago a 10km-wide asteroid slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsular of Mexico. It left a crater 110 miles wide and 12 miles deep. The resulting change in the planet’s climate is thought to have caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. The impact wiped out 75% of animal and plant species on Earth – and famously ended the reign of flightless dinosaurs.
But even small space rocks can lead to a bad day on Earth. In 2013 a 20m-wide asteroid exploded as a meteorite over the city of Chelyabinsk in the Ural region of Russia. The blast was equivalent to 500 tonnes of TNT, about a third of the force of the Hiroshima bomb. While no deaths were reported there were more than 1,400 casualties, some of them serious.
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“An asteroid impact is the one kind of natural disaster that we could potentially see coming decades away,” says Prof Colin Snodgrass at the University of Edinburgh is a member of the DART team.
He’s helped set up a telescope in Kenya to monitor the impact from Earth. “If one [the size of Dimorphos] was ever discovered coming towards earth being able to do something about that seems like a very sensible technology to have.”
US
Donald Trump on day one: Pace of change ‘like nothing you’ve seen in history’, warns campaign official
Within hours of taking office, president-elect Donald Trump plans to begin rolling out policies including large-scale deportations, according to his transition team.
Sky News partner network NBC News has spoken with more than half a dozen people familiar with the executive orders that his team plans to enact.
One campaign official said changes are expected at a pace that is “like nothing you’ve seen in history”, to signal a dramatic break from President Joe Biden’s administration.
Mr Trump is preparing on day one to overturn specific policies put in place by Mr Biden. Among the measures, reported by sources close to the transition team, are:
• The speedy and large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants
• Ending travel reimbursement for military members seeking abortion care
• Restricting transgender service members’ access to gender-affirming care
But much of the first day is likely to focus on stopping illegal immigration – the centrepiece of Trump’s candidacy. He is expected to sign up to five executive orders aimed at dealing with that issue alone after he is sworn in on 20 January.
“There will without question be a lot of movement quickly, likely day one, on the immigration front,” a top Trump ally said.
“There will be a push to make a huge early show and assert himself to show his campaign promises were not hollow.”
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Donald Trump ally Matt Gaetz has withdrawn his name from consideration to be the next US attorney general.
But Mr Trump’s campaign pledges also could be difficult to implement.
Deporting people on the scale he wants will be a logistical challenge that could take years. Questions also remain about promised tax cuts.
Meanwhile, his pledge to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in just 24 hours would be near impossible.
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Even so, advisers based at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort or at nearby offices in West Palm Beach, Florida, are reportedly strategising about ending the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Following his decisive victory on 5 November, the president-elect has moved swiftly to build a cabinet and senior White House team.
As of Thursday, he had selected more than 30 people for senior positions in his administration, compared with just three at a similar point in his 2016 transition.
Stephen Moore, a senior economic adviser in Mr Trump’s campaign, told NBC News: “The thing to realise is Trump is no dummy.
“He knows he’s got two to three years at most to get anything done. And then he becomes a lame duck and we start talking about [the presidential election in] 2028.”
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