Asteroid thing to do to19 avert Armageddon...
Irish prof part of space crash mission
AN Irish professor involved in a mission that saw a spacecraft crash into an asteroid said technology can prevent a small asteroid hitting Earth.
Ten months after launch, NASA’S asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft neared a planned impact with its target yesterday in a test of the world’s first planetary defence system, designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth.
The cubeshaped “impactor” vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to fly into the asteroid Dimorphos and selfdestruct.
The asteroid was about as large as a football stadium, and was travelling 11 million kilometres from Earth.
The impact was due to take place last night and will test the ability of a spacecraft to alter an asteroid’s trajectory with sheer force.
It will plough into the object at high speed to nudge it astray just enough to keep our planet out of harm’s way.
Prof Alan Fitzsimmons is an expert in the observation and measurement of asteroids and comets orbiting the s u n and is a member of the NASA DART Investigation Team.
The Irish scientist said: “I’ve been waiting 20
years to see a planetary defence test to be performed.
“This will give us our first proof that we have the technology to prevent a small asteroid hitting Earth.
“Asteroids the size of Dimorphos or larger hit our planet only once every 35,000 years or so, but we only know what a small fraction of them are. So one could be heading our way in the near future, and smaller asteroids hit us much more frequently.”
Prof Fitzsimmons has supported the mission by making telescopic observations of the Dimorphos/ Didymos system, including analysing telescope data of the impact itself.
He said: “Once the DART and follow-up Hera mission have been successfully completed, we’ll have a much better idea how to protect ourselves against a catastrophic impact.”
DART was launched by a Spacex rocket in November last year and made most of its voyage under the guidance of NASA’S flight directors.
Control was due to be handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation
system in the final hours of the journey.
Last night’s planned impact was due to be monitored in real time from the mission operations centre at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The celestial target is an asteroid “moonlet” about 170 meters in diameter that orbits a parent asteroid five times larger called Didymos as part of a binary pair with the same name, the Greek word for twin.
Neither object presents any actual threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test cannot create a new existential hazard by mistake.