The DART mission to knock an asteroid off course just helped make Earth a little bit safer
Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of planetary science, added: “Let’s all just kind of take a moment and soak this in. For the first time ever, NASA has changed the orbit of a [celestial] object. The whole world has been watching this since DART impacted Dimorphos two weeks ago.”
People sit at their workstations within the Mission Operations Center during the Double Asteroid Redirection Test Technology Media Workshop Telecon Briefing and tour at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, on Sept. 12, 2022.Just what the implications of the DART results are for planetary defense is yet to be determined. The principle has been proven—that it’s possible to change the velocity of a cosmic object—and that is a good start.
The good news is, NASA is doing a pretty good job of finding those rocks and tracking their trajectory. The space agency’skeeps a running tally of asteroids that fly within 45 million km of Earth. That’s considered close enough that even a slight change in their trajectory could put us in their path. According to CNEOS’ census, there are 855 such asteroids measuring at least 1 km , and more than 10,000 that are at least 140 m across.
A television at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, captures the final images from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test as it smashes into the asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26, 2022.Protecting the planet from those kinds of objects means not only finding them, but finding them early—years before they come close to Earth, so that there’s time to get a deflector spacecraft out to an intercept point and divert them in time.
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