Earth may be safe from asteroid 99942 Apophis for the next 100-years, but the NASA DART mission successfully crashed into asteroid moonlet Dimorphos today after 10-months of flying in space. Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland confirmed the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT.
Asteroid moonlet Dimorphos is basically a small body measuring 530-feet (160-meters) in diameter and it orbits a larger, 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid called Didymos. Thankfully, neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth, although this mission’s one-way trip confirmed that NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid to deflect it, also known as kinetic impact.
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DART’s success provides a significant addition to the essential toolbox we must have to protect Earth from a devastating impact by an asteroid. This demonstrates we are no longer powerless to prevent this type of natural disaster. Coupled with enhanced capabilities to accelerate finding the remaining hazardous asteroid population by our next Planetary Defense mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor, a DART successor could provide what we need to save the day,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer.
