The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and European Space Agency team-up together for a new mission, to shoot an asteroid with a spacecraft. The new mission is called The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).
The two space agencies are planning to launch the mission in 2022.
DART mission will be a part of the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission, a mission that is headed by international agencies such as NASA, ESA, DLR, OCA, and JHU/APL.
The goal of AIDA is to complete a DART test, meaning a spacecraft will smash an asteroid and the agencies will measure the impact.
AIDA's first mission will be the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM), a mission expected to be launch by 2020. For AIM, mission is to target the binary asteroid system of Didymos by 2020. The European Space Agency will head the mission. Didymos is an 800-meter wide main body orbited by a smaller asteroid informally referred to as "Didymoon."
According to ESA's Ian Carnelli, "AIM will be watching closely as DART hits Didymoon […] In the aftermath, it will perform detailed before-and-after comparisons on the structure of the body itself, as well as its orbit, to characterize DART's kinetic impact and its consequences. […] The results will allow laboratory impact models to be calibrated on a large-scale basis, to fully understand how an asteroid would react to this kind of energy. This will shed light on the role the ejecta plume will play – a fundamental part in the energy transfer and under scientific debate for over two decades."
This will be the first time that a vehicle or a spacecraft will attempt to collide with a celestial body.
via Science - Google News http://ift.tt/1MIVMYt
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment