NASA’s DART spacecraft succeeds in a planned collision with the asteroid Dimorphos
The spacecraft called the Double Asteroid Orientation Test (DART) of the US Aerospace Agency (NASA) successfully crashed into the asteroid, approximately 11 million kilometers from the earth, as planned.
🚀 NASA'nın DART uzay aracı, dünyadan yaklaşık 11 milyon kilometre uzaktaki Dimorphos asteroidine planlandığı şekilde başarılı bir çarpma gerçekleştirdi https://t.co/gGxXeP69ac pic.twitter.com/JgaiuweGCG
— ANADOLU AJANSI (@anadoluajansi) September 27, 2022
In a live broadcast from NASA’s website and all social media accounts, DART, launched into space to test the world’s defense technology against potential asteroid or comet dangers, hit the asteroid Dimorphos, which poses no threat to the world, just in time.
The DART spacecraft pushed a small piece (about 170 meters in diameter) called Dimorphos of the double asteroid, which it was locked in an autonomous position, to deflect it from its orbit at about 23,000 kilometers per hour.
The experimental collision, which was carried out for the first time to measure and prevent celestial objects that may pose a potential threat in the future, was also recorded by the Hubble, Webb and Lucy telescopes with the camera placed on DART, while those who watched the collision live were able to watch the images with a delay of approximately 45 seconds.
“This was humanity’s first attempt to change the course of a celestial body,” the NASA official said in a live broadcast after the planned collision, led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, which developed DART. Expressions of joy were heard.
The successful trial proved that a spacecraft can collide with a deliberately targeted asteroid to alter its trajectory in a way that can be measured using ground-based telescopes.
