NASA will crash the spacecraft into the asteroid's surface in a matter of days. The collision was part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which first launched in November 2021.
Since its launch 10 months ago, DART has flown as far as 11 million km from Earth to the asteroid (65803) Didymos and its moonlet or small moon called Dimorphos. If all goes well, DART will crash into the Dimorphos surface on Monday (26/9) tomorrow.
The DART mission is NASA's first experiment to find out whether a collision like this could change the asteroid's direction. This method is expected to be a solution to protect Earth from dangerous asteroids such as the one that made the dinosaurs extinct.
While changing the asteroid's orbit from a distance of 11 million km sounds complicated and terrifying, the NASA team and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) believe the mission will succeed.
"What we can say right now is that all the subsystems on the spacecraft are green, they're healthy, they're working really well. We have a lot of fuel and we have a lot of power," said Edward Reynolds, DART Project Manager at JHUAPL. quoted from Space, Sunday (25/9/2022).
"We've done a lot of practice and some of the drills are very nominal. At this point, I can say the team is ready. Ground systems are ready, and the spacecraft is healthy and in time for Monday's collision."
DART's target is Dimorphos, a moonlet with a diameter of 170 meters. Similar to the moon, this moonlet surrounds a larger asteroid, namely Didymos, which has a length of 780 m.
Don't expect a collision between DART and Dimorphos to result in a huge Armageddon-style explosion. The 589 kg spacecraft will nudge and provide a slight push toward Dimorphos which NASA believes could change its orbital period to alter its gravitational effect on Didymos, and then change the trajectory of both.
The collision itself will be executed on Monday at 19.14 Eastern United States time or 06.14 WIB. Approaching the second of the collision, the engineers on the DART team will work hard to ensure this small plane stays on its trajectory.
Interestingly, this desperate mission can be watched via a livestream provided by NASA. There are two ways to watch this mission, namely via a livestream on NASA TV or a live feed from the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) camera.
NASA has promised a spectacular view of the time DART crashes into Dimorphos which will all be broadcast. When will you be able to watch a NASA plane crash into an asteroid?