DART Spacecraft Crashes Into Asteroid in NASA's First Test of Planetary Defense

Excerpt from NPR: That's just what NASA did on Monday evening, when a spacecraft headed straight into an asteroid, obliterating itself. In images streamed as the impact neared, the egg-shaped asteroid, called Dimorphos, grew in size from a blip on screen to have its full rocky surface come quickly into focus before the signal went dead as the craft hit, right on target. Events transpired exactly as engineers had planned, they said, with nothing going wrong. The impact was the culmination of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a 7-year and more than $300 million effort which launched a space vehicle in November of 2021 to perform humanity's first ever test of planetary defense technology. It will be about two months, scientists said, before they will be able to determine if the impact was enough to drive the asteroid slightly off course. "This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption. This isn't going to blow up the asteroid," Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said.

Excerpt from the Associated Press: A few hours later, SpaceX joined NASA in announcing that they’re studying the feasibility of sending a private mission to Hubble, potentially led by a billionaire, to raise the aging telescope’s orbit and extend its life. Telescopes on all seven continents watched as NASA’s Dart spacecraft slammed Monday into the harmless space rock, 7 million miles from Earth, in hopes of altering its orbit. Scientists won’t know the precise change until November; the demo results are expected to instill confidence in using the technique if a killer asteroid heads our way one day. "This is an unprecedented view of an unprecedented event," Johns Hopkins University planetary astronomer and mission leader Andy Rivkin said in a statement.

Excerpt from Space: The James Webb Space Telescope observes the universe in the infrared (heat-emitting wavelengths), while the Hubble Space Telescope is a specialist in detecting optical light, the kind that is visible to the human eye. By combining observations from the two telescopes, astronomers can learn a great deal about objects in the cosmos. The asteroid appeared to Webb and Hubble like a dot of light that suddenly brightened when DART arrived. In the hours following the crash, the cloud of material stirred from the surface spread away from that dot, gradually changing its shape. According to Hubble measurements, the brightness increased threefold in the wake of DART's impact, and this brightness persisted for more than eight hours.