Planetary Defense Success! NASA’s DART Data Validates Asteroid Kinetic Impact Method

Planetary Defense Success! NASA’s DART Data Validates Asteroid Kinetic Impact Method

• Since NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully impacted its target nearly five months ago, on September 26 — altering the orbit of the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos by 33 minutes — the DART team has been hard at work analyzing the data collected from the world’s first planetary defense test mission.
• The DART mission employed an asteroid-deflection technique known as a “kinetic impactor,” which in simplest terms means smashing a thing into another thing — in this case, a spacecraft into an asteroid. From the data, the DART investigation team, led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, found that a kinetic impactor mission like DART can be effective in changing the trajectory of an asteroid, a big step toward the goal of preventing future asteroid strikes on Earth.

January Weekly Current Affairs (National) Bitbank: When will all government vehicles older than 15 years be scrapped?

                         >> Download Current Affairs PDFs Here

                              Download Sakshi Education Mobile APP

Published date : 03 Mar 2023 03:55PM