Can we stop an asteroid from hitting the earth? , globalnews.ca

NASA spent more than US$300 million on a spacecraft so that they could break it into pieces last year.

It sounds unbelievable, but it was done in the name of protecting the planet.

The mission was part of a larger effort to find a way to protect our planet from an asteroid that could end life on Earth.

If this sounds excessive, consider that meteors are regularly bombarding our planet. According to NASA, it is estimated that more than 6,000 hits occur each year.

They start out as asteroids in the far reaches of our Solar System but their trajectories hurtle them towards Earth as meteors, where if they avoid entering the atmosphere, they land as meteoroids.

Most are small and not very destructive but one day we may hit a big one and if it is more than a kilometer wide, it will have disastrous consequences.

For years, NASA, with the help of 28 countries, has been working on a planetary defense system aimed at keeping us safe from what could destroy it.

The most recent step in planetary defense is a program called DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirect Test. This was the first mission of its kind. The concept was to transfer an asteroid by slamming a spacecraft.

“We know that an asteroid or comet that hurtled the Earth millions of years ago caused the dinosaurs to become extinct. But we want to be able to do something about that moving into the future,” Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Near Baltimore, MD explains Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at the lab and coordination lead on the DART probe team.

The target for DART was a double asteroid system, Chabot explains.

Both the asteroids are about 11 million kilometers away from the Earth. The larger asteroid Didymos is about 780 meters in diameter. It has a moon that revolves around it called Dimorphos. Its diameter is about 160 meters.

On November 23, 2021, NASA launched the Dart spacecraft from California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, sending it on its long journey to Dimorphos.

The spacecraft was guided to the asteroid by a system called SMART Nav, which stands for Small-Body Maneuver Autonomous Real-Time Navigation.

Chabot told Global News ‘The New Reality’ that it was a big challenge for the spacecraft to hit something so far away. The team needed to develop something that would enable the spacecraft to steer itself, as it would be too far away, and traveling too fast, for scientists to guide it remotely from Earth. Thanks to the Smart Nav system, the craft found its way to Dimorphos using technology, not just a hope and a prayer.

“It had to be smart enough to tell the difference between these two asteroids within the last hour of the mission and then autonomously command its thrusters to make sure it detects Dimorphos and hits Dimorphos head-on.” Is.”

The team chose an asteroid that was not a threat to Earth.

The spacecraft, whose body is the size of a vending machine, guided itself on a collision course with the asteroid, which is about the size of a small football field.

The success of the mission was to be measured by whether the accident changed Dimorphos’ path through space.

“The goal of DART was definitely about asteroid deflection, not asteroid destruction. The idea is that this little nudge will make a big difference in its position over time,” Chabot says.

Equipped with a camera, the spacecraft provided NASA Mission Control with real-time images as it moved into space for impact.

And looking back, scientists say it worked.

“It successfully collided with an asteroid on September 26, 2022, becoming humanity’s first demonstration of asteroid deflection,” says Chabot. “It’s very exciting that we have taken this first step in protecting the planet.”

In fact, it turns out that the DART spacecraft did a better job than anticipated. Through observations from various telescopes around the world, the DART team was able to compare the orbit that Dimorphos followed before and after the impact. Scientists have discovered that Dimorphos’ orbit changed significantly after the collision.

Of course, all of the important work that NASA does would not be possible without the knowledge gained from studying meteorites that hit Earth.

“These different materials are going to react differently. If you use a kinetic impactor like DART, where you crash a spacecraft into it, you can see that react differently depending on the composition of the material.” Where is the reactant, ”says Chabot.

golden meteorite

Here’s one of the thousands of meteorites expected to land on Earth in October 2021, crashing through a roof in Golden, BC.

Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her bed when she heard a loud crash. “I was so scared. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared of anything in my entire life. I jumped out of bed, turned on the light, and all I could see was a hole in my ceiling.

There was a rock on her bed, a few centimeters away from where she was sleeping. Had it fallen on him it could have been fatal.

At first she didn’t understand who she was dealing with. “I didn’t know how special it was because it was just rock at the time. And then later, we found out it was a meteorite.

The meteorite is now officially named: The Golden Meteorite.

There is a lot of interest in meteorites from all over the world. So far, Hamilton has provided a piece of the space rock to the team at Western University in London, Ontario, for research.

Hamilton is still trying to figure out what she wants to do with the rest of it. “I haven’t decided yet what to do with it. There are a lot of organizations out there that want it.”

Canadian Meteorite Collection

Chris Hurd is one of those people who would love to investigate the golden meteorite.

He is a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He is also the curator of Canada’s largest university-based meteorite collection.

More than 350 space rocks are housed in the Meteorite Museum at U of A.

Global News’ The New Reality got an up-close look at the collection as well as the cameras Heard uses to track shooting stars.

Hurd says he can figure out where in the universe meteorites come from based on their trajectory in the sky.

This is important knowledge if we are going to figure out where the next potentially deadly asteroid might come from.

Swarm was able to capture images of the meteor while it was on its journey home to Hamilton.

He says that western Canada is a particularly good place to watch for meteors and find meteorites.

“We’re in the Prairies, it’s relatively flat,” and that means good sight lines. There is also the surrounding nature, he explains. “Since the land use in this part of the world is mostly farming and animal husbandry, if something falls, the chances are actually better to reach out and find it on the surface and collect it.”

Hurd says he is working on ways to better preserve the meteorites he has acquired, including “things like keeping them cold and keeping them out of Earth’s atmosphere.”

Recently he was sent part of a meteorite weighing 15.2 tonnes that fell in Somalia. And he says what he discovered was quite surprising.

“I discovered that there were some unusual-looking minerals inside, actually — minerals that I couldn’t identify,” Hurd says. “And so, when we looked deeper into it, we realized that we found three new minerals, minerals that have never been found before in this particular meteorite.”

Such knowledge of what meteorites are made of and where they come from is important for future asteroid-carrying missions.

Hurd says the more we know about potentially hazardous asteroids, both in terms of their physical properties and their composition, as well as where they come from, the more prepared we will be.

“It really buys us time and understanding when something potentially dangerous might be too big.”

After all, the DART mission is just the beginning of what NASA hopes for in the future if we find our Earth in peril.

According to Chabot, we still have a long time to figure it out. “You can actually have a warning time of 100 years. So you’re in a position where you can do something like DART, where you can give it a tiny little signal many years in advance and avoid a collision with the planet.” Can