Hi everyone! Last week, NASA launched a new planetary defense tactic: asteroid smashing. NASA deployed a Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) to hit an asteroid to test its ability to protect Earth from extraterrestrial threats. Although this sounds like the premise of a sci-fi movie, it really is real life. And the superheroes who defended Earth on this mission are none other than Johns Hopkins physicists!
Two asteroids about 7,000,000 miles from Earth (over 112 million kilometers!) were the targets in this situation in order for NASA to see if they could successfully detect and destroy any potential threats by using the DART. They completed this mission by using the physics we have seen in Physics 111!
NASA guided the 570-kilogram box-shaped spacecraft into space, but things got intense through the final 90, 000 kilometers of space when the DART came into the orbit of the bigger asteroid, Dimorphos. The DART's velocity increased until 6268 m/s when it crashed into the asteroid and slightly slowed the asteroid’s orbital speed. Smashing an asteroid was as easy as solving a high speed projectile motion problem!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/science/dart-nasa-asteroid-dimorphos-contact.html?smid=url-share
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