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NASA is about to launch a spacecraft with a simple mission: crash into an asteroid at 15,000 miles per hour.

The mission, the Dual Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART, leaves Earth early Wednesday to test whether striking a spacecraft with an asteroid could drag it into a different orbit. If successful, the test’s results will come in handy when NASA and other space agencies need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and prevent a catastrophic impact.

When and how can I watch the launch?

The DART spacecraft is scheduled to take off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 01:20 ET (or 10:20 pm local time) Wednesday.

NASA plans to broadcast the launch live on its platform. Youtube channel It starts at 12:30 on Wednesday.

If bad weather around the Vandenberg launch site causes a delay, the next takeoff opportunity will be in approximately 24 hours.

Why does NASA crash into an asteroid?

NASA is crashing DART into an asteroid to test for the first time a planetary defense method that could one day save a city, or perhaps the entire planet, from a catastrophic asteroid impact.

“DART is like a remake of Bruce Willis’ ‘Armageddon,’ but it was purely fictional,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview.

If all goes as planned with DART, NASA will have an approved weapon in its planetary defense arsenal. If a different asteroid were on a collision course with Earth, the world’s space agencies would count on an asteroid missile like DART to launch the space rock.

How will the task work?

Once launched into space, the spacecraft will make nearly one full orbit around the sun every 11 hours 55 minutes before intersecting paths with Dimorphos, a soccer field-sized asteroid that closely surrounds a larger asteroid called Didymos. Astronomers refer to these two asteroids as a binary system, where one is a mini-moon relative to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years.

Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, and the mission is essentially target execution. The impact of DART will occur in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, about 6.8 million miles away.

Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, officially called the kinetic impactor, will autonomously orient itself directly at Dimorphos for a head-on collision at 15,000 miles per hour. An onboard camera will capture photos in real time up to 20 seconds before impact and send them back to Earth. A small satellite from the Italian Space Agency, deployed 10 days before the impact, will come as close as 34 miles to take an image of the asteroid every six seconds in the moments before and after DART’s impact.

How will NASA know if DART has been successful?

Telescopes on Earth will fix their lenses at the crash site, showing the two asteroids as tiny dots of reflected sunlight. To measure whether the impact of DART changed Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos, astronomers will track the time between one flicker of light (which indicates Dimorfos passing in front of Didymos) and another that shows Dimorfos orbiting behind Didymos.

If Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos extends by at least 73 seconds, DART will have successfully completed its mission. But mission managers expect the impact to extend the asteroid’s orbit for another 10 to 20 minutes.

Why can’t Earth blow up planet-threatening asteroids?

As in “Armageddon” and other sci-fi disaster movies, simply hitting dangerous space rocks with a nuclear weapon can create a field of more dangerous space rocks and multiply the dangers to Earth rather than eliminate them.

Still, a nuclear device, if used correctly, is one of the few conceptual tools in NASA’s planetary defense toolbox.

For any small and distant asteroid that could threaten Earth in the next few decades, a mission like DART “has a pretty good chance of getting the job done,” said Brent Barbee, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

“But if the asteroid is larger than that, or the warning period is shorter than that, then that’s where you transition from looking at kinetic impactors to nuclear devices,” said Mr. Barbee.

Astronomers and officials from various space agencies have simulated deflecting an asteroid from Earth by the power of nuclear explosions.

Other asteroid-destroying simulations have shown that nuclear explosives could be used to destroy some small asteroids two months after impact, posing little risk to Earth.

“Other than the physics of the device itself and how the device will interact with the asteroid, there are many challenging aspects of a nuclear mission,” said Mr Barbee.

The treaties banning the use of nuclear weapons and the Outer Space Treaty, the cornerstone of international space laws signed in the 1960s, prohibit the deployment or use of nuclear weapons in space.

This indicates that it would be a breach of treaty for any country to urgently use a nuclear-tipped spacecraft to fend off a killer asteroid. However, this legal impasse can be resolved with an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council.

Are there any asteroids heading towards us right now?

Headlines about asteroids passing near our planet are routine. But according to NASA, Earth must be protected from dangerous space rocks for the next century.

The agency keeps Database of near-Earth objects They come from about 28 million miles from Earth. The closest object to buzz by Earth over the next few days will be a 50 to 100-foot-wide asteroid that came within 511,246 miles on Thanksgiving. (This is about twice the distance from the moon.)

About 27,000 such objects have been tracked by NASA so far; that’s just 40 percent of the total amount the agency was tasked with finding in-house. Near Earth Object Observations Program.

NASA also Duty Risk Tableis a separate list of asteroids that have a higher chance of impacting Earth (although the chances remain extremely low). One of the celebrities on this list is Bennu, a pebbly, acorn-shaped asteroid about the size of a skyscraper. The probability of affecting the Earth between 2178 and 2290 is 0.057 percent.

NASA sent a spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx to Bennu last year. to collect rock samples worth a suitcase and bring them back to Earth in September 2023.

Of course, space always surprises people big and small. Forced landing on a Canadian woman’s bed or by broken windows during atmospheric reentry over a Russian city.