DOOMSDAY: Are We Ready?
By: Laurie Smith
Don’t Look Up
Ever since mankind began leaving graffiti on cave walls, we have been afraid of “stuff.” Stuff that eats us. Stuff that makes us sick. Stuff that burns us, drowns us, freezes us, or is otherwise fatal.
For example, let’s examine outer space. Ever since humans realized that a big, honkin’ rock fell out of the sky and wiped-out the dinosaurs, taking nearly all the other living things on our planet with them, we have obsessed over “Death by Stoning: Extinction Event Edition.”
This becomes the fuel of nightmares. But here’s the thing: it also becomes the fuel of invention.
For years, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been watching the skies for unexpected visitors. Many people assume this refers to the (alleged) Area 51 variety. However, the agency has been scanning for asteroids and other Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). In 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke apart and crashed in spectacularly into Jupiter. The images returning to Earth were dramatic enough that even politicians got the picture. According to the NASA website, “Congress directed NASA to develop a plan to discover, characterize and catalog potentially hazardous NEOs larger than 1 kilometer in size. In 1998, NASA formally established a NEO program in response to the congressional directive to discover at least 90 percent of 1-kilometer-sized NEOs within 10 years. NASA fulfilled this mandate by 2010.”
Shortly after an undetected NEO asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February of 2013—causing tens of millions of dollars in damage—NASA reorganized its NEO Observations Program into the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). This new office expanded on the original program with added mandates to mitigate threats from NEOs, as well as coordinate between national and global emergency response agencies in the event of an impact.
Up to this point, there has been little comfort in knowing that we could spot a killer asteroid within hours, days, or even a few weeks before its inevitable crash into Earth. It isn’t as if we could sidestep the planet out of the way or evacuate to some other, safer dirtball in space.
This is where NASA’s “DART” comes into play.
So, What’s a DART?
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was NASA’s speculative answer to the question a few people have been asking: “Why should we even bother to look at what the Universe is throwing at us?” In true Socratic fashion, the answer is another question: “What if we could deflect space rocks and other debris before it reaches us, by crashing into an asteroid with something, like, say—a spacecraft? Could we make it move?”
NASA launched the DART spacecraft along with the Italian Space Agency’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) in a combined payload on November 23, 2021 at 10:21 p.m. PST. Liftoff took place from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California using the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle.
The goal would be to crash the DART spacecraft into a small asteroid, affecting its orbit around a larger asteroid by at least 72 seconds. The target asteroid system was specially chosen for the mission. No matter how absurdly right or wrong the mission goes, there would be no way we could inadvertently cause disaster for ourselves. (Typical of famous last words, we may find this comes back to haunt us in a few decades or centuries.) The LICIACube would be there to record the event, much like the cousin who always manages to capture the drunken “Hey, y’all! Watch this…!” moments at large, Southern family picnics.
Did it Work?
On September 26, 2022 at 7:14 p.m. EDT, the DART spacecraft impacted Dimorphos, the smaller asteroid of the Didymos System, at roughly 14 thousand miles per hour. According to an October 11, 2022 NASA press release, the space agency was originally defining success as altering the asteroid’s orbital movement by 72 seconds. Scientists have since established that Dimorphos’ orbit has shortened by nearly 32 minutes, which is more than 25 times that. A thirty-two minute change may not sound like much. But when an object is moving at a rate of multiple miles per second, that can mean a deflection of thousands of miles. Perhaps enough to miss us entirely. Which is, of course, the primary goal.
So, What’s Next?
Scientists from around the world will be studying the footage that “cousin” LICIACube posted to social media, as well as images gathered from telescopes the world over. In addition, several long-range probe missions will study asteroid fields on the far side of our solar system, giving us new insight into those regions where they orbit. It is almost certain that there will be more missions to different asteroids which will test different models of deflection as time goes on.
For more information on NASAs Planetary Defense and other media on the DART Mission, visit these links:
styler8 • November 7, 2022