NASA’s fancy-pants asteroid missions can save Earth AND reveal its history
Let’s go Armageddon on these asteroids
Asteroid strikes
Not all asteroids are confined to a belt. Some wander throughout the Solar System on orbits which can bring them into close proximity with planets like Earth. The impact hazard of asteroids is relatively well-publicized, particularly after theChelyabinsk meteorwhich exploded over a Russian town in 2013, injuring over 1,000 people and causing extensive damage.
At some point in late November, Nasa will attempt to launch DART. This spacecraft will attempt to intercept65803 Didymos, a near-Earth asteroid with a small moon of its own, called Dimorphos. The approximately 170 metre sized moon will be struck by the 500kg DART spacecraft with an impact velocity of 6.6 kilometres per second. The objective is to observe a change in orbital motion of Dimorphos about Didymos as a result of the collision.
This will be accomplished by a follow up mission launched by ESA, calledHera, which will reach Didymos in 2026 and perform a detailed survey of Dimorphos’ orbit. By measuring the change in orbit of the little moon, scientists and engineers will be able to better calculate how much energy is required to alter the orbit of a hypothetical future threatening asteroid. It must be stressed that, currently, there are no known future asteroid-Earth collisions, but clearly it is best to prepare for such an eventuality.
There are even more asteroid missions in the near future. In August 2022, Nasa will launchPsycheto visit its namesake asteroid,16 Psyche, which orbits in the main belt. This peculiar world is over 200km across and contains a lot of metal. So much in fact that it is believed to be the exposed core of a once growing planet in the early Solar System, which suffered a catastrophic impact at some point in the distant past.
This collision sheared off the outer layers of the fledgling planet, leaving the exposed metal-rich core behind. If this theory turns out to be correct, then it will be the first time that scientists have had a chance to directly observe a planetary core.
This slew of upcoming missions, and many recentprevious ones, represent something of a golden era in asteroid research. Asteroids still have many stories to tell, hold vasteconomic potentialas mining resources, and pose an obvious danger to civilization on Earth.
This article byGareth Dorrian, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Space Science,University of Birminghamis republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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