Hey, want to watch NASA beat up an asteroid?
NASA successfully launched a spacecraft into an asteroid last night in an attempt to change its orbit
Aux Features Asteroid
NASA has just accomplished something extraordinary. Last night, as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) program, it smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, potentially altering the course of such an object for the first time in our species’ history. It also, we are happy to say, filmed the event from the perspective of the craft, which means we get to enjoy not just the knowledge that humanity’s capable of such incredible feats, but also the simple pleasure of watching a piece of sophisticated technology beat up an asteroid.
Mashable’s Elisha Sauers detailed the test in an article that calls the Dimorphos asteroid collision “the first time in history humans have attempted to alter the path of an asteroid.” The now-destroyed craft, which wasn’t named because, as Sauers puts it, it was “like an animal raised for slaughter,” was about “the size of a vending machine” and smacked into Dimorphos “at 14,000 mph.”
The video tweeted out by NASA is taken from a feed that “almost unfolded in real-time, with perhaps just a 45-second delay, delivering an extreme closeup of an event happening 6.8 million miles away.” It shows Dimorphos’ surface getting closer and closer until, at the last moment, the feed cuts like a found footage horror movie’s conclusion as the craft meets its end by rapidly headbutting the asteroid.
DART is part of NASA’s planetary defense work and is meant to help us figure out how to swat away asteroids in the rare event that they do a better job of threatening our planet than our species is capable of on our own. “… whether DART was truly a triumph, able to shove the asteroid off its trajectory, won’t be known for some time,” Sauers writes. “It could take up to two months to confirm.”
Its success would be a good thing for humanity’s long-term safety, though it will also, we regret to inform all skyward-looking oil drillers, potentially mean that the plot of Armageddon will never play out in real life.
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16 Comments
For some perspective, an asteroid the size of Dimorphos would obliterate New York City and cause 7.7 magnitude earthquakes out for about 1,000 miles.
The phrasing of “poses no threat to Earth” just makes it sound hilariously like something out of Futurama. I totally understand why we did this (and I approve), but from a certain angle it sounds like we did it out of spite or something.
Dimorphos knows what it did.
Came here for this
Let this be a lesson to the other asteroids.
Yeah, stop eyeing my wife you damn asteroids!
Yeah, now all we’ve done is piss off these guys.
Happy to see that this is seemingly going to work, but on the off chance it doesn’t, can we go ahead and send Ben Affleck into space? Y’know…just in case.
Wouldn’t it be easier to train an astronaut to be Ben Affleck?
Since it looks in the final moments exactly like a dragon’s egg, I’m worried that we may have inadvertently awakened an ancient evil here.
My immediate thought: “Great, we just poked the outer-space dragons.”
I watched this live and was astonished not just by the magnitude of what NASA accomplished, but also by how far to the edge of my seat it pushed me. Seeing those asteroids resolve themselves from pixels to blurry blobs to detailed rock-encrusted heavenly bodies in the space of a couple of minutes was absolutely mesmerizing.
Same – I had seen a headline about it earlier in the day and just happened to click the “watch live” link in time to tune in about five minutes before impact.Those nerds were PUMPED.
That’s no rock-encrusted heavenly body. That’s a space station!
That was the whitest, most socially awkward room of physical congratulations I have ever witnessed. So much confuse.