NASA Live Broadcasts Humanity's First Asteroid Impact Experiment [Reading Science]

NASA to Live Stream DART Mission on 26th at 7:14 PM
High-Performance Cameras and CubeSats Capture Footage, Ground Telescopes Also Monitor

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] On the afternoon of the 26th (morning of the 27th Korean time), humanity's first asteroid collision experiment will be conducted in space near Jupiter, 11 million km away from Earth. It will be broadcast live online, allowing anyone to watch.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on the 25th that at 7:14 PM Eastern Time on the 26th, it will live stream the world's first experiment to test technology for defending Earth from asteroids and comets, called the "Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)."

The live broadcast can be viewed simultaneously on NASA's own TV channel, website, YouTube, and social network accounts. The live coverage will begin at 6 PM, about an hour before the collision, hosted by NASA's Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). From 8 PM, APL experts will provide commentary. The DART spacecraft is equipped with a high-performance telescope called DRACO and an automatic navigation system that captures the positions of Jupiter and its moon Europa to locate the target asteroid Didymos and fly toward it.

NASA explained, "This test will demonstrate whether the spacecraft can autonomously find the target asteroid and deliberately collide with it to change its trajectory enough to be observed by ground telescopes," adding, "It will provide data to better prepare for asteroids that pose a collision risk to Earth." They also stated that such trajectory changes will not pose any threat to Earth under any circumstances.

In November last year, NASA launched the approximately 610 kg DART spacecraft toward Dimorphos, a moon of the Didymos asteroid located near Jupiter, 11 million km from Earth. The collision on this day will test whether the trajectory can be altered. NASA expects that the 610 kg DART spacecraft will collide at a high speed of over 6 km/s, causing changes in the velocity and trajectory of the Dimorphos moon, and delaying the orbital period of its parent asteroid Didymos around the Sun by several minutes. The results will be measured by an Italian Space Agency CubeSat that accompanied DART but separated on the 15th. Additionally, the European Space Agency plans to launch the Hera spacecraft around 2024 for a detailed investigation.

Fragments of an asteroid that fell in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 (Photo by AP Yonhap News)

NASA is investing a total of 400 billion KRW in this experiment to address the threat posed by asteroids and comets orbiting near Earth. Approximately 20,000 asteroids and comets have been observed near Earth, of which about 2,000 are estimated to be over 150 meters in size, posing a potential collision threat. Most asteroids burn up in the atmosphere upon collision with Earth and do not pose a threat, but depending on their composition and size, they can cause significant destruction if they impact the surface. A representative example is the asteroid about 20 meters in diameter that exploded over Chelyabinsk in central Russia in 2013, devastating a small city and injuring over 1,500 people. About 65 million years ago, an estimated 10 km diameter asteroid collided with the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs and other mass extinctions on Earth.

However, the previously most threatening asteroid Apophis is now projected to have no collision risk with Earth for the next 100 years due to trajectory changes, and asteroid Bennu is expected to pass between Earth and the Moon in 2135 and approach Earth closely in 2181, but the collision probability is 1 in 2,700. Meanwhile, China, competing with the U.S. in space development, announced earlier this year that it will conduct a similar asteroid collision experiment around 2025-26.

Some view the U.S.-China "competition" as an attempt to weaponize asteroids, akin to the ultimate weapon "Meteor Swarm" in novels and games, by attaching propulsion devices to asteroids or deliberately changing their trajectories to collide with rival countries, effectively developing "space weapons." After the DART launch last year, The Debrief, a U.S. defense science and technology magazine, cited opinions from experts including Professor Thomas Bania of Boston University, stating, "Theoretically possible and would be a very effective and most lethal weapon." However, it also noted that the technology is still far from realization. Finding asteroids of appropriate size, transporting them at high speed near Earth, and accurately targeting and colliding with them require enormous costs, time, and are difficult with current technology.