Space Coast (FL) Daily reports that NASA’s DART mission “was recognized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics with the organization’s newest award the AIAA Award for Aerospace Excellence at the AIAA Awards Gala, Thursday, May 18, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.” DART was honored with the Award for Aerospace Excellence “which celebrates a unique program or mission in the aerospace community deserving timely recognition, namely for marking ‘humanity’s first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object by a team of protectors of our home planet.’”
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Tag: DART
DART Mission Shows that Dimorphos Has No Water-Ice
SPACE reports that six months following the DART mission slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid, Dimorphos has given NASA scientists time to clarify a profile of the asteroid. Careful scrutiny of the debris “from the impact of NASA’s DART mission into Dimorphos has not found any evidence for water-ice on the asteroid, nor the residue of thruster fuel from the spacecraft, new results from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) show.” However, the data from the MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) “instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile does indicate differences in the size of particles in the debris, and show how the polarization of the light from the asteroid changed.”
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NASA’s DART Hailed as Viable Planetary Defense Test
Aviation Week reports that NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) “has been deemed a ‘first successful step’ in demonstrating the viability of a kinetic impact strategy for diverting a near-Earth object, according to findings from five research efforts published March 1 in the journal Nature.”
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NASA to Launch DART Planetary Defense Mission November 23
CNN reports that NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will “lift off at 10:20 p.m. PT on November 23 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.” After launching in November, “NASA will test its asteroid deflection technology in September 2022 to see how it impacts the motion of a near-Earth asteroid in space.” The Daily Mail (UK) reports that NASA “said on Monday that its mission to deflect an asteroid in deep space using a spacecraft is targeting a late November launch.”
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More Info (Daily Mail)
DART Mission Successfully Crashes into Asteroid
The Conversation reports that NASA “has crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to push the rocky traveler off its trajectory.” The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully collided into Dimorphos’ center. The image “taken at 11 seconds before impact and 42 miles (68 kilometers) from Dimorphos shows the asteroid centered in the camera’s field of view.”
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Video
NASA’s Official Broadcast of DART’s Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos, September 26, 2022
(NASA; YouTube)
NASA to Crash DART into Asteroid Monday
SPACE reported that on Monday “at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT), NASA will intentionally crash a spacecraft into an asteroid – and you might be able to see it live.” The test mission “is targeting the moonlet Dimorphos, a small celestial body orbiting the asteroid Didymos about 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) away from Earth.” The livestream “from the telescopes will begin on Monday at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT) on the Virtual Telescope Project’s website.”
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NASA’s DART One Month Away from Impact
SPACE reported that NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) “will crash into the asteroid Dimorphos at approximately 15,000 mph (24,000 kph) in an attempt to alter the celestial body’s trajectory around a larger asteroid called Didymos” on September 26 at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT). The DART mission is “a test to see if ‘kinetic impact technology’ would work to deflect any potential Earth-bound asteroids.” Members of the public “will be able to view live coverage of the impact on NASA TV, NASA’s website, and NASA social media pages beginning at 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) on Sept. 26.”
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