![]() Located in the constellation Auriga, the cluster of stars lies some 4,200 light years from Earth. With those measurements in hand, the DART team could accurately move the spacecraft to point DRACO at objects of interest, such as Messier 38 (M38), also known as the Starfish Cluster, that DART captured in another image on Dec. The DART navigation team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California used the stars in the image to determine precisely how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera is pointed relative to the spacecraft. Taken about 2 million miles (11 light seconds) from Earth - very close, astronomically speaking -the image shows about a dozen stars, crystal-clear and sharp against the black backdrop of space, near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect. 7, the spacecraft popped open the circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic camera and, to everyone's glee, streamed back the first image of its surrounding environment. ![]() Because components of the spacecraft's telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious. The actual acceleration? Thirty-two minutes.Just two weeks after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has opened its "eye" and returned its first images from space - a major operational milestone for the spacecraft and DART team.Īfter the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift to minus 80 degrees C in space, scientists and engineers at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, held their breath in anticipation. To be considered a success, mission planners determined that the orbit of Dimorphos would have to speed up by at least 73 seconds. The mission-which was a first test of the kind of asteroid deflection defense that could be used to protect the Earth from an incoming space rock-worked spectacularly. Rather, all of it is cause for celebration of the success of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test ( DART), which last September successfully crashed a small spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, to see how much it could change the speed of its orbit around its parent asteroid Didymos. The asteroid will make nine more potentially close passes from Feb. 14, 2046 will not be the only time 2023 DW swings by our way. That’s 18 times farther than the moon is from Earth.īut 2023 DW’s distance could change, as NASA itself admits, as further observations of the space rock are conducted and its trajectory is more finely calculated. So where does 2023 DW rank? For now, NASA puts it at a one, indicating “a routine discovery in which a pass near the Earth is predicted that poses no unusual level of danger.” For now, that pass near the Earth will be no closer than 7.5 million km (4.65 million mi.), according to NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids website. NASA calculates the risk a near-Earth object poses of colliding with Earth on something known as the Torino scale, a zero to 10 ranking of the likelihood of impact, with zero representing no danger or, a risk “so low as to be effectively zero.” Five on the scale indicates “A close encounter posing a serious, but still uncertain risk, of regional devastation.” Ten-which the dinosaurs could tell you about if they weren’t all dead-indicates that “a collision is certain, capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it.” 15, 2013, a projectile roughly half the size of 2023 DW exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring 1,500 people and damaging more than 7,000 buildings. The bad news is that a swimming pool sized piece of space rubble can still do a lot of damage. It’s nowhere near the 12 km (7.5 mi.) wide asteroid-more than half the length of Manhattan-that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. For starters, there’s the size of 2023 DW to consider-which is not that big, but not that small either.
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