NASA Illustration of the DART spacecraft on final approach to the Didymos binary asteroid system with the Italian LICIACube observing the impact.
The DART spacecraft is on its way to slam into asteroid moon Dimorphos, to change its orbital period around the sun ever so slightly. We will be able to monitor the results vs simulation from Earth telescopes. And this is how we will save the world. Once a meteor is on final approach to Earth, it is too late already (unlike the movie treatments). Instead, the challenge is to find future threats decades earlier, and nudge their velocity ever so slightly, so that their trajectory, integrated over years, misses Earth entirely. The challenge is one of early detection, and n-body simulation over decades, something that Moore’s Law has only recently made tractable. This is why I became a founding donor to B612, to develop the computational methods for tracking the busy cosmos of Near Earth Objects to figure out who needs to get rear-ended. The defense is simple if we detect all future threats in advance. TLDR; from 10 years of B612 posts: Survival is computational. Intelligence allows us to see the future.
“If DART succeeds… NASA and other space agencies will team up to develop a fleet of planetary defense spacecraft that can intentionally redirect asteroids that threaten Earth, preventing catastrophic impacts like the one that likely wiped out 75% of species and virtually all nonavian dinosaurs around 66 million years ago.
Given that CEO Elon Musk’s entire motivation for founding the company and pursuing spaceflight was to help make humanity multiplanetary and protect against mass-extinction events like those that befell the dinosaurs, it’s only fitting that SpaceX ultimately won NASA’s DART launch competition and sent the DART spacecraft on its way to Dimorphos as part of the first true planetary defense test in history.” — today’s news
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