Here’s how to watch NASA’s DART spacecraft hit an asteroid today
A NASA spacecraft is set to collide with an asteroid Monday and the space agency is inviting spectators to watch.
The DART spacecraft, which launched 10 months ago, will hit the rock around 7:14 p.m. with a livestream starting on NASA’s website at 6 p.m.
The mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, will attempt to deflect Dimorphos, a moon that orbits the asteroid Didymos, which is about 2,560 feet in diameter. While the moon and asteroid pose no real threat to Earth, the technology, if successful, could be used to knock future celestial objects headed toward the planet off-course.
Illustration of NASA’s DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben/)
The craft will travel at a speed of about 13,421 miles per hour when it hits the moon about 6.8 million miles away. Images of the collision will be recorded by a cube satellite following behind the DART craft.
The Hubble and Webb telescopes will also observe the planetary defense test.
“This is an exciting time, not only for the agency but in space history and in the history of humankind, quite frankly,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, said in a news conference Thursday, according to Space.com. “This demonstration is extremely important to our future here on Earth.
The test presents a number of unique challenges.
“Dimorphos is a tiny asteroid,” Tom Statler, the mission’s program scientist at NASA, said at the news conference. “We’ve never seen it up close, we don’t know what it looks like, we don’t know what the shape is. And that’s just one of the things that leads to the technical challenges of DART. Hitting an asteroid is a tough thing to do.”
