Page 2 - Binary Asteroid News Today

Around the main asteroid. so when you slam into the moon and you slightly change its orbit, we know the orbit so well now, well be able detect what kind of change happened to it afterwards. >> so the amazing thing is this thing was launched overnight. its going to smash into this asteroid in october of next year. you have to be pretty good at math, right, to make that work? >> yeah. its a bad ass move. here we are on earth, on a platform, you are aiming this space probe to a point in space ten m...

Math, right, to make that work? >> yeah. its a bad ass move. here we are on earth, on a platform, you are aiming this space probe to a point in space ten months from now where the binary asteroid will be. and you will hit the moon thats going around it. and so this, yes, there is not enough praise given to the orbital dynamicists who figured this out. the craft weighs about 1,000 pound, much less than the mass of the moon, itself. but just enough to push it and change its orbital speed by one-ha...

One. so this did the most binary asteroid, did almost in die morph us if you are in to have been aiming. isnt asteroid where you have a wide center, like this double strawberry. and then you have another asteroid going around it like the blueberry. so if you can hit the blueberry with a spacecraft, like the strawberry leaves, then you can slow the smaller asteroid down. ever so slightly. and then one an object is closer to the larger object it will go run faster. that is why, for example mercury...

Objects. today, they started the mission that could help us avoid a cataclysmic scenario. the mission is called the double asteroid redirection test. or dark. early this morning, they launched a space craft. that spacecraft is going to be on a ten month journey towards a binary asteroid. which is basically to asteroids which orbit a common center. 6 million miles away from earth where, luckily, they caused no danger to us. if all goes according to plan. the spacecraft will smash into the smaller...

So one of them comes near enough to earth to do this redirect experiment. otherwise, you waste a lot of energy going so far out in the solar system. >> yeah, good. this is it. the next one, well see what that is. the dark mission. this is what they found. they identified this. and why are you so appreciative of what they found here as a model for this experiment? >> thats a great question. if you try to deflect a random asteroid. theres so many things that affect the asteroid. soiler heating on ...

And thats what nasa -- one of the missions of the director for planetary defense is to actually identify all of these things. so theres -- we think there is probably 27,000 near earth aft recognized that will pose a potential danger to us. the first thing you have to do is find them. which is hard because 150 meters across, that is about a football field size or so. 5 million miles away. good luck finding that. so step one, find them all. step two, characterize their or bits, figure out which on...

Asteroid could look like. that wasnt the scene of it saving it right there. and this wednesday, nasa plans to test it out in real life, launching a spacecraft on a 16,000-mile-an-hour collision course with a nearby asteroid to rye to nudge it just a little bit off-course. but it raises the question, whose job is it to prevent an armageddon? joining us right now is brian bender, a senior national political correspondent at politico, whose new article explores exactly that. i love that their bosse...

This is a computer simulation of dart, the double asteroid redirection test, which could be our first line of defence if one of those lumps of rock comes heading our way. nature has given us a setup where we have an asteroid, a binary asteroid, thats approaching close to earth so that we can observe from earth—based observatories, but this is a test. and this is how the test will work. astronomers have long been aware of a pair of asteroids called didymos and dimorphous. sometime later next ye...

Massive asteroid danger to Earth: NASA to strike Didymos asteroid with a rocket - The mission is called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) and its target is hazardous near-earth binary asteroid Didymos.