One of NASA’s latest missions, in which a spacecraft knocked an asteroid off course, is a rehearsal for saving the world.
separated from its rocket, two twenty-eight-foot-long panels scrolled outward into space on either side of the craft, like wings made of parchment. Butgave everyone a fright. During its two-hour test firing, in December, the ion thruster emitted a sudden hundred-amp electrical surge. Fortunately,was not mission-essential—it had been added to the craft solely for testing purposes—and Adams made sure that the ion thruster stayed switched off from then on.
. She’d slept terribly the night before, and now felt every moment of the sleep she’d missed. She needed that pixel to appear.. It wasn’t until the nineteen-nineties when the vast and largely submerged Chicxulub crater, near the Yucatán Peninsula, became widely recognized as a mark left by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Fears increased in 2004, when astronomers discovered an asteroid that would speed past Earth in 2029, with a 2.7-per-cent chance of direct impact.
In 2016, the agency established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office; its head, Lindley Johnson, is the nation’s first planetary-defense officer. “If we find an object on an impact trajectory,after twenty-three years in the U.S. Air Force, where he worked on national-security space missions, told me. “We will be coördinating activities across U.S. agencies, and also coördinating with our international partners, because it’s very much an international problem.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
NASA's DART asteroid now has a massive comet-like tail after dramatic spacecraft crashThe glimmering comet-like tail could signal success for NASA's DART mission, which aims to prove the viability of planetary defense technology.
Read more »
LICIACube Sends Home Images of the DART Impact and the Damage to DimorphosThe Italian LICIACube CubeSat has returned its first images of the collision between the DART probe and the asteroid Dimorphos
Read more »
DART Considers Discontinuing 2 More Parkland Shuttle RoutesThe hospital has suggested it will provide its own shuttles for employees, but patients may have to walk a quarter mile to the nearest mode of public transit.
Read more »
Human for scale shows true size of enormous asteroid hit in DART missionThe asteroid is 530 feet across and weighed around 10 million times more than the spacecraft that was launched into it.
Read more »
Smacked asteroid's debris trail more than 6,000 miles longThe asteroid that got smacked by a NASA spacecraft is now being trailed by thousands of miles of debris from the impact.
Read more »