Why a NASA spacecraft is about to clobber an asteroid

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — In the first-of-its kind, save-the-world experiment, NASA is about to clobber a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away.

People are also reading… "This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption," said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University, which is managing the effort."This isn't going to blow up the asteroid. It isn't going to put it into lots of pieces." Rather, the impact will dig out a crater tens of yards in size and hurl some 2 million pounds of rocks and dirt into space.

The size of a small vending machine at 1,260 pounds, the spacecraft will slam into roughly 11 billion pounds of asteroid."Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a Great Pyramid," said Chabot. Although the strike itself should be immediately apparent, it will take months to verify the moonlet's tweaked orbit. Cameras on Dart and a mini tagalong satellite will capture the collision up close.

Asteroid missions galorePlanet Earth is on an asteroid-chasing roll. NASA has close to a pound of rubble collected from asteroid Bennu headed to Earth. The stash should arrive next September. In 2026, NASA will launch a census-taking telescope to identify hard-to-find asteroids that could pose risks. One asteroid mission is grounded while an independent review board weighs its future. NASA's Psyche spacecraft should have launched this year to a metal-rich asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, but the team couldn't test the flight software in time.

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