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Mahesh

24/09/22 16:19 PM IST

NASA's DART Mission

In News 
  • In the first-of-its-kind, save-the-world experiment, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft will crash into a small moonlet called Dimorphos.
  • The impact of the collision should be just enough to nudge the asteroid into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space rock — demonstrating that if a killer asteroid ever heads our way, we’d stand a fighting chance of diverting it. 
DART mission 
  • The mission is to test the new technology to be prepared in case an asteroid heads towards Earth in the future.
  • The aim is to test the newly developed technology that would allow a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid and change its course.
  • After the mission has collided with the asteroid, scientists will study its impact on the trajectory of the asteroid with a range of telescopes deployed on different regions of the planet.
  • DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space.
  • The target of the spacecraft is a small moonlet called Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms”).
  • Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos (Greek for “twin”).
  • It is a suicide mission and the spacecraft will be completely destroyed.
  • DART is a low-cost spacecraft.
  • It has two solar arrays and uses hydrazine propellant for maneuvering the spacecraft.
  • It also carries about 10 kg of xenon which will be used to demonstrate the agency’s new thrusters called NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster–Commercial (NEXT-C) in space.
Source- The Hindu 

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