DART Mission | IASbaba

DART Mission

Part of: Prelims and GS-III – Space 

Context On November 24 NASA will launch the agency’s first planetary defense test mission named the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

Key takeaways 

• DART is a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid.
• The main aim of the mission is to test the newly developed technology that would allow a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid and change its course. 
• The spacecraft will be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
• The target of the spacecraft is a small moonlet called Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms”). The spacecraft is expected to collide when it is 11 million km away from Earth.
• Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos (Greek for “twin”)