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Hera team congratulates NASA asteroid impactors


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DART's moment of impact

ESA’s Hera mission team congratulates their counterparts in NASA’s DART mission team for their historic impact with the Dimorphos asteroid. Moving at 6.1 km per second, the car-sized Double Asteroid Redirect Test spacecraft struck the 160-m diameter asteroid at 01:15 CEST (00:15 BST) in the early hours of Tuesday morning, in humankind’s first test of the ‘kinetic impactor’ method of planetary defence.

#news #space #science #esa #europeanspaceagency
posted by pod_feeder_v2

Whuffo diaspora
As a verification of the computer calculations, this test is invaluable. But looking at the amount that small asteroid was diverted makes one worry about the future.
Isaac Kuo diaspora
@Whuffo The mission was designed to hit a binary asteroid system in order to provide great precision of the measurements. That way, the impactor could be relatively small in scale. The basic principle is straightforward to scale up in mass and/or number.
Whuffo diaspora
Yeah, the impactor weighed about as much as an automobile. How many tons could they put on target when it's important?
Isaac Kuo diaspora
@tomgrzybow@diaspora.freifunk-naila.net There are off-the-shelf rocket boosters that have more payload capacity, so that gets you something bigger right there. And you can scale up in number with mass production. Cost per rocket goes way down when you simply build a whole bunch of them.
Richard diaspora
Heh. So the first thing I thought of was one set of rockets launched by a military to move an asteroid's orbit to collision, another set of rockets launched to move it somewhere else, another set of rockets...
Pool cool. Moonlet, side pocket.

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