It’s rare for spacecraft mission personnel to cheer at the words “loss of signal,” but tonight, that’s exactly what happened.
Team members are celebrating the successful impact of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which slammed into an asteroid called Dimorphos tonight (Sept. 26) at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT) as planned. The mission was designed to evaluate a potential method of planetary defense so that, if astronomers ever spot a large asteroid that might collide with Earth, humans might be able to avoid the catastrophe. Although the team will need days or possibly weeks to evaluate just how successful DART’s test was, simply hitting Dimorphos was a massive achievement, they said.
“Definitely as we were getting close to the asteroid, there was a lot of — Ed [Reynolds, DART program manager] said joy, I say both terror and joy at the same time,” Elena Adams, DART’s mission systems engineer, said during a news conference held about an hour after impact.
Related: Asteroid impact: Here’s the last thing NASA’s DART spacecraft saw before it crashed
“This asteroid was coming into the field of view for the first time,” Adams said. “We really had no idea what to expect. We didn’t really know the shape of the asteroid, but we knew we were going to hit. So I think all of us were kind of holding our breath. I’m kind of surprised none of us passed out, actually.”
The team members also confirmed that DART operators didn’t have to intervene at all during the final four hours of DART’s approach. “This mission was straight down the middle of what our expectations were, and there were no adjustments needed,” Mark Jensenius, DART Smart Nav guidance engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), which operates the DART mission for NASA, said during the news conference.
“It was actually kind of disappointing,” Adams said. “We prepared these 21 contingencies and then we did none of them.”
DART’s final measure of success will come in the next weeks and months, as scientists evaluate just how much the impact changed the orbit of Dimorphos around its larger parent asteroid, Didymos. But the team isn’t concerned.
“As far as we can tell, our first planetary defense test was a success,” Adams said. “Yeah, I think Earthlings should sleep better. Definitely I will.” Planetary defense is dedicated to spotting asteroids that could potentially hit Earth and, if necessary, attempting to adjust the space rock’s orbit enough to avoid…
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