follow live the Dart mission, intended to deflect a small asteroid using a spaceship

Normally, spaceships are not designed to crash. However, this is exactly what NASA planned to do, on the night of Monday September 26 to Tuesday September 27, to deviate the trajectory of an asteroid by projecting a kamikaze ship on it. This unprecedented mission must enable us to learn how to protect humanity against a possible future threat.

The targeted asteroid does not represent any danger. But the mission, named Dart (“dart”, in English), must “help determine our response if we detect an asteroid threatening to hit Earth” in the future, NASA boss Bill Nelson said Monday.

The moment of impact, 11 million kilometers from Earth, can be followed live on the NASA video channel, at the top of this article. The ship, no bigger than a car, took off in November from California. After ten months of travel, the time of collision was scheduled for 1:14 a.m. on Tuesday at a speed of more than 20,000 km/h.

The target is actually a pair of asteroids: a large one, Didymos (780 meters in diameter), and its satellite, Dimorphos (160 meters in diameter), in orbit around it. The two are only about a kilometer apart. It is on the little one, Dimorphos, that the ship must crash. This asteroid currently circles the largest in 11 hours and 55 minutes, and the goal is to reduce its orbit by about ten minutes.