This week was a great success for NASA’s Dart mission. The objective of slamming the DART spacecraft into the asteroid moon Dimorphos (or as YouTuber Scott Manley likes to call it – DiddyMoon) was a total success. Not just a success but a somewhat spectacular one as well.
Asteroid Defence is a go!
DART marks the first test of planetary defence. One of our biggest existential threats is that of an asteroid impacting the Earth and forever changing things for the worse. Just ask any dinosaur. Wait, you can’t … because of an asteroid! The threat of an asteroid’s impact is a real thing.
The DART mission attempts to prove that it’s possible to divert the course of a space rock by slamming a smaller mass (such as a satellite) into an asteroid at speed.
The impact happened, soon we’ll know the degree of change in the orbit of Dimorphos. We’ll then have a baseline for future asteroid defence calculations.
What Actually Happened?
This is from NASA showing the moment of impact from DARTs point of view. Actual Press Release
Why Get Excited?
Because it’s a message of hope. The DART mission demonstrates that difficult tasks as possible tasks. It opens up the possibility of beating an unbeatable existential threat, and there is hope in that.
It’s hope that is big takeaway.
We live in a time of climatic change, war and economic chaos. It would be so easy to give up and say “the future looks awful; lets give up”. Then along comes a space mission chock full of hope, and the suggestion that we can beat a threat of the ages.
Doing something big, extreme and complex enough to make you think all can be overcome is not the sole reserve of space. But it is something that space travel has always been very good at. Think of the euphoria that surrounded the first man on the moon.
Of course, the first man on the moon was the product of the cold war space race. Something that eventually ground to a halt. We’re in a new space race now and its diverse. Full on national interests yes, military also and private organisations doing until now something that was the preserve of super powers. I’m hoping that means we’ll see more that helps us all understand that we can overcome.
Space travel may not be the rosy futuristic thing that SF promised us. But it could still help everyone.
Stream of Consciousness 