![]() ROSA’s power output coupled with NASA’s NEXT-C drive system will have, over significant time and interplanetary distances, the capability of reaching up to 324,000 kilometers per hour, more than five times faster than the speedy Voyager 1 probe. The ROSA solar arrays will provide reliable and continuous power for NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster-Commercial (NEXT-C) ion drive system. The ROSA solar array for the DART mission will provide more than 6.6 kilowatts of power at beginning-of-life, and is based on the ROSA solar array technology recently demonstrated on NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) in June 2017. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate is the lead for planetary defense activities and is sponsoring the DART mission. The project is overseen by the Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The DART mission is a critical step in understanding and demonstrating one of the approaches that could be used to protect Earth by changing the speed of a hazardous incoming asteroid, putting it into a different orbital flight path that would not threaten the planet.ĭART is directed by NASA and led by a team at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory with support from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Johnson Space Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Observations of the results of this impact by ground-based observatories (and possibly other spacecraft) will provide data on how effective this technique is. DART is planned to intercept the secondary member-or “moonlet”-of the Near-Earth Asteroid Didymos binary system in October 2022, changing the orbit of the moonlet around the primary asteroid while not altering the overall path of the pair around the Sun. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will be the first-ever spacecraft to demonstrate asteroid deflection by kinetic impactor on an asteroid target. (DSS), a leading supplier of innovative flexible blanket and rigid panel solar array systems, announced today that that it has been awarded a contract by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for the design, analysis, manufacturing, testing, and delivery of Roll-Out Solar Arrays (ROSA) for NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission.Īrtistic rendering of the DART spacecraft with ROSA solar arrays ![]() Santa Barbara, California, Ap– Deployable Space Systems, Inc. According to CNEOS’ census, there are 855 such asteroids measuring at least 1 km (0.62 mi.), and more than 10,000 that are at least 140 m (460 ft.) across.DSS awarded contract by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to provide ROSA solar arrays for NASA’s DART Mission. That’s considered close enough that even a slight change in their trajectory could put us in their path. The space agency’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) keeps a running tally of asteroids that fly within 45 million km (28 million mi.) of Earth. The good news is, NASA is doing a pretty good job of finding those rocks and tracking their trajectory. Much more troubling is the huge population of wild rocks out there-asteroids that fly free through the solar system and could one day come our way. So as a target for celestial skeet-shooting it served its purpose well. “The key point of this type of technique is to just give that little nudge such that the asteroid crosses over Earth’s path, either just before we get there or just after we’ve gone by,” said Nancy Chabot, DART science coordinator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.īut Dimorphos is both a harmless and relatively static object-a known rock that keeps its distance at a known spot in space, never venturing anywhere near Earth. The DART impact was intended as a test of the kind of deflection technology that might one day be necessary to save Earth from just such a killer rock. Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos pose any danger to Earth, but other asteroids out there do pose a potential collision risk to our planet. The purpose of the cosmic collision? To see if DART’s impact could nudge Dimorphos, speeding it up slightly and shortening its orbit around Didymos. Dimorphos is a moonlet of the larger, 780 m (2,560 ft) asteroid Didymos, making one revolution around its parent rock every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The spacecraft, known as DART (for Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was launched last November, and its sole job was to fly out to the small, 160 m (525 ft.) asteroid Dimorphos, and crash into it at at 22,500 k/h (14,000 mph). And we should all be very glad they did, because today the Earth feels a little bit safer than it did yesterday. The mission managers at NASA spent $330 million to send a refrigerator-sized spacecraft 7 million miles (11 million km) into space and punch an asteroid in the nose. ![]()
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