Watch the asteroid-smashing DART spacecraft make its 6-million-mile shot right now • TechCrunch

Considered one of NASA’s greatest crowd-pleasers in years is about to achieve its denouement: if all goes effectively, the Double Asteroid Redirection Check spacecraft (or slightly guided anti-space-rock missile) will impression its goal at round 14,700 miles per hour. You possibly can watch it live-ish proper right here at about 3 PM Pacific.

DART was launched final November and has spent the intervening months positioning itself for an ideal shot on Dimorphos, a 525-foot-wide asteroid in orbit round Didymos, half a mile extensive (and extra the kind we’d want to fret about, planetarily talking). At the moment is the large day.

You possibly can evaluation the particulars of the mission right here, however the gist of it’s fairly easy. DART itself will smack straight into Dimorphos, to not annihilate it or ship it careening again out of the photo voltaic system, however simply to have an effect on its orbit sufficient that researchers again right here on Earth can inform whether or not this method would truly work in an emergency.

Really deflecting an asteroid of any dimension is hard — even a “small” one 525 ft extensive has huge mass and momentum, that means a spacecraft that weighs a number of hundred kilos isn’t going to have an effect on it a lot. However it should have an effect on it slightly — sufficient to measure, that means we will inform how a lot drive was imparted on it and different elements. That in flip will have an effect on future missions and supply a baseline for any future Armageddon-style operations.

The excellent news is that enormous asteroids are pretty straightforward to identify in the event that they’re not already on the books (1000’s of objects are tracked by astronomers worldwide). We don’t want a planet-killed to take a tough proper and miss the Earth by 50 million miles — slightly faucet whereas it’s nonetheless on the outskirts of the photo voltaic system could be all it takes to make sure it passes a protected distance away, or will get captured by one other planet, or burns up within the solar.

A sew in time saves 9, as they are saying, and an asteroid impression in time saves 9 billion.

The livestream will seemingly encompass largely NASA mission crew trying anxious, and a 3D rendering of the spacecraft’s telemetry. The precise second of impression will come and go within the blink of an eye fixed — actually. Whenever you’re going 4 miles per second, a 500-foot goal comes up on you quick. DART’s on-board digital camera will seize it for a number of frames earlier than it hits, however the chaser spacecraft LICIACube will likely be proper behind, capturing the impression from one other angle.

What’s going to it seem like? Most likely slightly puff of mud and pebbles, however there’s no means we’d move up the possibility to catch this on video. Tune on this afternoon, with the feed beginning at about 2:30 and protection at 3.