At 10:21 p.m. Pacific Time on November 23, a NASA mission called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to embark on a nearly year-long voyage around the sun. If all goes well, DART’s journey will end on the evening of September 26, 2022, when the golf cart-size spacecraft will intentionally slam into a little, unsuspecting asteroid called Dimorphos.
Dimorphos is a harmless space potato, a 525-foot-wide “moonlet” that orbits a bigger asteroid called Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. DART’s mission is to smash into Dimorphos at roughly 15,000 miles an hour, altering the moonlet’s orbit around its parent body. The name Dimorphos, Greek for “having two forms,” was chosen because the asteroid will have one form before DART and one form after.
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