NASA DART mission 14 days to impact watch live presentation on youtube

This is a companion thread to an earlier one about the mission itself, interesting use of visuals if you watch long enough it shows how small the impact should be, and interestingly enough a visual representation of 4 asteroids plummeting toward earth along with a picture of the ancient impact in Arizona. Not sure who thought that was a good idea, because the 4 asteroids are definitely heading toward earth that has lights on them, and represent modern earth. Of course, we can expect them to play up the program for funding and whatnot

www.abovetopsecret.com...

This is exciting! I'm definitely going to follow the countdown and see how it turns out. Is that little spacecraft really powerful enough to knock an object out it's orbit? I guess we'll find out.

a reply to: putnam6

Showing Earth with lights on it might not be foreshadowing, but using older rendered images of earth instead? Probably would save a lot of time and a bit of money if you can just grab something already completed in the ways of assets for a rendering in whatever shader program or whatever.

But regardless, I've stopped reading the various articles about "killer asteroid heading towards earth in two weeks," because there seems to be one every other week nowadays. "Near Earth" has expanded recently to include distances greater than the distance of Earth to the Moon. Soon to be changed to 1AU if the numbers of people tuning in keeps increasing

originally posted by: LogicalGraphitti
This is exciting! I'm definitely going to follow the countdown and see how it turns out. Is that little spacecraft really powerful enough to knock an object out it's orbit? I guess we'll find out.

IIRC the impact is so low it will move fractionally over the course of its orbit, it is why it is a test to measure how far and how much punch is gonna be needed if there was a real emergency.

originally posted by: LogicalGraphitti
This is exciting! I'm definitely going to follow the countdown and see how it turns out. Is that little spacecraft really powerful enough to knock an object out it's orbit? I guess we'll find out.

The little spacecraft isn't supposed to knock asteroid Dimorphos out of its orbit around asteroid Didymos. It's supposed to add just enough energy to raise the orbit around Didymos so that it's observable and measurable from Earth. That will allow a simple calculation of how much energy was imparted by the collision. That will allow scientists and engineers to figure out how big a spacecraft would have to be if we ever had to deflect an asteroid heading toward Earth.

Dimorphos will continue to orbit around Didymos and the pair will continue to orbit around the Sun. The experiment was constructed this way so that there is no chance that either one of that asteroid pair will be deflected toward Earth.