Sharp shooting

I read today at reference 1, the NASA have succeeded in sending a small spacecraft around 7 million miles to crash into an asteroid about 150m across. And in filming the impact and transmitting the images back to earth. We will learn in due course whether they have succeeded in deflecting the asteroid, the object of the exercise.

In the meantime, we are not told how much the spacecraft weighed, although to judge from its pictures I should imagine well under a ton, well under say 1,000kg. Not very much compared with 150m sphere of rock, which Bing tells me amounts to 1,767,145.867644 cubic metres. Say 5 million tons in rock, so a lot bigger.

But whatever the case, a feat of engineering.

PS 1: I have also now learned that the gif file format supports moving pictures as well as stills, movement which survives uploading into Blogger. A form of illustration which is rather abused on the Internet, often irritating rather than informing me, but I thought I had to give it a go. I had to know.

PS 2: also, from reference 3, that the spacecraft weighed around half a ton. No idea how big that is in the zoo of satellites and other space objects.

References

Reference 1: Watch the moment NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed into an asteroid: The project is the first time humanity has tested a planetary asteroid defense system - Rhiannon Williams, MIT Technology Review - 2022.

Reference 2: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/dart/in-depth/.

Reference 3: https://dart.jhuapl.edu/.