So this.
I’m convinced the celebrations are staged with paid actors. Yes the celebration would look the same if they were not, as long as the mission is a success. But you have to be a good actor to contain your anxiety up to the moment of truth. And failure is an option idc what anybody says.
NASA is giving an update on the DART mission. Started at noon ET. They say the orbital period of Dimorphos was decreased by 32 minutes, so more successful than expected (10 minutes). That’s due to ejecta having a multiplying effect on the change in momentum due to the impact (more info on that at wiki).
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The problem if I’m understanding correctly with asteroids is that they’re very hard to spot til they’re pretty close or you already know where to look.
Idk if this helps but Didymos orbits the Sun once in 2 Earth years. Based on the 10 year number, if it was going to hit us we’d have to realize it 5 orbits ahead of time and we’d need a much bigger DART (Didymos is 100x heavier than Dimorphos).
Eta image stolen from wiki: Earth is dark blue, Didymos is green, DART purple, the Sun is the yellow dot at center.
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The kind of asteroid redirects we are talking about here, are of asteroids who have a close flyby of the earth, which alters their trajectory and puts them on a collision course with the earth years down the line. These asteroids have what is called a keyhole trajectory on their flyby, where a deflection of a couple of 100 meters will cause them to not be on a collision course anymore.
If we discover an asteroid whose first close encounter with the earth is when it hits us, we are still screwed.
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Can we at least redirect it enough so that it hits Florida?
Yeah, it’s largely a question if some amateur astronomer is lucky enough to spot one ahead of time, no way NASA can scan the entire sky.
Some of them are in orbits interior to the Earth’s and are hidden by the Sun. Very hard to see.
Awesome, NASA has decided to award a no-bid contract for up to 20 SLSs to Boeing! Putting NASA in Bill Nelson’s safekeeping is about as smart as putting your weed stash in Willie Nelson’s safekeeping.
This contract will probably end up costing $500 billion or something, but on the plus side it will take like 115 years to complete, so maybe the annual drain won’t be too bad.
NASA said it examined other launch contracts it had, along with those by the U.S. Space Force, noting that none of them “include the requirement to lift 42t [metric tons] in a single-launch to the Moon and beyond,” which is the projected SLS Block 1B payload capacity.
Maybe let’s see if they can manage to fuel a Block 1 booster before we go throwing Boeing more money.
It’s possible that they timed this out so they could announce it right after the maiden flight, but then SLS got delayed again so they had to just dribble it out with no fanfare.
In this case the best we can do is move a lot of heavy stuff either to or from the equator, thus altering the length of a day, to make sure Florida is as close as possible to the impact location.