It's one large-ish asteroid, approximately 780 meters across - that's Didymos proper - and a 160-meter "moonlet" in its orbit.Īs the moonlet is more typical of the type likely to threaten Earth - there being more asteroids that are that size and not easily observed - we will be testing the possibility of intercepting one by smashing into it at nearly 15,000 miles per hour.
The DART mission, managed by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (!), involves sending a pair of satellites out to a relatively nearby pair of asteroids, known as the Didymos binary. NASA has a launch date for that most Hollywood of missions, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which is basically a dry run of the movie "Armageddon." Unlike the film, this will not involve nukes, oil rigs or Aerosmith, but instead is a practical test of our ability to change the trajectory of an asteroid in a significant and predictable way.
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