NASA’s mission DART will take a look at our means to redirect an asteroid by fairly actually crashing into it — however the spacecraft will even take a look at a brand new sort of propulsion system for the company.
NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster-Commercial (NEXT-C) is an ion drive. Rather than igniting hydrogen-based propellant as most rockets do, NEXT-C will use the electrical energy generated by the spacecraft’s personal solar panels to create {an electrical} discipline that accelerates charged xenon ions as much as very excessive speeds with a view to propel the craft. Ion drives can, in concept, attain a lot greater speeds than standard rockets. NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and the corporate Aerojet Rocketdyne teamed as much as construct the NEXT-C system, and a mission referred to as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) shall be its testbed.
DART will launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday (Nov. 24) at 1:58 a.m. EST (0658 GMT, or Nov. 23 at 10:58 p.m. native time). Next autumn, the spacecraft will crash into the smaller asteroid of a pair referred to as Didymos, referred to as Dimorphos, in order that scientists can measure how dramatically such an affect would possibly change an asteroid’s orbit ought to a space rock ever threaten Earth. Launch protection will start at 12:30 a.m. EST (0530 GMT) right here at Space.com and on NASA TV.
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But earlier than the mission’s dramatic finish, DART will use NEXT-C, testing the system in space for the primary time. An ion drive was beforehand used on NASA’s Deep Space 1 and Dawn spacecraft, which launched in 1998 and 2007, however NEXT-C shall be 3 times as highly effective, according to NASA.
“It is a little bittersweet to know that we are only going to be able to operate for a short amount of time before we impact the asteroid,” Jeremy John, lead propulsion engineer for DART, and an engineer for Johns Hopkins University Advanced Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), stated in a video.
NEXT-C will not be the primary power pushing DART alongside its journey; that responsibility will fall to the 12 standard thrusters aboard the spacecraft that shall be liable for a lot of the spacecraft’s actions, together with within the ultimate leg of its journey because it plunges into Dimorphos.
But NEXT-C will mild up a number of instances alongside DART’s journey. The intent of the maneuvers, in response to NEXT-C’s creators, is to take the ion drive for a take a look at spin. Its engineers will flip the system on to indicate that the ion drive can run with simply the facility generated by the spacecraft’s solar panels — and to indicate that it really works within the harsh circumstances of space.
“And we’re going to just basically demonstrate that we can operate it, in space, because part of the wonders of new technology is just that step from when you built it up to getting it to space and getting it to operate for the first time,” Elena Adams, an engineer at JHUAPL and DART’s deputy mission supervisor, stated throughout a information convention held Nov. 4. “So that’s what we’re demonstrating for NASA.”
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