Over the weekend NASA scrubbed the Artemis launch AGAIN in preparation for Hurricane Ian.
They are still planning on sending a spacecraft crashing into an asteroid that’s roughly the size of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London though.
DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirect mission, was designed to test our planetary defense capabilities IF an asteroid were positioned to threaten Earth in the future, To be clear, NASA knows of no asteroids that are both on track to collide with Earth AND large enough to do major harm to our planet.
According to the DART mission website. NASA first sent the DART spacecraft in November 2021, and its official crash-time estimate is 7:14 p.m. ET, September26, 2022.
If you want to watch, NASA will have live coverage on the NASA TV YouTube channel along with a separate video stream with real-time images from DART’s DRACO camera. (Watch the stream with DART's DRACO camera here.) The DRACO camera is the only instrument onboard the spacecraft and is set to send one image back to Earth per second. The live feed to start as a black screen with one light source — and as impact nears, the point of light will increase until the asteroids are visible.
After impact, the feed is expected to go to black and then NASA will replays of the event.
