The world’s first-ever planetary defense test is a big hit …
A major hurricane spotted from space …
And moving our mega Moon rocket back inside ahead of that storm … a few of the stories
to tell you about – This Week at NASA!
On Sept. 26, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART spacecraft successfully impacted
Dimorphos – the asteroid the spacecraft had been on a collision course with for about
10 months.
“Waiting … (applause) … and we have impact!”
DART’s intentional crash into Dimorphos, a moonlet of a larger asteroid called Didymos,
was an attempt to alter the course of an asteroid in space as part of the world’s first planetary
defense technology demonstration.
The DART team will observe Dimorphos with ground-based telescopes to confirm that the
technique, known as kinetic impact, did indeed alter the moonlet’s orbit around Didymos.
The cosmic collision was actually captured by our Hubble and Webb space telescopes, marking
the first time that Webb and Hubble observed the same celestial target at the same time.
Neither of these asteroids is a threat to Earth, but this technique could prove to be
a reliable way to alter the course of an asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth in
the future.
On Sept. 26, external cameras aboard the International Space Station captured views of Hurricane
Ian just south of Cuba as the storm moved toward the north-northwest.
As expected, Ian intensified as it approached Florida.
Space station cameras caught the storm again on Sept. 28 as it was making landfall in southwest
Florida as a Category 4 storm with winds upward of 155 mph and a potentially catastrophic
storm surge.
On the night of Sept. 26, the team at our Kennedy Space Center began moving our Artemis
I Moon rocket from launch pad 39B back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB.
The Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft were secured inside the VAB the next morning.
Managers decided on the “roll back” due to weather predictions related to Hurricane
Ian.
In addition to protecting the integrated rocket and spacecraft, they also wanted to give employees
time to address the needs of their families ahead of the storm.
The spacecraft for our Juno mission at Jupiter made a close flyby of the planet’s ice-covered
moon, Europa on Sept. 29.
This image from the pass, some 220 miles above Europa’s surface, is the first to come of
some of the highest-resolution images ever taken of portions of the moon.
Valuable data are also expected from the flyby that, once processed, could benefit and inform
future missions, like the agency’s Europa Clipper mission, which is targeted to launch
in 2024 to study the icy moon.
More information is available at: nasa.gov/juno.
Believe it or not, these inflatable habitats are being blown up to help make them safe
for humans.
Habitats like these could be used to house astronauts on future long-term surface exploration
missions to the Moon and, eventually Mars.
But before then, NASA and commercial partners are conducting burst pressure tests to determine
the maximum internal pressure these habitats can safely withstand before they fail.
That’s what’s up this week @NASA … For more on these and other stories, follow us
on the web at nasa.gov/twan.