Maine engineer part of NASA team using spacecraft to deflect asteroid away from Earth
By Kathleen Jordan
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CUMBERLAND, Maine (WMTW) — Early Wednesday morning, NASA launched a new spacecraft that will attempt to deflect an asteroid away from Earth.
Maine native Mark Jensenius is one of the engineers taking part in the mission.
“I’ve been working on this almost a decade now. From the beginning concepts, all the way through to where we’re going to see this thing happen,” Jensenius said Tuesday, hours before the launch.
Jensenius said NASA does not see asteroids being a threat to Earth in the next century, but he said the mission will make sure the agency is ready.
“DART, the double asteroid redirection test, is a technology demonstration mission where we’re going to go out and impact and redirect an asteroid out in space,” Jensenius said.
He said the spacecraft will be going about 15,000 mph with a communication delay of about one minute due to the distance it is traveling from Earth.
Jensenius is part of a team that designed a set of algorithms to direct the spacecraft from a lab at Johns Hopkins University.
“It takes in information that it’s sensing using its imager and other sensors, and it combines it into an estimate of how much we need to maneuver the spacecraft, and then it will issue those commands automatically so that the spacecraft can hit the asteroid without any human intervention,” Jensenius said.
He credits his teachers at Greely High School in Cumberland for setting him on his course to a career in science and hopes students realize how many STEM career opportunities there are in Maine.
“There is a lot of engineering that goes on in Maine even though it’s not the aerospace industry,” Jensenius said. “Look within the state for opportunities. You can look outside the state. It’s just a fantastic time to be an engineer.”
DART launched Wednesday at 1:21 a.m. and will reach the asteroid in 10 months. The mission can be tracked on NASA’s website. NASA said early Wednesday that the launch was successful and that DART cleared all of its hurdles, culminating with the unfurling of its 28-foot-long solar arrays.
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