NASA mission to crash spacecraft into asteroid to redirect its path launches this week
Officials say the test mission will provide “further insights into how we can deflect potentially dangerous near-Earth objects in the future.”
NASA is gearing up to test a technique that may one day be used to defend Earth from an incoming asteroid.
The space agency plans to launch a spacecraft Tuesday night that will deliberately slam into an asteroid more than 6 million miles away at speeds upwards of 15,000 miles per hour to observe how the asteroid’s trajectory shifts.
While the asteroid poses absolutely no threat to humanity, the goal of the test mission is to determine whether intentionally crashing an object into an asteroid is an effective way of changing its course, should an asteroid ever set its sights on Earth.
The mission, dubbed the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will utilize what NASA calls the kinetic impactor technique. DART’s target will be a binary asteroid dubbed Didymos, which is an asteroid system made up of a 780-meter asteroid and a smaller “moonlet” measuring 160 meters across.
Using cameras and autonomous navigation, the spacecraft will deliberately crash into the moonlet, called Dimorphos, at a speed of 6.6 kilometers per second, according to NASA.
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NASA mission to crash spacecraft into asteroid to redirect its path launches this week https://t.co/0I2OKXxGoX pic.twitter.com/ZfOD80QmNm
— The Hill (@thehill) November 23, 2021
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