NASA has been working on a system that will protect the Earth against threats from outer space for a while. If you’ve seen Deep Impact or Armageddon movies before, you can easily understand the project NASA is working on. The goal is to change the trajectory of asteroids targeting Earth.
On September 26, NASA successfully completed the first step of the futuristic project: NASA, which built humanity’s first interplanetary defense system, crashed its school bus-sized spacecraft called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) into a floating cosmic rock about 7 million miles from Earth. And it did so at about 22,530 kilometers per hour.
The aim of the study was to see if the collision could alter the orbit of this asteroid, Dimorphos, around a larger asteroid called Didymos. No, neither Dimorphos nor Didymos pose any threat to our planet. This was NASA’s proof experiment to show that if we ever encounter such a problem, we might find a way to deflect asteroids on a collision course with Earth. If we encounter such a scenario, this attempt by NASA seems to be successful. Because the collision worked. Scientists have confirmed that DART has officially changed the trajectory of its target by 33 minutes.
And now, scientists say that they have obtained more information as a result of this collision and that they will announce these results soon. But they also cite an important prediction: They estimate that the collision blew more than 2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of the asteroid’s dusty surface into space.
In terms of context, the team says this should be enough to fill six or seven wagons. “What we can learn from the DART mission is part of NASA’s extensive work to understand asteroids and other small objects in our solar system,” DART program scientist Tom Statler said in a statement. “We use it to study how it’s made and formed, and we’re also learning how to defend our planet in the event of an asteroid coming our way.”
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