NASA Launches Spacecraft to Smash into Near-Earth Asteroid

NASA launched a spacecraft on Tuesday night, struck an asteroid, and tested whether it would be possible to drop a fast-moving space rock if it threatened the Earth.

The DART spacecraft was lifted from the Vandenberg Space Force Base on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a 330 million project with echoes from the Bruce Willis movie “Armageddon”.

LIVE: A new @Roscosmos module launches to the @Space_Station. Watch the Prichal docking module & its uncrewed Progress transport spacecraft lift off aboard a Soyuz rocket: https://t.co/mzKW5uV4hS pic.twitter.com/fMB3Rl3OTX

— NASA (@NASA) November 24, 2021

Still, in September 2022 it’ll hit an asteroid Dimorphos across 525 bases at a speed of 15, 000 country miles per hour if all goes well.

Dimorphos orbits is a larger asteroid called “Didymos”. The brace poses no trouble to Earth but offers scientists try to measure the chance of collisions.

Dimorphos does one route of Didymos every 11 hours, 55 twinkles. DART’s thing is a crash that will decelerate DeMarphos and push it 10 twinkles down from its route into a large asteroid.

DART will take 10 months to reach the asteroid brace. The collision will do about6.8 million country miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth. You can also read more about SpaceX Successfully Launches 53 Satellites in Starlink Mission.

The minimum change to be considered a mission success is 63 seconds, measured by the Earth Telescope.

Since there are presently no asteroids affecting Earth, we do know that there’s a large population of asteroids around Earth,” said Lindley Johnson, Planetary Defense Officer of NASA.

Scientists are looking for asteroids and planning their course to determine whether they could hit the Earth or not.