NASA is a making a page out of the move flick “Armageddon” – by launching a spaceship to wallop an asteroid’s moon in a test to avoid an asteroid undermining our planet.
The space office’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is set to take off at 1:20 a.m. EST on Nov. 24 on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The planetary defense mission is expected to have effect between Sept. 26 and Oct. 2, 2022 – striking its objective at almost 15,000 mph, 6.8 million miles from Earth, authorities said.
Live coverage of the launch will be displayed on NASA TV, the office’s application and its site.
“DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique, which involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an asteroid in space to change its motion,” NASA said.
“Its target is the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet,” it added.
The Planetary Defense Coordination Office deals with the mission, which includes sending a pair of satellites out to the generally close by Didymos, which is around 2,600 feet in diameter, and its 525-foot-wide moonlet, as per Tech Crunch.
“Up until now, we haven’t had too many options for what we might do if we found something that was incoming,” Johns Hopkins planetary astronomer Andy Rivkin told Vice News recently.
“DART is the first test of how we might be able to deflect something without having to resort to a nuclear package, or sitting in our basements, waiting it out and crossing our fingers,” he added.
The Italian Space Agency is working together with the Light Italian CubeSat for Imagine Asteroids, or LICIACube, which will notice “the mess we make,” as Rivkin put it.
Earthbound humans additionally will actually want to get the activity with extremely incredible telescopes.
Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Chicago Headlines journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.
