An experiment by the US space agency, scheduled for early Monday, aims to assess whether it will be possible to deflect an asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth.
A NASA spacecraft will collide with an asteroid at dawn on Monday.
DART, which stands for “Dual Asteroid Redirection Test”, will have an encounter with the space rock after being launched 10 months ago. the ship will crash on the moon of an asteroid to see how it affects the movement of this space body.
The mission is directed to Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the asteroid Didymos. The asteroid system poses no threat to Earth, NASA said, making it a perfect target for testing a kinetic impact, which may be necessary if, one day, an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.
The event will be the first large-scale demonstration of diversion technology that can protect the planet. The impact is expected at 00:14 on Monday.
At that time, Dimorphos will be relatively close to Earth, within a radius of 11 million kilometers. The spacecraft will accelerate to approximately 24,140 kilometers per hour when it collides with the asteroid.
“For the first time, we will measurably change the orbit of a celestial body in the universe,” said Robert Braun, head of space exploration at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
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