In roughly a year, a NASA rocket will voluntarily collide with an asteroid with the objective of diverting it from its trajectory, in a mission classified by the American space agency as “planetary defense”. The scenario, worthy of the movie ‘Armageddon’, in which Bruce Willis and Be Affleck save the Earth from a huge asteroid, is no longer science fiction and became a real experience that NASA has already finalized preparations. Although there are no known large asteroids on a collision course with Earth yet, the eventuality is already being prepared.
“We don’t want to face a situation where an asteroid could head to Earth and this is when we have to test this technique for the first time,” said Lindley Johnson, from the Department of Planetary Defense, at a NASA press conference.
The mission was named DART and will take off from California aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on November 23, with the expectation that it will take 10 months to reach the target.
The mission has a dual objective: first, a large asteroid, Didymos, which measures 780 meters in diameter, twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. And, in its orbit, a moon (Dimorphos), measuring 160 meters in diameter, the stage for the end of the trip. But, “it’s not going to destroy the asteroid, it’s just going to give it a little hit,” according to Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who is leading the mission. Therefore, the small asteroid’s orbit around the large one will be reduced by only “about 1%”.
Thus, “if an asteroid is ever discovered on a collision course with Earth, we will have an idea of how much force we will need for this asteroid not to reach Earth”, explains Andy Cheng, also from the same university.
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