Jakarta (Lampost.co) – The United States Air and Space Administration (NASA) is set to strike an asteroid later this month. The agency will conduct a planetary defense test.
Reporting from space, NASA will usher in a new era of the solar system as a continuation of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. This mission began in the fall of last year.
On September 26, 2022, DART will move headlong into a small asteroid. Rare cases where the destruction of a spaceship is the desired result.
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The mission is in the name of planetary defense, which seeks to protect the Earth from potential asteroid impacts. Scientists hope that if dangerous asteroids threaten the planet in the future, missions like DART can prevent a catastrophe
“These objects that dart through space and, of course, damage the moon and over time on Earth have had a huge impact, having influenced our history,” said NASA Associate Science Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen.
He added that a new series of NASA missions to understand and measure the threat in an unprecedented way.
“DART is the first mission to attempt to completely avoid a threat object in a live experiment,” concludes Zurbuchen.
Scientists have identified and mapped the orbits of nearly 30,000 asteroids moving around the solar system in the Earth’s environment. All these space rocks never cross the Earth or are very small. So if they did, they would burn harmlessly in the Earth’s atmosphere.
However, a possible future impact from an asteroid could damage the Earth. Preparation is needed if this happens.
The DART spacecraft will hit a small asteroid called Dimorphos, which continuously orbits a larger near-Earth asteroid called Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes.
Scientists on Earth will spend weeks after the impact measuring actual changes in the moon’s orbit to compare them to their predictions.
“This is not a one-time event,” said Nancy Chabot, head of DART coordination at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
“We want to know what happened to Dimorphos, but above all, we want to understand what it means to potentially apply this technique in the future.”
EDITOR
Efran Kurniawan
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