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Why would NASA launch a spacecraft to hit an asteroid?



Every year a dozen asteroids they pass about almost five million miles away from the land and potentially could impact it. Consequently, the POT It prepares a plan to prevent this potential accident, which consists of the launch of a spacecraft, whose objective is to collide with one of the dangerous bolides to deflect it when it is still very far from the planet.

Its about DART project, an expression whose acronym means Double Asteroid Redirection in English or double asteroid redirect test in Spanish. The mission is slated to launch in July 2021.

A spacecraft will crash into the smallest asteroid in a binary system. It will be easy to measure any change in the orbit of the smallest object from Earth and will be a good indicator of whether it has been successfully deflected“, is explained in an article in National Geographic magazine.

View of the spacecraft that will collide with the asteroid Didymos. (NASA.gov)

“This is an exciting time. I think DART will be an extraordinary demonstration,” said Ed Lu, a retired NASA astronaut and founder of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to asteroid detection and diversion.

The spacecraft will approach a 2,600-foot-wide asteroid called Didymos in October 2022., at a distance of about 7.2 million miles from Earth.

The space agency’s plan has, as its first objective, to identify the “murderous” asteroid, a fundamental step according to specialists. Not an easy task since, according to NASA, there are currently 2,078 potentially dangerous planetoids in the catalog.

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