Share:NASA is going to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid purposely on Monday at 7.14 pm EST (1214GMT) in a first-of-its-kind mission to protect the Earth. The project, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will intentionally crash the space probe to see whether deflecting space rock could one day prevent the planet from being destroyed by a potentially catastrophic impact from an asteroid. “It’s a very complicated game of cosmic billiards,” said astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons, a member of the NASA Dart investigation team, in an interview. The DART spacecraft will target a giant space rock (525 ft./160 m in diameter) called Dimorphos at a blistering speed of 15,000 mi per hour (24,140 km per hour). NASA says the goal is not to obliterate the asteroid but rather to see whether the collision can alter the space rock's orbit.

Source: The Nation September 26, 2022 05:03 UTC