All eyes are now on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.
A spacecraft under the DART mission is set to clash with tiny moon of the asteroid Didymos. The spacecraft is roughly the size of a small car, will strike the smaller body at about 4 miles per second on September 26, 2022.
As per reports, the impact has been set at 4:30 am (IST) on September 27. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is set to make history as the world’s first planetary defense test.
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DART is the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact.
DART will deliberately collide with a target asteroid—which poses no threat to Earth— in order to change its speed and path.
Deputy Director of Pathani Samanta Planetarium, Subhendu Patnaik said that NASA’s technologies will be tested in the mission including the autoguided system.
“The DART Mission will intentionally crash into a non-hazardous asteroid to try to change its orbit. It will be helpful in future to destroy the asteroids coming towards earth in space,” said Patnaik.
According to Patnaik, NASA will subsequently reveal the change in the path of the asteroid after the collision with the spacecraft.
“Always observations are kept on large asteroids and so far it has been ascertained that no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years,” Patnaik added.