On Monday, DART, a NASA spacecraft collided with an asteroid at breakneck speed in an extraordinary practice run for the day when a rock threatens the Earth.
The DART spacecraft collided with an innocuous asteroid at 22,500 kph, causing a massive slam 9.6 million kilometers away. DART is an abbreviation for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
DART spacecraft: The collision’s primary goal was to alter the asteroid’s orbit
The event was witnessed through telescopes from Earth. The collision’s primary goal was to alter the asteroid’s orbit. According to AP, scientists expect the crash to create a crater and launch streams of boulders and dirt into space.
The USD 325 million mission was the first attempt in space to move any natural object.
On Monday, a 160-meter asteroid named Dimorphos was the target. It is a moonlet of Didymos, a rapidly spinning and five times larger asteroid that means “twin” in Greek.
The asteroid weighed approximately 5 billion kilograms
The DART spacecraft, developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and launched in November of last year, was the size of a vending machine. Engineers for missions yelled with joy.
A small satellite followed a few minutes later to photograph the collision. DART launched the Italian Cubesat two weeks ago.
Scientists insisted that the DART would not break dimorphous. The asteroid weighed approximately 5 billion kilograms, while the spacecraft weighed only 570 kilograms.
According to NASA, only about half of the 25,000 near-Earth objects in the lethal 140-meter range were discovered.
Currently, less than 1% of millions of smaller asteroids have the potential to cause widespread devastation.