NASA To Shoot A Giant DART To Prevent An Asteroid From Crashing Earth

Dhir Acharya - Feb 17, 2019

NASA is testing a new way, DART, to help the Earth from being attacked by asteroids, saving the human.

Imagine an asteroid shooting towards the Earth, what can we do then?

Of course, we can send a team of miners who would drill into the asteroid and blast it off from the inside. However, NASA has a new way that will save us from bringing miners into space or exploding any space rock.

Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)

NASA is working on a solution to our doomsday with somewhat called Double Asteroid Redirection Test. This test mission will give us the answer to whether we can fire a spacecraft into an asteroid and change its direction, saving mankind.

On Watch This Space’s this week episode, we get to see the DART mission sent to 65803 Didymos, which is a binary asteroid orbiting the sun out past the Earth.

The moonlet called “Didymoon”, according to NASA, poses a perfect example of the type and size of an asteroid that can crash into our home planet. So, the plan is, in December 2020, NASA will send DART to space and crash into the 150-meter-wide Didymoon.

NASA’s plan will work like a game of pool. DART will act like the cue ball careening into the moonlet, by which NASA will measure the influence of DART on the momentum of the moonlet. From that, the space agency hopes to come up with a way to redirect asteroids in the future.