And right here’s an explainer we printed earlier in regards to the Dart mission, which Nasa is working in affiliation with scientists from Johns Hopkins college.
It’s vital to level out that there isn’t a present risk to Earth from an asteroid… this take a look at mission is going down to evaluate our readiness IF such a peril ever materialized.
But it surely’s a topic that’s been within the public eye not too long ago, notably via final yr’s Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up, through which Earth faces impending doom from a menacing asteroid and barely anyone appears to care or discover.
Good afternoon weblog readers, house lovers, and those that simply wish to know if humanity may be saved from the apocalypse of an enormous asteroid slamming into Earth.
In about two hours from now, at 7.14pm ET, Nasa will take the primary steps in direction of discovering out. The house company will deliberately crash a spacecraft the scale of a small automotive into Dimorphos, the moon of the asteroid Didymos, orbiting about 6.8m miles away.
The goal of the Dart (double asteroid redirection take a look at) mission is to see if the asteroid’s trajectory may be altered by the drive of the influence, thereby suggesting humankind has the potential of at the least trying to avert such an Armageddon-style occasion.
The unprecedented “planetary protection take a look at” is a enterprise a number of years and $325m within the making, and is the primary of what Nasa intends to be a sequence of missions to evaluate our readiness for the specter of a big asteroid influence.
We’ll deliver you all of the developments as they occur over the following few hours, however earlier than we get began, let’s check out the mission itself:
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