The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will for the first time test the Earth’s protection against potentially dangerous asteroids.
According to the Washington Post, the US space agency plans to launch a rocket with a special probe to one of these objects in November, which will have to collide with the asteroid and change its orbit.
The launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle with a binary asteroid redirection test complex (DART) from the Vanderberg Space Station in California is scheduled for November 24 at 1:20 a.m. East Coast time.
The DART spacecraft will have to separate from the rocket and reach the double asteroid Didim-Dimorph in the fall of 2022. The probe is expected to collide with the smaller of them – Dimorph – at a speed of about 25,000 kilometers per hour. As a result, the orbit of Dimorph, which revolves around the larger Didim, will have to deviate “by a fraction of a percent.” Scientists expect that this will be enough to correlate the deviations with telescopes from Earth.
The double asteroid Didim-Dimorph revolves around the Sun and currently does not pose a threat to our planet, although it periodically approaches the Earth. The purpose of the experiment is to develop a technique that will allow experts in the future to change the trajectory of asteroids, if they become really dangerous for the planet.
In 2016, NASA established the Office for the Coordination of Measures to Protect the Earth from Asteroids. As part of this program, it searches for asteroids and comets that could threaten the Earth in orbit within 48 million km of the Earth, collects data on their size, orbits and chemical composition, and analyzes the possible consequences of their fall to Earth.