The Earth has been hit before by asteroids and will be again someday. Though the Earth is in no immediate danger, an asteroid’s impact can cause global disaster if it hit the Earth.
To defend the Earth against asteroids headed our way, NASA has hit an Asteroid in the first-ever planetary defense test.
It was the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space
After almost ten months of flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed on an asteroid to test the world’s first unique defense technology.
DART successfully impacted 530 feet (160 meters) wide Deimorpos, a moonlet of the Didymos asteroid at a blistering speed of 15,000 mi per hour on Monday, 26th Sep. Dimorphos was about 6.8 million miles from Earth at the time of DART’s impact.
The $344 million spacecraft crashed into the asteroid to nudge it into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space-rock.
The impact might one day give us a fighting chance if a killer asteroid ever heads our way
The spacecraft’s cameras and telescopes including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble telescope tracked the spacecraft to capture images of DART’s impact.
But it could take a few weeks or more to see the impact and verify the moonlet’s tweaked orbit.
