NASA to launch “Armageddon” style mission to purposefully crash into an asteroid moon and test “planetary defense”

NASA’s next mission might look like a scene from a sci-fi disaster movie. The agency said on Sunday it was sending a spacecraft above Earth crashing into an asteroid moon to alter the body’s trajectory.

The mission, a Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will be the agency’s first use of the kinetic impactor technique, in which a large, high-speed spacecraft is sent into the path of an asteroid to modify its movement. NASA is to conduct the mission, what it calls “the first planetary defense test,” on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, to strike the near-Earth binary asteroid Didymos and its moon, Dimorphos.

The asteroid is about 780 meters in diameter, or about 2,559 feet, according to NASA. Its moon is around 525 feet, which NASA says is “more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the greatest threat to Earth.”

The DART spacecraft will crash into the near-frontal moon at about 6.6 kilometers per second, a speed that is faster than a bullet and fast enough to change the moon’s speed by a fraction of 1 percent, according to The NASA. Although it appears to be a small change, this impact will alter the moon’s orbital period by several minutes.

DART will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but it won’t crash into the asteroid’s moon for 10 months. NASA has said it will sail in space until September 2022, when the Didymos system is less than 11 million kilometers from Earth.

The mission is reminiscent of the 1998 sci-fi action movie “Armageddon”, in which the space agency deploys a team of civilians to land on an asteroid and detonate it before it destroys Earth. Although the basic idea of ​​the film is similar, NASA has said that neither Didymos nor Dimorphos pose a threat to Earth. This particular mission, according to the agency, is intended to allow scientists to calculate the effectiveness of DART missions.

The distance from Earth that the asteroid and its moon will be at the time of the collision is close enough that telescopes can observe what is happening.