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NASA is a page from the action movie “Armageddon” – launching a spaceship to hit the moon from an asteroid in a test to deflect a space rock threatening our planet.
The Space Agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is scheduled to take off at 1:20 a.m. EST on November 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The planetary defense mission is expected to have an impact between September 26 and October 2, 2022 – hitting its target at nearly 15,000 mph, 6.8 million miles from Earth, officials said.
Live coverage of the launch will air on NASA TV, the agency’s app and website.
“DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique, which involves sending one or more large spacecraft at high speed on the path of an asteroid in space to alter its motion,” said NASA.
“Its target is the near-Earth binary asteroid Didymos and its moon,” he added.
The Planetary Defense Coordination Office is handling the mission, which involves sending a pair of satellites to the relatively nearby Didymos, which is about 2,600 feet in diameter and its moon 525 feet wide, according to Tech Crunch.
“So far, we haven’t had too many options for what we might do if we find something to come up,” Johns Hopkins planetary astronomer Andy Rivkin recently told Vice News.
“DART is the first test of how we might be able to deflect something without having to resort to a nuclear package, or just sitting in our basements, waiting for it and crossing our fingers,” he said. added.
The Italian space agency is collaborating with the Light Italian CubeSat for Imagine Asteroids, or LICIACube, which will observe “the mess we make”, as Rivkin put it.
Terrestrial humans will also be able to capture the action with very powerful telescopes.
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