If an asteroid crashes towards Earth, the planet is in danger of catastrophe.
NASA now wants to carry out a test for defense against a possible danger.
Washington - It is an absolute horror scenario: an asteroid falling towards Earth.
However, this month NASA is starting a mission designed to prevent exactly that in an emergency.
With the DART ("Double Asteroid Redirection Test") project, it should be possible to change the course of an asteroid through targeted bombardment.
The mission will start in November 2021.
NASA itself describes the DART mission on its homepage as a "planetary defense-powered test of technologies to prevent a dangerous asteroid from impacting the earth".
It will be the first attempt to change the orbit of an asteroid in space with the targeted impact of a spacecraft.
NASA wants to shoot down asteroid with spaceship: currently no danger to earth
According to NASA, Didymos - the asteroid targeted by DART - currently does not pose a threat to the earth. Rather, it is "a perfect training ground" to practice in an emergency. One wants to test whether the deliberate bombardment of an asteroid with a spaceship "is an effective way to change its course, should an earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future," said the US space agency.
According to NASA, there is no significant risk that an asteroid larger than 140 meters will hit the earth in the next 100 years.
However, only about 40 percent of these asteroids had been discovered by October 2021.
Didymos is significantly larger than the asteroids, which could pose the most likely threat to Earth.
It has a diameter of around 780 meters, its moon is around 160 meters tall.,
NASA wants to shoot down asteroid with spaceship: DART is to change orbit
According to NASA, the DART spacecraft will intentionally collide with the asteroid's moon using an on-board camera and sophisticated autonomous navigation software at a speed of around 6.6 kilometers per second.
The aim is to change the speed of the moon in its orbit around the asteroid by a fraction of one percent.
However, this would change the cycle time by a few minutes.
Enough time to observe and measure the changes from Earth, as announced by the US space agency.
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NASA wants to shoot down asteroid moon - without knowing exactly what it looks like
At a press conference last Thursday (November 5), NASA engineer Elena Adams said, “We can't really predict the angle of impact very well. We only know where and how we will strike. We hit him head-on. And we know where the sun will be at that point in time. ”The angle of impact depends on what the asteroid's moon actually looks like. That will only be found out "in the last 20 seconds" before the impact, said Adams.
The launch window for the DART mission will open on November 24, 2021. The spacecraft will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
After the separation from the launcher and almost a year of travel time, DART is scheduled to hit the Didymos moon in late September 2022.
At that time, the asteroid system will be less than 11 million kilometers from Earth.
This enables NASA to observe the changes in orbit caused by the impact.
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