NASA began its mission for the “Double Asteroid Redirection Test” on Monday, which saw the DART spacecraft intentionally crash into the Dimorphos asteroid. The mission was intended to serve as a test to see whether the space agency will be able to protect Earth from flying asteroids should the planet face an Armageddon-type scenario, according to Axios.
“It’s quite frankly the first time that we are able to demonstrate that we have not only the knowledge of the hazards posed by these asteroids and comets that are left over from the formation of the solar system, but also have the technology that we could deflect one from a course inbound to impact the Earth,” Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA, said last week during a press conference.
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Dimorphos, which has a diameter of approximately 160 meters (equal to 530 feet), orbits the much larger asteroid Didymos with a diameter of 780 meters (equal to 2,560 feet). Neither asteroid is currently a threat to Earth, according to the agency.
In the situation in which an asteroid is making its way to Earth, the flying projectile would not be able to be shot down hours ahead of its expected impact. The average speed of an asteroid is 12 miles per second, meaning no weapon could shoot it down ahead of impact, the agency stated.
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In 2013, an asteroid that crashed near Chelyabinsk, Russia, carried somewhere between 20 to 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb dropped in World War II. The asteroid caused a shock wave that broke windows, knocked down parts of buildings in six Russian cities, and left 1,500 people seeking medical attention, according to EarthSky.
NASA predicts that an object similar to the Chelyabinsk asteroid striking Earth would only happen once or twice every century, and that impacts of larger objects can be expected to occur even less frequently. However, the agency is still searching for other near-Earth objects, meaning an asteroid could unexpectedly strike the planet.
