Even if Earth is alone in the void of space, it is not entirely alone when it comes to visitors arriving from beyond the solar system. Most of these visitors are relics from the solar system’s formation. About 66 million years ago, one of these remnants slammed Earth, eradicating dinosaurs from the globe.
Asteroids are among these objects, which we refer to as Near Earth Objects (NEO). Five of them made a so-called planetary flyby of Earth just last week. Although none of these objects posed a threat to us, one might be headed in our direction in the future.
Nasa, which tracks these outer space objects, wants to be ready to hit them back and is set to test a technology that will deflect these incoming asteroids if one dared to in the future.
The technology is already its route to the asteroid, where it will purposefully collide in order to test a kinetic impactor technique to slightly alter the asteroid’s orbit. It is known as DART.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is a pioneering spacecraft created to test a novel technique for diverting an asteroid that is headed towards Earth and has a good probability of hitting the planet. The asteroid will be purposely struck by the spaceship in order to alter its kinetic impact motion in space.
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