In the early hours of Tuesday, Nasa deliberately smashed a £300 million spacecraft into an asteroid in a first-of-its-kind experiment to try and alter the course of a space rock.

In the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact, astronauts save the world by flying to an asteroid and a comet, respectively, and blowing them up with nuclear bombs, thus saving the world.

But, in real life, if a meteorite is set to hit Earth and destroy life as we know it then the solution is likely to be better planned and less dramatic. Nasa’s Dart mission is the first iteration of this planetary defence mechanism.

Dart stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. It was a 1,100lb cube that crashed into Dimorphos – a 525ft-wide “moonlet” orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos — at 00:14am on Tuesday morning.

The asteroid was almost seven million miles away and posed no threat to our planet but was being used as a trial run to see if human technology has the ability to move asteroids away from a collision course with Earth.

Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/09/26/nasa-ready-crash-300m-spacecraft-asteroid/

#dart #nasa #crash #asteroid #mission #space

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