Remember the Armageddon movie? Yes, the movie where a group of astronauts led by Bruce Willis save humanity by preventing a huge asteroid from crashing into Earth, well, now NASA will do the same to prevent a huge asteroid from impacting our planet in 2022.
NASA has been working for a while on this type of mission, all under the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) project, and although they will not send a spacecraft with nuclear warheads to destroy the asteroid, they will send a ship to impact against it. Divert it from its course.
It will be in October 2022 when NASA starts the mission, against ‘(65803) Didymos,’ which is the name with which this asteroid is identified, it is part of a double asteroid system, so they classify it as potentially dangerous.
The mission is to send the DART ship to directly impact Didymos, which has a weight of 500 kilograms, so according to NASA calculations, if DART hits Didymos at a speed of 6 km/s, then it will be enough to divert its course, because it would change the course of the orbit by 0.4 mm, enough to miss our blue planet.
According to NASA, the primary body of Didymos is approximately 800 meters wide, its secondary body (or moon) has a size of 150 meters, which is more typical of the size of the asteroids that could represent a more common danger to Earth.
Likewise, Andy Cheng, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said:
“DART is a planetary defense-driven test of one of the technologies for preventing the Earth impact of a hazardous asteroid: the kinetic impactor. DART’s primary objective is to demonstrate a kinetic impact on a small asteroid. The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target for DART. While Didymos’ primary body is approximately 800 meters across, its secondary body (or “moon”) has a 150-meter size, which is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose a more common hazard to Earth.”
