This past Monday, NASA intentionally crash-landed an un-crewed vending machine-sized spacecraft into the side of an asteroid in order to test our current defensive network should an object of similar size ever threaten to slam into Earth.
In an event that comes across as a mixing up of the classic end-of-the-world drama “Armageddon,” or as the most recent Netflix take on the doomsday story, “Don’t Look Up” — the U.S. space agency expressed a massive bound in planetary defenses for the very first time in recorded history by flinging a spacecraft at an asteroid that has been labeled as Didymos, along with its moonlet Dimorphos.
“We’re embarking on a new era of humankind, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous, hazardous asteroid impact,” explained the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, Lori Glaze, as stated in a report from CNN. “What an amazing thing. We’ve never had that capability before.”
The new NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) officially cemented itself as the planet’s first mission to successfully carry out the testing of technology that would “defend earth against an incoming killer asteroid,” explained NASA’s 14th administrator, Bill Nelson, via a recent video.
“One of our main reasons at NASA that we exist is not only that space is the place,” explained Nelson. “But we also look back at the home planet, and we tried to benefit life here on planet Earth.”
“We only have one home, so we ought to take care of it,” he went on.
Nelson stated that DART would scream out at over 15,000 miles per hour in order to intersect the asteroid potentially as large as an Egyptian pyramid at a distance of almost 7 million miles from the Earth in order to shift its trajectory away from the planet.
DART first went live back in November 2021 with a roughly briefcase-sized CubeSat created by the Italian Space Agency connected to it in order to capture photos and videos of the incident on impact, as expressed by a report from CNN. Images from the vent are slated to be streamed over the course of the coming weeks and months.
Various other space technology that was able to capture the results of the collision included the James Webb Space Telescope, Nasa’s Lucy Mission, and the Hubble Space Telescope.
A report from Space.com stated that neither Dimorphos nor Didymos currently threaten the planet, and the DART mission carried out would not change that fact regardless of its success or its failure.
However, the mission was carried out in order to test a theory and prove that such a technique could be utilized in the prevention of an event when an asteroid threatens Earth.
The Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee chairman, Rep. Don Beyer, labeled the DART mission ” a historic success.”
“The risk of impact from asteroids and other hazardous space objects is low, but the damage would be immense,” expressed Beyer via a social media post directly after the annoucnement of the mission’s success
He concluded by stating that “developing the capability to prevent impact is a key long-term objective.”