It’s only a matter of time until a Chicxulub 2.0 impactor will pose a threat to Earth and to all of its life forms. That’s how the dinosaurs got extinct about 60 million years ago. Many astronomers and scientists, in general, agree that the scenario could repeat itself. We all hope that such an event will happen as far into the future as possible when humanity would be so technologically advanced that nothing that comes from outer space could pose a threat.
The good news is that space agencies are already looking for ideas to overcome an asteroid or comet big enough to destroy the human race. NASA has always been one of those agencies, and it’s now up for the real deal.
The DART Mission spacecraft will launch in July 2021
The Jerusalem Post writes that NASA along with the Applied Physics Laboratory from John Hopkins University, developed the DART Mission, meaning the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. The spaceship will collide with an asteroid head-on to change its trajectory.
At the moment, no known asteroid or comet jeopardizes the existence of life on Earth, but DART still remains a highly important mission. NASA calls the technology involved the ‘kinetic impactor’ technique.
A Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX will carry NASA’s spacecraft into space, and the first test will be in the Didymos asteroid system on September 2022.
Andy Rivkin, the DART investigation team leader, declared:
Up until now, we haven’t had too many options for what we might do if we found something that was incoming.
He also added:
DART is the first test of how we might be able to deflect something without having to resort to a nuclear package – or sitting in our basements, waiting it out and crossing our fingers.
NASA even stated recently that our planet is completely safe from any asteroid impacts for the next century, but let’s not forget that the Universe is far too large for us humans to grasp.
