NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully collides with an asteroid to deflect it

Image of the Dimorphic asteroid photographed by the DART probe seconds before impactNASAIn the coming weeks it will be seen if the orbit of the asteroid has been modifiedIt is the first foreign defense mission carried out by NASAThe asteroid is the size of a football field and was 11 million kilometers from Earth At 1:14 in the morning the engineers responsible for the DART probe jumped for joy. They had lost contact with the ship. Which meant that it had fulfilled its ‘kamikaze’ mission: Impact with the asteroid Dimorphos. The 500-kilogram spacecraft was traveling at 2,500 kilometers per hour and collided with the cosmic rock 160 meters in diameter, about the size of a football field. The objective was to modify its orbit and trajectory. The asteroid was not a threat to Earth. Dimorphos was more than 11 million kilometers from our planet, but the mission has served as a test. NASA wants to test whether the trajectory of an asteroid can be modified and thus avoid possible asteroid impacts that could destroy entire areas of the Earth. It is the first mission of this type carried out by NASA and, as usual, it has transmitted it live on your social networks. “We are showing that the defense of our planet is a global task and it is very possible to save the planet,” said Bill Nelson, the head of NASA. “Tonight, NASA will crash an unmanned spacecraft into an asteroid. purpose. Yes, they are reading correctly. And it is not the script of a movie”, said the director of NASA, Bill Nelson, shortly before the start of the mission. He wasn’t but he looked like it. Only Bruce Willis was missing. In the images you can see how the ship approaches the asteroid and its rocky surface can be seen clearly. After the signal has been lost, which implies the DART probe has been able to impact. In the coming weeks it will be seen if it has fulfilled its mission and has managed to divert the rock from its trajectory. Objective: to protect the Earth NASA has calculated that there are currently some 20,000 space rocks that could impact our planet, 5,000 of them potentially dangerous. They are asteroids that exceed 140 meters in diameter and that are located less than ten million kilometers from Earth. Although the Space Agency assures that none of them poses a real danger to our planet at least in the next 50 years, the The DART mission has served as a test to see if we could avoid a possible impact of these rocks and create a kind of anti-asteroid shield.