Washington: A NASA spacecraft was scheduled to crash into an asteroid early Tuesday in an attempt to test technology to protect Earth against potential dangers from asteroids or comets in the future.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART), the first such mission, was due to impact its target asteroid – which does not pose a threat to Earth – at 7.14 pm on Monday (4.44 am Tuesday IST).
“This test will demonstrate that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and deliberately collide with it to alter the asteroid’s motion in a way that can be measured using ground-based telescopes,” said the US space agency in update.
DART’s target is the twin near-Earth Didymos asteroid system, made up of the roughly 780-meter-diameter Didymos and the smaller, roughly 160-meter-sized Didymos orbiting Didymos.
DART will impact Dimorphos to change its orbit within the binary system, and the DART investigation team will compare DART’s kinetic impact results to the asteroid for extremely detailed computer simulations of kinetic asteroid impacts, according to NASA.
“This will assess the effectiveness of this mitigation approach and assess how best to apply it to future planetary defense scenarios, as well as how accurate the computer simulations are and how well they reflect the behavior of a real asteroid,” the space agency added. agency.
DART will provide important data to help better prepare for an asteroid that could pose a threat to Earth if one is ever discovered.