In Order To Prevent An Asteroid From Hitting The Earth, NASA Plans To Crash Into A Spacecraft

NASA will destroy asteroids that threaten Earth by crashing spacecraft (Scitech Daily)

JAKARTA - NASA is rumored to be crashing its spacecraft to prevent an asteroid from hitting Earth. The plan will be executed in The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

The mission will be released on November 24, 2021, or no later than February 2022. The DART mission aims to deflect the asteroid's direction so it doesn't hit Earth. NASA has a special target, namely an asteroid called Diomorphos.

Diomorphos is the size of a football stadium. The asteroid orbits an even larger asteroid, Didymos. NASA estimates the DART mission to reach its target could take a year.

In addition to NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) is also reported to have a Hera mission aimed at checking whether the DART mission was carried out as planned or not. But the new ESA will run the Hera mission five years later after NASA.

"We did this to have the ability to prevent a truly catastrophic natural disaster", said Tom Statler, one of the scientists on NASA's DART mission citing by Technology Review.

Early simulations of the DART mission led by Harrison Agrusa of the University of Maryland showed that when DART hit Dimorphos, the impact force was equivalent to three tons of TNT explosion. The event is expected to throw thousands of debris into space.

The explosive force will change the rotation of Dimorphos in a few days so that the asteroid loses its balance. However, not much information can be known from the DART mission that will be launched by NASA. Because when the collision occurs, DART is predicted to be shattered into pieces. It seems that Hera's mission from ESA will know for sure what happened.

"It's not as simple as just crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid. There's a lot of physics that we need to understand", said astronomer Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario.