Asteroids are pretty scary. They're basically giant hunks of rock, bigger than countries sometimes, capable of wiping out a planet. They get a lot scarier when the planet in their path is our tiny blue marble Earth. So NASA is testing out a way to keep these world-enders at bay.
ESA
NASA has been planning a project with the European Space Agency (ESA), that it calls the Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART). DART is basically a practice run for a futuristic asteroid defense grid for Earth. It basically involves us chucking a fast-moving projectile at an incoming asteroid in order to safely direct it away from the planet.
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For DART specifically, the target is an asteroid known as Didymos and a much smaller rock orbiting it called Didymoon. Neither of these are really a threat to us, as they'll be about 1.12 crore kilometres away when the test run occurs. Which is exactly why they were chosen, given that we should be safe from even a disastrous outcome.
For context, Didymoon is about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It will actually be the smallest ever visited by a man-made probe, but it's still capable of wreaking havoc across a wide swathe of Earth if it were to hit. But if this test goes well, NASA and ESA can scale up to try knocking even larger asteroids out of their orbits.
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The spacecraft to do this will be launched between 2020 and 2021, and is expected to smack into Didymoon in October 2022. Once that's done, the ESA probe Hera will launch to the two asteroids years later and determine how successful the course correction was.
"We will better understand whether this technique can be used even for larger asteroids, giving us certainty we could protect our home planet if needed," ESA's Hera project scientist Michael K¨¹ppers explained in a statement.
If it fails though, we don't really have any other fallback options yet. Anybody have a giant laser?