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Protecting Earth From Deadly Asteroids
It’s no longer science fiction but reality
How realistic was the movie Armgegeddon? According to MIT professor Richard Binzel, not very. He’s the inventor of the Torino scale, which assigns a 10-point scale to asteroids. Most of them are in the zero to one range — so they are tiny.
However, in 2013, a 60-foot meteor that landed in Russia injured 1,500 people and damaged thousands of structures.
NASA has decided to get prepared.
On September 26th, after 10 months in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully hit its first target, changing the course of an asteroid in space. This was the agency’s first attempt to do so.
Mission control reported the successful impact at 7:14 p.m., EDT.
DART’s impact on the asteroid, Dimorphos, therefore successfully demonstrated a viable technique to protect the planet from Earth bound asteroids or comets.
Dimorphos was just 530 feet in diameter and was orbiting a larger asteroid, Didymos, over 7 million miles away. Neither asteroid was a threat.
However, the test showed that DART could successfully defend our planet as well as providing a “mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity” according to NASA’s Bill…
