Space agency to cause collision with Dimorphos to avert sci-fi fears of catastrophic impact with Earth
controllers will deliberately crash their $330m Dart robot spacecraft into an asteroid. The half-tonne probe will be travelling at more than four miles a second when it strikes its target, Dimorphos, and will be destroyed.
“Dart’s target has been carefully chosen,” said Jay Tate, director of the National Near Earth Objects Information Centre in Knighton, Powys. “Dimorphos actually orbits another, bigger asteroid called Didymos, and the extent of the deflection caused by the crash will be easier to detect as astronomers have been carefully observing its path around the bigger asteroid.”
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in Don’t Look Up, a film about two astronomers who try to warn about a comet heading for Earth.“We know where the big asteroids are because we can see them with our current generation of telescopes, and we know none of the detected asteroids are coming anywhere near our planet for the next couple of hundred years or so. So we can rest easy in our beds about those ones,” added Fitzsimmons.
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