Why is Nasa slamming a £300m spacecraft into an asteroid 7 million miles from Earth? 🔎 BawdenTom explains:
– a 525ft-wide “moonlet” circling a larger asteroid called Didymos – to see if it can be knocked off its course.While this asteroid poses no threat to our plane, the aim of the mission is to demonstrate that dangerous incoming rocks can be deflected by deliberately smashing into them.
Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, from Queen’s University Belfast, who is a member of the Dart investigation team, said if the mission is successful, it will give us “our first proof that technology can prevent a small asteroid hitting Earth”. Professor Fitzsimmons says: “Asteroids the size of Dimorphos or larger hit our planet only once every 35,000 years or so, but we only know what a small fraction of them are. So one could be heading our way in the near future, and smaller asteroids hit us much more frequently.”
A Nasa spokesperson added: “Dart’s target asteroid is not a threat to Earth but is the perfect testing ground to see if this method of asteroid deflection – known as the kinetic impactor technique – would be a viable way to protect our planet if an asteroid on a collision course with Earth were discovered in the future.”Rocks 140m and larger and that come nearer than 4.7 million miles during orbit are classed as potentially hazardous asteroids .
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