Since Bruce Willis can’t live forever,NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are trying to come up with a new solution to take out asteroids on a collision course with Earth. What have they come up with so far?The most American solution next to giving it diabetes…they’re just going to smash something into it.
More than 130 scientists recently met in Rome and they decided to try slamming a spacecraft into a near-Earth asteroid to study how feasible it might be for humans to push an asteroid off trajectory. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a half-ton chunk of metal launches July 2021 its goal is to hit a “moonlet” orbiting the asteroid 65803 Didymos.
The trip will take DART 16-months and it will be coming in hot since they estimate it’ll make impact going 14,700 miles per hour. If it works, it will be the first time in history humans will have changed the trajectory of a space-based object and they better get video, because it sounds badass!
Source:Technology Review