NASA has launched the world’s first “full-scale mission” to test asteroid-deflecting technology in hopes of protecting Earth from potential “Armageddon.”
The space agency said in a statement the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) lifted off late Tuesday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vanderberg Space Force Base in California.
The mission of the $330 million project is to slam into a 530-foot asteroid, Dimorphos, at about 15,000 mph in late September 2022 to test a potential method of defense against potentially catastrophic asteroid or comet hazards.
The project is “something of a replay of Bruce Willis’ movie, ‘Armageddon,’ although that was totally fictional,” NASA’s administrator, Bill Nelson, told the New York Times.
In the 1998 Michael Bay film, Willis and Ben Affleck starred as oil drillers on a space mission to destroy a giant asteroid on a collision course with the earth.
Scientists estimate DART’s impact into Dimorphos — which orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos — will shorten its path around the bigger space rock by several minutes. --->READ MORE HERE
Taking aim at a distant asteroid, SpaceX fired a small NASA probe into space early Wednesday, setting up a head-on 15,000 mph impact next September to test the feasibility of nudging a threatening body off course long before it could crash into Earth.
The $330 million Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, the first test flight in a NASA planetary defense initiative, "will be historic," said Tom Statler, mission program scientist at NASA Headquarters. "For the first time, humanity will change the motion of a natural celestial body in space."
Perched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the DART mission blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base northwest of Los Angeles at 10:21 p.m. PST Tuesday (1:21 a.m. EST Wednesday), lighting up the deep overnight sky as the booster climbed away atop 1.7 million pounds of thrust.
Arcing to the south over the Pacific Ocean, the Falcon 9 smoothly powered out of the dense lower atmosphere and into space. Fifty-five minutes after liftoff, after two firings by the rocket's second stage engine — and spectacular on-board camera views of Earth receding in the background — the DART spacecraft was released to fly on its own. --->READ MORE HEREFollow link below to related stories:
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