At the end of last month, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reported on a historic event – engineers managed to send a special device into space that crashed into an asteroid at high speed, thanks to which scientists managed to successfully change the orbit of this cosmic body. Initially, there were only assumptions that a man-made spacecraft would be able to “move” a large asteroid from its orbit, but today, October 12, NASA officially confirmed that the asteroid’s orbit had been changed. And this is certainly great news for humanity.
A NASA-designed strike spacecraft called DART crashed at high speed (23,000 km / h) into the lunar asteroid Dimorphus from the Didymos asteroid system, thanks to which it was possible to change the trajectory of its movement around the parent asteroid – now the child asteroid needs thirty minutes less to complete a full cycle of rotation. Of course, this is not the largest asteroid in space, plus the change in the trajectory is not so impressive that we can talk about significant progress in this direction. But scientists see great potential for the future in this event.
The fact is that the planet Earth periodically has to face various kinds of threats from outer space – some time ago, for example, the fall of an asteroid led to the extinction of dinosaurs. And earlier, scientists and NASA had no way to counter such an impressive threat – to get to the asteroid to plant a bomb, and then blow it up, as in the movie “Armageddon”, until it comes out with all the will. But the use of space weapons in the format of a percussion apparatus capable of changing the trajectory of a space body may well work.
For example, if one DART impactor is not enough to shift the orbit of a large asteroid moving directly towards planet Earth, NASA can use several DARTs at once. Or you can create a larger spacecraft to accelerate it to a higher speed. In addition, it is worth noting that NASA scientists initially expected more modest results – deviations from the orbit by 30 minutes are 25 times higher than the original expectations, so now we can say that the Earth is under reliable protection.
Source: Trash Box
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