The series of events that brought us to this particular point in human history can be traced back to 1998, when an astronomy institute issued an alert about a recently discovered asteroid that looked like it could hit in 2028. But here we are, throwing a spacecraft the size of a vending machine at an asteroid as big as Egypt’s Great Pyramid. It’s a weirdly godlike power move-you know, shifting heaven and earth for our own purposes. In some ways, it’s kind of rude? A bunch of “star stuff,” as Carl Sagan called us, has become sentient and smart enough to interfere with orbital mechanics and change, on a small scale, the nature of its solar system. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART for short, marks humanity’s first-ever attempt to change the orbit of an asteroid. NASA punched that asteroid for the sake of science.
That mission was designed to collect some of those rocks and return them to Earth so that scientists might better understand how nature shaped the solar system and gave our planet its oceans. Last year, a probe touched down on an asteroid’s surface and blasted it with nitrogen gas to stir up rocks. This would not be the first time a NASA spacecraft has bumped into an asteroid just minding its own business. Read: A handful of asteroid could help decipher our entire existence Afterward, scientists will observe the shift with telescopes on Earth to determine whether this technique could work to protect our planet from a real cosmic threat. The impact is expected to change the orbit of the asteroid ever so slightly. (What did this particular asteroid ever do to us? Nothing-but NASA needs a test subject.) In September 2022, with the asteroid in its sights, the probe will line itself up and then- bam!-smash right into the unsuspecting rock at nearly 15,000 miles an hour. The spacecraft will now spend months zooming toward an asteroid millions of miles from Earth. So this week, just before Thanksgiving, NASA launched a space mission to test technology that could, someday, help humanity deflect a dangerous asteroid barreling its way. (If you want to worry about extinction, consider the extinctions brought on by climate change and other negative repercussions of our presence here on Earth.)īut it helps to be prepared for these kinds of scenarios, and luckily there are people for whom thinking about them is a full-time job. The chance that a known asteroid big enough to really do damage-or, you know, imperil our entire existence-will strike the planet in the next 100 years is insignificant. The last thing anyone needs to think about right now is a catastrophic asteroid impact.Īnd, thankfully, most of us don’t have to! Earth is not in immediate threat of a space rock.
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