NASA and the European Space Agency want to ram into an asteroid in a bid to save humanity from a “Deep Impact”-style catastrophe.
They want to see whether it’s possible to deflect a space rock from its course as part of a planetary defense mission.
Fears over potentially deadly asteroids are at an all time high after the White House issued an “emergency defense plan” in the event of a collision late last year.
Esteemed British astrophysicist and cosmologist Lord Martin Rees recently warned that the government should be spending “millions” on planetary defense.
The proposed mission will use two spacecraft, one to be launched by the ESA in 2020 and the other by NASA in 2021.
The first spaceship, dubbed AIM (for Asteroid Impact Mission) will orbit around 65803 Didymos, which was discovered in 1996.
The NASA spacecraft, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) will be timed to hit the rock a few months later, at a speed of nearly four miles per second.
AIM’s telescopes will monitor where stray pieces of rock end up.
The mission is to figure out whether deflection is the best defense from a stray space rock.
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http://nypost.com/2017/03/24/nasa-to-slam-a-spaceship-into-an-asteroid-for-practice/Try it and see engineering at it's best. I approve. ^-^
