The US space agency’s experiment, scheduled for the early hours of Monday, is aimed at assessing whether an asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth can be deflected.
NASA spacecraft will collide with the asteroid at dawn on Monday.
DART, short for “Dual Asteroid Redirection Test”, will encounter a space rock after launching 10 months ago. ship crash into the moon an asteroid to see how it affects the movement of this cosmic body.
The mission is heading towards Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the asteroid Didymos. The asteroid system poses no threat to Earth, NASA says, making it an ideal target for a kinetic impact test, which could be necessary if one day an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.
The event will be the first large-scale demonstration of sabotage technologies capable of protecting the planet. Collision is expected at 00:14 Monday.
At this time, Dimorphos will be relatively close to the Earth – within a radius of 11 million kilometers. In a collision with an asteroid, the spacecraft will accelerate to 24,140 kilometers per hour.
“For the first time, we will significantly change the orbit of a celestial body in the universe,” said Robert Brown, head of space science at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.