The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has successfully completed the launch of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, CNN reported.
The mission was launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket at 1:21 am ET from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The target of the mission is a small moon, Dimorphos which is 525 feet (160 m) in diameter, orbiting a near-Earth asteroid called Didymos. The mission is expected to crash in September 2022.
According to numbers released by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), there are over 27,000 asteroids that humankind knows of, whose orbits are close to that of the Earth. Of these, a little over 2,200 are classified as “potentially hazardous.” Although none of these are currently headed towards Earth, it just takes one rock to destroy a city and even eliminate a species in a moment.
