NASA Just Launched a Spacecraft to Crash Into an Asteroid and Change Its Trajectory

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.

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