Hey, want to watch NASA beat up an asteroid?
NASA successfully launched a spacecraft into an asteroid last night in an attempt to change its orbit
NASA has just accomplished something extraordinary. Last night, as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) program, it smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, potentially altering the course of such an object for the first time in our species’ history. It also, we are happy to say, filmed the event from the perspective of the craft, which means we get to enjoy not just the knowledge that humanity’s capable of such incredible feats, but also the simple pleasure of watching a piece of sophisticated technology beat up an asteroid.
Mashable’s Elisha Sauers detailed the test in an article that calls the Dimorphos asteroid collision “the first time in history humans have attempted to alter the path of an asteroid.” The now-destroyed craft, which wasn’t named because, as Sauers puts it, it was “like an animal raised for slaughter,” was about “the size of a vending machine” and smacked into Dimorphos “at 14,000 mph.”
The video tweeted out by NASA is taken from a feed that “almost unfolded in real-time, with perhaps just a 45-second delay, delivering an extreme closeup of an event happening 6.8 million miles away.” It shows Dimorphos’ surface getting closer and closer until, at the last moment, the feed cuts like a found footage horror movie’s conclusion as the craft meets its end by rapidly headbutting the asteroid.
DART is part of NASA’s planetary defense work and is meant to help us figure out how to swat away asteroids in the rare event that they do a better job of threatening our planet than our species is capable of on our own. “… whether DART was truly a triumph, able to shove the asteroid off its trajectory, won’t be known for some time,” Sauers writes. “It could take up to two months to confirm.”
Its success would be a good thing for humanity’s long-term safety, though it will also, we regret to inform all skyward-looking oil drillers, potentially mean that the plot of Armageddon will never play out in real life.
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