Today, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, has announced that it has received the first signals from DART Mission.
The Aeronautics and Space agency shared the information via its Twitter site earlier this morning. The Twitter post reads:
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission was launched by NASA today, Wednesday, 24th November with one simple mission: Smash into an asteroid at 15,000 miles per hour.
The DART mission was launched from Earth to see if crashing a spaceship into an asteroid could nudge it into an alternative orbit. If the test is successful, the results will be useful if NASA and other space organizations ever need to deflect an asteroid to rescue Earth from a disastrous collision.
The spacecraft will make nearly one complete circle around the sun after launch before colliding with Dimorphos. This football-field-sized asteroid orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The two asteroids are known as binary systems because one is a mini-moon to the other. Every two years, the two asteroids complete one full orbit around the sun.
DART will be a confirmed weapon in NASA’s planetary defense arsenal if everything goes according to plan. Should another asteroid come close to colliding with Earth, the world’s space agencies would be confident that an asteroid missile-like DART would be able to deflect the space rock.
According to NASA’s administrator, Bill Nelson, who speaks about the mission stated thus:
DART “is something of a replay of Bruce Willis’s movie, ‘Armageddon,’ although that was totally fictional.”
