Washington, Nov 20,2021: NASA and SpaceX set Tuesday night as a launch date for a spacecraft designed to hit an asteroid and test if it is an effective way to respond to such threats.
“Targeting Tuesday, November 23 at 10:21 pm PT [Pacific Time] for Falcon 9’s launch of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test [DART],” SpaceX said via Twitter on Friday. “NASA will intentionally crash the DART spacecraft into an asteroid to see if that is an effective way to change its course, should an Earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future.”
The DART mission will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the US state of California.
The spacecraft is set to hit the smaller asteroid of the two-asteroid system Didymos and change its trajectory through kinetic impact.
The diameter of the smaller asteroid, known as Dimporphos, is about 160 meters (530 feet) while the larger is about 780 meters, but they pose no threat to Earth. The size of the DART is hundreds of times smaller than Dimorphos and will hit it at the speed of 24,000 kilometers per hour (14,900 miles per hour).
