Durban - A Nasa spacecraft travelling through outer space will collide with an asteroid in about three days.
DART – Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the name given to the rocket propelling through our cosmos – is the first of its kind, according to Nasa, to undertake a save-the-world experiment.
DART – zipping through space at about 22 000km/h since November – will collide with Dimorphos, a 160m space rock around 30m bigger than the London Eye Ferris wheel, according to NASA.
The $330-million spacecraft was created for the sole purpose of preparation for the day that humanity may have to stop an asteroid from destroying Earth (in case Bruce Willis isn’t alive to save us).
“DART was developed and is managed by APL for Nasa’s Planetary Defense Co-ordination Office. DART is the world's first planetary defence test mission, intentionally executing a kinetic impact into Dimorphos to slightly change its motion in space.”
Dimorphos is currently orbiting another asteroid, and together they form an orbit around the sun, spanning from beyond Mars to just outside Earth’s orbit, according to a report by Mashable.
“While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth, the DART mission will demonstrate that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a kinetic impact on a relatively small target asteroid, and that this is a viable technique to deflect a genuinely dangerous asteroid, if one were ever discovered,” Nasa said.
The rocket and asteroid will collide on September 26.
While traversing the universe, DART also took thousands of images of stars along the way with its Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation, or DRACO.
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