Explanation:
Could humanity deflect an asteroid headed for Earth?
Yes.
Deadly impacts from large
asteroids have happened before in
Earth's past,
sometimes causing
mass extinctions of life.
To help protect our Earth from some
potential future impacts, NASA tested a new planetary defense
mechanism yesterday by crashing the robotic
Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into
Dimorphos,
a small asteroid spanning about 170-meters across.
As shown in the
featured video,
the impact was a success.
Ideally, if impacted early enough, even the kick from a
small spacecraft can deflect a large
asteroid enough to
miss the Earth.
In the video,
DART is seen in a time-lapse video first passing larger
Didymos, on the left,
and then approaching the smaller
Dimorphos.
Although the video ends abruptly with DART's crash,
observations monitoring the changed orbit of Dimorphos -- from
spacecraft
and telescopes around the world --
have just
begun.
