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NASA will intentionally crash DART spacecraft into asteroid in attempt to change its orbit

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — NASA will intentionally crash a spacecraft into a small asteroid in the name of planetary defense.

At around 7:15 p.m. Monday, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test will collide with a near-Earth asteroid called Dimorphos in an attempt to change its speed and direction around its larger neighbor, Didymos.

DART is a demonstration to test if humanity could redirect an asteroid if needed, says Dr. Tom Statler, NASA planetary defender and DART program scientist.

“We have a planetary defense coordination office at NASA and our job is to find and track all of the potentially dangerous asteroids in our solar system and to come up with ways to mitigate that natural hazard — and that’s what we’re doing with DART. We’re testing a technology that can one day be used to deflect an asteroid impact on Earth if we ever discover an asteroid that is really a danger.”

By giving a future asteroid a nudge, NASA could move it enough off course that it misses a collision point with the Earth, Statler says.

“The Hollywood version is, we discover the asteroid with barely any time to spare and then there’s this heroic effort to deflect it. What we’re really trying to do is to discover the potentially dangerous asteroids years and years in advance. And an asteroid is only dangerous if its orbit around the sun intersects with Earth’s orbit around the sun — and there’s only a danger where those two paths intersect with each other.

“We’re trying to find the asteroids that can have that intersection, project forward and predict those collisions, and then learn to give an asteroid a nudge.”

After the impact, astronomers will monitor the orbit of Dimorphos to see if DART successfully changed the asteroid’s motion in space.

Statler says Monday’s test poses no danger to the Earth. Dimorphos and Didymos, which make up what’s called a binary asteroid, are about seven million miles away from earth.

“In the case of DART, the asteroid that we’re doing the test on is not dangerous, and there’s absolutely nothing that we can do to it that would make it dangerous.”

Visit NASA’s DART page for more mission information.