Epi 76: How NASA sent a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid

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If you remember the tales about why dinosaurs went extinct, one of the common stories is that a meteorite crashed into earth. Some scientists in NASA who were thinking about this story were curious to see if we could avoid such a fate, if a meteorite came crashing into earth. And humans might become extinct. In this episode, 10-year Aarav from Emerald Heights school, Indore, describes NASA’s daring mission into space.

For the first time ever, humans sent a spacecraft to move the path of a celestial body. The celestial body was an asteroid called Dimorphus. The spacecraft was called the DART mission. This spacecraft, which was the size of a giant refrigerator flying into space with two light sabres coming out of it, rammed into the asteroid. And yippee! the mission was a success. The asteroid’s path was changed.

Before you ask, this asteroid posed NO threat to earth. This was just a simple experiment to find if spacecrafts could change the orbit of asteroids. So, we can be prepared for an actual collision course reaction.

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