NASA spacecraft Dart hits asteroid Dimorphos

One of the anticipated dangers from outer space is that a meteor could crash into earth, and cause mass extinction.

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It had happened once 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out. There is also the fear that comets could crash into earth. But that has not happened.It is with this scenario in mind that the United Sates’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which had led space exploration and succeeded in landing human beings on the moon in 1969, had launched a spacecraft Dart to hit the asteroid Dimorphos, which is orbiting a bigger one, Dydimos, which in turn is orbiting around the sun.

These asteroids were not in the way of earth's orbit around the sun. Far from it. But NASA's Dart is an experiment to see how much asteroids which could hit earth can be staved off. The Dart was launched in 2021, and it hit Dimoprhos in 2022 and it altered the orbit of the subsidiary asteroid by 720 metres or 2,360 feet. The Dimorphos' orbit around the sun is 360 million miles. And the Dart hit has dented the time taken by Dimorphos by 0.15 seconds of the 769 days of the asteroid's round trip of the sun.