To train to save the earth, NASA is about to deviate an asteroid

Like many rocky objects of the solar system, the earth carries the scars of ancient asteroid impacts, and more particularly of a few shells that have shaped the evolution of life itself.About 66 million years ago, an asteroid almost 10 kilometers long, for example struck the Yucatán peninsula, in Mexico, and caused mass extinction that decimated all non -avian dinosaurs.

For the first time in its history, the earth has decided to retaliate.

On November 23, at 10:21 pm Pacific time, NASA inaugurated the DART mission (Double asteroid deviation test).From the Vandenberg space base in California, the agency has launched a probe that will embark for a trip of almost a year around the sun.If everything goes as planned, the Dart journey will end on September 26, 2022 in the evening, when this probe the size of a golf cart will strike with all its might a small asteroid that suspects nothing: Dimorphos.

Dimorphos is only a harmless cosmic potato, a "telescope" 165 meters in diameter which orbits every 11 hours and 55 minutes around its big brother, the asteroid Didymos.Dart's goal is to go crash on Dimorphos at around 24,000 km/h and divert the trajectory of this little moon.The name Dimorphos, which means "two forms" in Greek, has been chosen because the asteroid will have a shape before the impact and another after.