NASA debuts as 'defender of Earth' against asteroids; Google celebrates with doodle

Earth's first planetary defence technology demonstration, US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully impacted its asteroid target on Monday, after 10 months of flying in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT. This was the US space agency's first attempt to move an asteroid in space and was aimed primarily at crashing to succeed in its mission.

Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator, in a statement, said, "At its core, DART represents an unprecedented success for planetary defence, but it is also a mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity,"

Meanwhile, if you google 'NASA's DART', you will see a cool new doodle appearing in the search results. Google's this animation is to celebrate NASA's successful 'first planetary defence technology demonstration'.

Doing a Google search about NASA's DART mission provides a demo of what happened in space and shows a spacecraft moving over the screen and hitting the desired object, making your screen wobble and tilt a bit.

According to NASA, DART targeted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a small body of 530 feet (160 meters) in diameter, that orbits a larger, 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid called Didymos. NASA also claimed that neither asteroid poses a threat to our home planet.

"As NASA studies the cosmos and our home planet, we're also working to protect that home, and this international collaboration turned science fiction into science fact, demonstrating one way to protect Earth," Nelson added.

The mission of NASA's DART spacecraft was to demonstrate the space agency's planetary defence system, which is designed to smash directly into an asteroid and deflect it away from causing a potential Armageddon-style doomsday collision with Earth.

This mission's one-way trip confirmed also NASA can navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact. The DART spacecraft was launched on November 24, 2021, from the Vandenberg US Space Force Base aboard a SpaceX-owned Falcon 9 rocket. NASA's this mission costs around $330 million (Rs 2,460 crore).

NASA's investigation team will now observe Dimorphos using earth-based telescopes and will see if the DART's impact had altered the asteroid's orbit around Didymos. Researchers expect the impact to shorten Dimorphos' orbit by around 1 per cent or roughly 10 minutes.

In addition to this, the European Space Agency's Hera project will conduct detailed surveys of both Dimorphos and Didymos around four years from now. This project would focus on the crater left by DART's collision and precise measurement of Dimorphos' mass.