How dangerous asteroids can be for Earth. NASA revealed the horror.
Space is filled with objects like asteroids, comets, stars, planets, meteors, stars, galaxies and more. There are cases when due to gravity, Earth tends to attract some objects like asteroids and meteorites and they crash into Earth. However, there is no possibility of harm by these objects until and unless they are large, such as the asteroid that killed all dinosaurs. Needless to say, the Earth needs a defense system to prevent any kind of misconduct. NASA has revealed that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago due to an asteroid strike or comet impact on Earth, but also shares another possibility.
“The extinction of the dinosaurs may have occurred 65 million years ago by the impact of an asteroid or comet, but it is also possible that they died from multiple cometary impacts in one to three million years,” the team said. Scientists hypothesize. Dr. Paul Weissman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., one of eight authors of the paper recently published in Nature, the British scientific journal, said. NASA said in a report.
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Therefore, vigilance and preparedness are crucial as any similar attack would destroy the Earth in unpredictable ways and could even lead to the extinction of the human race. Yes, the horror potential is huge.
With this goal in mind, NASA launched the Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission in November 2021. DART is the world’s first planetary defense test mission dedicated to investigation and demonstration. a method of deflecting asteroids by altering the asteroid’s motion through space through kinetic impact.
“DART will show that a spacecraft can automatically navigate to a target asteroid and deliberately collide with it – a method of deflection known as kinematic impact. The test will provide important data to help better prepare for an asteroid that could pose a collision risk to Earth, one that should be discovered or not,” NASA said.
LICIACube, a CubeSat riding with DART provided by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), will be released before the impact of DART to capture images of the collision and the resulting ejected cloud of matter. About four years after the DART impact, the ESA’s Hera (European Space Agency) project will conduct detailed surveys of both asteroids, with a particular focus on the crater caused by the impact of the asteroids. DART leaves and accurately determines the mass of the Dimorphos.
According to one techexplorist’s report, a small fraction of the asteroid population that has survived since the formation of the solar system has undergone numerous collisions, dynamical and thermal events that have shaped their structure and orbital properties. Because impact conditions cannot be reproduced in laboratory experiments, the observed low-intensity, low-gravity impact mode has remained largely unexplored to date. In addition, the very large timescale involved in crater growth (more than a few hours in the case of DART) has made it impossible to simulate numerically these impact processes until now.
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Missions such as JAXA’s Hayabusa2 anthropogenic impact experiment on the surface of asteroid Ryugu, have demonstrated that an asteroid can have a very loose internal structure. However, earlier simulations of the impact of the DART mission assumed a solid interior of its asteroid target Dimorphos.
“This could dramatically change the outcome of the collision of DART and Dimorphos, scheduled for next September,” said study lead author Sabina Raducan from the Institute of Physics and the National Center for Competence. Researcher PlanetS points out, as quoted by techexplorist.
The report adds that in 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) will send a space probe to Dimorphos as part of the HERA space mission. The purpose of the mission was to visually investigate the consequences of the DART exploratory impact.
