NASA plans to destroy an asteroid by crashing a spacecraft in 2022

Credits: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

It might sound like the story of a Hollywood movie, but American space agency NASA will collide a spacecraft with an asteroid in reality in 2022 to crush it. Through this, NASA will first demonstrate the celestial defense technique of destroying a space object before it collides with the Earth. NASA gave this information in a statement on Thursday.

NASA said, the double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will get a very little amount of time to penetrate the asteroid. During this test, the smaller moon (Didymos B) will be targeted in the binary asteroid system named Didymos. However, NASA has made it clear that this asteroid does not have any threat to the Earth and it has been fixed as a target only for the testing of technology. To remind, many small moon-like objects in our solar system rotate around a common  barycenter forming binary systems.

According to NASA, this mission will be launched in 2021. DART will use the power of solar energy to penetrate the Didymos moonlet. While conducting this operation, it will be specially taken care that Didymos remains at least 11 million km away from the earth.