![]() ![]() “Had that object entered the atmosphere a mere 20km further north than it did, it would have done much greater damage to the city,” said Tate. Thought to have been 20 metres in diameter, it exploded in the atmosphere, triggering a 400 kiloton blast that injured more than 1,500 people. “We don’t want to be in a situation where an asteroid is headed toward Earth and then have to be testing this kind of capability.”Īn example of the danger posed by small asteroids and comets is provided by the rocky object that penetrated Earth’s atmosphere near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on 15 February 2013. It is a point backed by Nasa’s planetary defence officer, Lindley Johnson, who stressed the importance of developing asteroid deflection technology as soon as possible. However, astronomers believe it is unlikely we will experience such catastrophic impacts in real life in the near future. Since then, films such as Don’t Look Up, Armageddon and Deep Impact have depicted similar devastation being triggered by asteroid or comet crashes in modern times. The collision created a blast that had the energy of several billion atomic bombs and led to the destruction of 75% of all plant and animals species, including all land-based dinosaurs. The best known collision occurred 66 million years ago when a 10 km wide asteroid struck Chicxulub in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Impacts by asteroids and comets have had big effects on life on Earth in the past. “Dimorphos actually orbits another, bigger asteroid called Didymos, and the extent of the deflection caused by the crash will be easier to detect as astronomers have been carefully observing its path around the bigger asteroid.” “Dart’s target has been carefully chosen,” said Jay Tate, director of the National Near Earth Objects Information Centre in Knighton, Powys. By carefully studying the asteroid’s path after the collision, scientists believe they will better understand how similar collisions could be used to deflect Earth-bound asteroids and comets. ![]() Launched last November, the probe is scheduled to strike its target in the early hours of 27 September, BST. That is the purpose of Dart,” said Fitzsimmons, a member of the science team for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission. “The problem is that we have never tested the technology which will be needed to do that. “These impacts are a natural process and they are going to happen in the future. “We know asteroids have hit us in the past,” said Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast. ![]()
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