25 March 2013

Bring on 2022!



A Spacecraft is smashed into an enormous asteroid measuring 2,625 feet across.  (To put this in perspective,  a professional football field is 360 feet in length.)  Sounds like science fiction, right?  Well, guess again!  At a recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the United States and the European Space Agency began planning to do just that.  They intend to send out a space probe to Asteroid Didymos and crash it into the oncoming rock.  Don't fear, however, the asteroid isn't on a trajectory towards our lovely planet - it will actually take three years for the probe to reach its target which will be 6.8 million miles from Earth.  They are hoping these impacts might break the asteroid apart and send it in alternate directions.  So bring on the year 2022 - I can't wait to see if this works!


No comments: