"Stray" space projectiles threaten to destroy planet Earth and humanity
The word asteroids means meteorites and other celestial bodies that penetrate the Earth's atmosphere and fall to Earth, and may cause severe destruction at the sites of their fall.
NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is particularly interested in asteroids that are larger than 140 meters and have the potential to flatten entire cities or regions, as their impact energy exceeds the energy of a nuclear bomb.
There are 10,000 asteroids classified as “Near-Earth Objects” with a size of 140 meters or more, but there is no possibility that any of them will collide with Earth within the next 100 years. But experts warn that there are still 15,000 additional similar objects waiting to be discovered.
Planetary scientists can create miniature effects in laboratories and use the results to produce complex models of how an asteroid deflects an asteroid's path, but their levels are always below real-world tests.
In a remarkable development, the US space agency NASA began an unprecedented mission by launching a spacecraft to collide with an asteroid. The "historic" step aims to avoid the Earth from the risk of a space object colliding with it.
Scientists say the Didymos-Dimorphos system is an "ideal natural laboratory" because ground-based telescopes can be used to judge the time it takes the smaller moon to orbit around the larger moon.
The Dart spacecraft is a box the size of a large refrigerator equipped with solar panels.
The spacecraft also includes advanced navigation and imaging tools, including the Italian Space Agency's "Light Italian CubeSat" for photographing asteroids with the aim of watching the collision process and its subsequent effects.
NASA scientist participating in this mission, Tom Statler, said in a press conference that this test “will be historic,” noting that “humanity will for the first time change the movement of a natural space body in space.”
This method used in the Dart mission is not the only method to divert an asteroid, but it is the only technique that is ready to work with current technology.
Another method that has been hypothesized is for a spacecraft to fly near the asteroid to send out a small gravitational force. There is also resort to a nuclear explosion close to the asteroid but not on it, as happened in the films “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact,” which is a technology that could potentially produce many dangerous objects.
Scientists estimate that asteroids measuring 140 meters in size hit Earth once every 20,000 years. As for asteroids approximately 10 kilometers wide, such as those that collided with Earth 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of most life on Earth, including dinosaurs, they collide with Earth approximately every 100 to 200 million years.
Source: websites