Killer Asteroid hitting Earth in 2022? Here is what NASA says

Since its early days, NASA has been watching over and tracking movement of Asteroids. An asteroid impact has potential to destroy life on an entire planet, hence asteroids have been an object of fear for humans. Currently, NASA is tracking course of several hundreds of asteroids that could potentially be hazardous to human life on Earth. 

For this exact same purpose, NASA has deployed multiple Asteroid watching satellites. ncy also maintains a record of ir movement with help of NASA Asteroid watch data on its official website. Read on to find out about killer asteroid which could potentially hit Earth.

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Killer Asteroid hitting Earth in 2022

Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defence officer said in a statement on its official website, “ first step to stopping a killer asteroid is finding it. re are literally hundreds of thousands of asteroids out re, and we want to separate out those we should keep a closer watch on and monitor over time.”

Johnson revealed that so far, re are 2,078 potentially hazardous asteroids in NASA’s catalogue. In October 2022, a half-mile-wide asteroid called Didymos will approach Earth.

killer asteroid will be accompanied by its 500-foot-wide moon, which will be orbiting it. Given huge size of Didymos and its moon, ground-based telescopes will be able to detect asteroid very soon. y will also be able to detect durational changes in its orbit around larger asteroid to measure effects of impact.

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What does NASA plan to do with killer asteroid?

NASA has scheduled its DART mission, for a July 2021 launch. mission will test NASA’s strategy of slamming a half-ton craft built by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) into approaching killer asteroid. Hence, ncy has planned to take its asteroid shattering craft, seven million miles from Earth. refrigerator-sized craft will approach Didymos.

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However, Didymos will t be on NASA radar. NASA’s DART mission will be eyeing ‘Didymoon.’ Didymoon itself is big eugh to demolish large cities. On official p of NASA’s DART mission, Megan Bruck Syal from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed that just before DART smashes into Didymoon at roughly 14,700 miles an hour, NASA craft will release a shoebox-size camera concocted by Italian ncy. 

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camera will witness craft’s collision with Didymoon. It will take pictures of spray of debris and perhaps even of resulting crater. collision could potentially decrease moon’s 12-hour orbit by as much as seven minutes.

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