Published 17:32 IST, September 28th 2020
Killer Asteroid hitting Earth in 2022? Here is what NASA says
NASA has identified the course of a killer asteroid named ' Didymos' which will be approaching Earth in October 2022. Find out what will do with it.
- Science News
- 3 min read
Since its early days, NASA has been watching over and tracking the movement of Asteroids. An asteroid impact has the potential to destroy life on an entire planet, hence asteroids have been an object of fear for humans. Currently, NASA is tracking the 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. The space agency also maintains a record of their movement with the help of NASA Asteroid watch data on its official website. Read on to find out about the killer asteroid which could potentially hit Earth.
Killer Asteroid hitting Earth in 2022
Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defence officer said in a statement on its official website, “The first step to stopping a killer asteroid is finding it. There are literally hundreds of thousands of asteroids out there, and we want to separate out those we should keep a closer watch on and monitor over time.”
Johnson revealed that so far, there are 2,078 potentially hazardous asteroids in NASA’s catalogue. In October 2022, a half-mile-wide asteroid called Didymos will approach Earth.
The killer asteroid will be accompanied by its 500-foot-wide moon, which will be orbiting it. Given the huge size of Didymos and its moon, ground-based telescopes will be able to detect the asteroid very soon. They will also be able to detect the durational changes in its orbit around the larger asteroid to measure the effects of the impact.
What does NASA plan to do with the killer asteroid?
NASA has scheduled its DART mission, for a July 2021 launch. The mission will test NASA’s strategy of slamming a half-ton spacecraft built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) into the approaching killer asteroid. Hence, the space agency has planned to take its asteroid shattering spacecraft, seven million miles from Earth. The refrigerator-sized spacecraft will approach Didymos.
However, Didymos will not be on NASA radar. NASA’s DART mission will be eyeing the ‘Didymoon.’ Didymoon itself is big enough to demolish large cities. On the official page 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, the NASA spacecraft will release a shoebox-size camera concocted by the Italian Space Agency.
The camera will witness the spacecraft’s collision with the Didymoon. It will take pictures of the spray of debris and perhaps even of the resulting crater. The collision could potentially decrease the moon’s 12-hour orbit by as much as seven minutes.
Promo Image credit: Shutterstock
Updated 17:32 IST, September 28th 2020