'Avenge the dinosaurs': Elon Musk responds as NASA's DART heads towards an asteroid

NASA has successfully launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission on Wednesday to test technologies to protect Earth from hazardous asteroids. This one-of-a-kind mission came to be as scientists are willing to avoid a future where humanity gets wiped out by a massive asteroid just like the dinosaurs once did. Talking about dinosaurs, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made an amusing response regarding the extinction of the species that once roamed the Earth. In a tweet posted by Musk today, the billionaire hilariously wrote “avenge the dinosaurs” as the DART spacecraft is on its way to intentionally crash into an asteroid.

Musk's tweet came in as a response to NASA's which read "Asteroids have been hitting the Earth for billions of years. Now, we begin to make it stop." Soon after the response caught the eye of netizens, they chimed with numerous responses of their own. Check them out below.

NASA's one-of-a-kind DART mission

The mission, which has been launched as part of preparations against hazardous asteroids lifted off on November 24 from Space Launch Complex 4 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This mission is the most unique regarding asteroids as it would be the first to demonstrate the planetary defence technique which is known as kinetic impact. The suicidal spacecraft will travel over 100 crore kilometres before reaching the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and colliding with its moonlet Dimorphos. Both the asteroids are massive in size as the former measures 780 metres in diameter whereas the latter is roughly 160 metres in diameter.

Notably, NASA's spacecraft will ram into Dimorphos, the smaller moonlet orbiting the larger Didymos asteroid, at a speed of 24,140 kmph to change its course. According to NASA, DART is a carefully planned demonstration that will help determine if kinetic impactor technology, which requires flying a spacecraft directly into a small Solar System body, can serve as a reliable method of asteroid deflection in the event where a hazard ever heads for the Earth. The scientists will observe if the crash between Dimorphos and the spacecraft changes the time taken by the moonlet to orbit Didymos, something upon which the success of the mission depends.

Image: Twitter/@ElonMusk/AP