NASA spacecraft to crash into an asteroid to save earth

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Asteroid Didymos-

• The asteroid with the bull’s-eye on it is Dimorphos, about 7 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) from Earth. 
• It is actually the puny sidekick of a 2,500-foot (780-meter) asteroid named Didymos, Greek for twin. 
• Discovered in 1996, Didymos is spinning so fast that scientists believe it flung off material that eventually formed a moonlet. 
• Dimorphos roughly 525 feet (160 meters) across  orbits its parent body at a distance of less than a mile (1.2 kilometers).
•  Little Dimorphos completes a lap around big Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes.

Dart spacecraft-

• Double Asteroid Redirection Test(DART) is a NASA space mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects.
• The Johns Hopkins lab took a minimalist approach in developing Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — given that it’s essentially a battering ram and faces sure destruction. 
• It has a single instrument: a camera used for navigating, targeting and chronicling the final action. 
• Believed to be essentially a rubble pile, Dimorphos will emerge as a point of light an hour before impact, looming larger and larger in the camera images beamed back to Earth.  
• The spacecraft’s navigation is designed to distinguish between the two asteroids and, in the final 50 minutes, target the smaller one.
• The Dart will zero in on the asteroid on September 26, intent on slamming it head-on at 14,000 mph (22,500 kph). 
• The size of a small vending machine at 1,260 pounds (570 kilograms), the spacecraft will slam into roughly 11 billion pounds (5 billion kilograms) of asteroid.  

Numerous asteroid missions-

• Planet Earth is on an asteroid-chasing roll. NASA has close to a pound (450 grams) of rubble collected from asteroid Bennu headed to Earth.  
• Japan was the first to retrieve asteroid samples, accomplishing the feat twice. 
• China hopes to follow suit with a mission launching in 2025. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, meanwhile, is headed to asteroids near Jupiter, after launching in 2021. 
• Another spacecraft, Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, is loaded into NASA’s new moon rocket awaiting liftoff; it will use a solar sail to fly past a space rock that’s less than 60 feet (18 meters) next year. 
• In the next few years, NASA also plans to launch a census-taking telescope to identify hard-to-find asteroids that could pose risks.  
• The Psyche mission of NASA is a journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. 

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