NASA plans to test out a method of preventing an asteroid impact by launching a non-explosive spacecraft into one.
According to Discovery News, the European Space Agency's (ESA) development of the spacecraft has only just begun and the mission is not expected to take place until 2022. The goal will be fairly simple, to see if it is a plausible way to eliminate other future threats from asteroids.
Together with NASA, the ESA has already started work on the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment mission. The first phase of the joint project is called the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM), which involves the ESA sending a spacecraft in Oct. 2020 to meet a binary asteroid system called "Didymos."
AIM will try to put a lander on the smaller of the two, which is the one NASA will later try to obliterate, Discovery News learned. Two years later, NASA will set the Double Asteroid Redirection Test or (DART) in motion.
"AIM will be watching closely as DART hits Didymoon," Ian Carnelli, AIM mission manager at the ESA, told Discovery News. "In the aftermath, it will perform detailed before-and-after comparisons on the structure of the body itself, as well as its orbit, to characterize DART's kinetic impact and its consequences.
"The results will allow laboratory impact models to be calibrated on a large-scale basis, to fully understand how an asteroid would react to this kind of energy. This will shed light on the role the ejecta plume will play - a fundamental part in the energy transfer and under scientific debate for over two decades."
