The American space agency, NASA, said that its recent attempt to divert the path of an asteroid was successful, reports Radio Free Europe.
A space probe that hit a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles from Earth managed to change its orbit, NASA said Oct. 11 in announcing the results of its save-the-world test.
The space agency conducted a test two weeks ago to see if a potentially dangerous asteroid could be diverted from Earth's path in the future.
The DART spacecraft carved a crater into asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, ejecting debris into space and creating a dust trail. It took days of telescope observations from Chile and South Africa to determine how much the impact changed the path of the 160-meter-long asteroid.
Neither asteroid posed a threat to Earth and still does as they continue their journey around the Sun.
Planetary defense experts have an approach to divert an asteroid or comet out of the way, given enough time, rather than blowing it up and creating multiple pieces that could fall to Earth.
"This is spectacular that we've taken as a first step ... but we really need to have warning time for a technique like this to be effective," said mission manager Nancy Chabo of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft and managed the mission. worth 325 million dollars.
Launched last year, the ATM-sized DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was destroyed when it hit an asteroid 11 million kilometers from Earth at a speed of 22.500 kilometers per hour.
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