Humanity could face one less doomsday scenario if NASA has its way. On Friday, the space agency announced plans to redirect the course of a small asteroid approaching Earth, as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), according to a NASA press release. The release notes that asteroids hit Earth nearly every day, but most are small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. But the DART project — a joint effort between NASA and the John Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory in Maryland — is for the asteroids that are too big to break up — those that could have severe consequences for the Earth if they hit. “DART would be NASA’s first mission to demonstrate what’s known as the kinetic impactor technique — striking the asteroid to shift its orbit — to defend against a potential future asteroid impact,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer in Washington, READ MORE
