‘New era of humankind’: Nasa crashes spacecraft into asteroid

Nasa has successfully collided a spacecraft head-on with an asteroid the size of a football pitch.

It was “an unprecedented test” of the US space agency’s “capacity to defend Earth from a doomsday scenario”, said The Guardian.

Travelling at 15,000 miles per hour, the multimillion-dollar spacecraft smashed into the Dimorphos asteroid 6.8 million miles from Earth on Monday evening.

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The ten-month $325m mission, known as Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), “was the first attempt to shift the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space”, reported Voice of America.

Although it will still take weeks to determine how much the asteroid’s path has been altered, Nasa’s director of planetary science, Lori Glaze, hailed the impact as a “new era of humankind, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous hazardous asteroid impact”.

The mission has been compared to the 1990s Hollywood film Armageddon, in which a crew of oil drillers are sent to an asteroid to dig a hole and drop a nuclear bomb into it that will smash the rock apart, so avoiding impact with Earth.

The Telegraph reported that “Nasa does not believe that would be a good strategy for saving Earth, because it could create many pieces that might hit the planet”. Instead the paper said the space agency hopes the Dart head-on impact will alter the trajectory of the asteroid by around 1%, “a celestial nudge which will show it is possible to alter a large object’s trajectory in this way”.

The BBC’s science correspondent Jonathan Amos said that small rocks similar in size to Dimorphos and Didymos, the asteroid around which Dimorphos orbits, could pose a risk to Earth.

“Although sky surveys have identified more than 95% of the monster asteroids that could initiate a global extinction were they to collide with Earth (they won't; their paths have been computed and they won't come near our planet), this still leaves many so-far undetected smaller objects that could create havoc, if only on the regional or city scale,” Amos said.