LONDON: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have joined forces to shoot an asteroid with a spacecraft in what the space agencies are calling the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).
The Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission, which the DART test is a part of, is a joint international collaboration between NASA, ESA, DLR, OCA, and JHU/APL. AIDA’s primary goals are to smash a spacecraft into a potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid and to measure and characterize the deflection caused by the impact, according to the ESA.
In the first half of the join AIDA mission, the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) which is scheduled to launch in October of 2020, the European Space Agency will will target the binary asteroid system of Didymos, which is composed of an 800-meter wide main body orbited by a smaller asteroid informally referred to as “Didymoon.” The smaller asteroid, Didymoon, is what the joint operation will target for redirection.
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