NASA launches mission to orbit Earth

The US space agency NASA has successfully launched a defense mission 'Dart' aimed at colliding a spacecraft with a planet in order to see if the spacecraft collided with the spacecraft coming towards the Earth. Can save from destruction or not.

The robotic spacecraft was launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Wendenburg Airport, about 150 miles from Los Angeles, at 10:20 pm local Pacific time.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will test NASA's ability to orbit a planet using kinetic energy. The purpose of the mission is to make the robotic spacecraft collide with the planet at such a speed that our planet would not be in their way so that its direction would change so much.

The DART mission targets an asteroid that is only a fraction of the size of the catastrophic Chicxulub. Chaksolub was the asteroid that hit the Earth 66 million years ago, killing most of all species on Earth.

The target planet is not on track to hit Earth in the future. But scientists say relatively small planets are far more common and could be considered a major threat to Earth in the near future.

The dart mission will target a "small moon-like" planet, about the size of a football stadium. The planet is part of a system of two planets called Dadimos, in which the planet revolves around a planet five times its own size. The word dadimos is used in Greek for twins.

The target asteroid, called Demorphs, is one of the smallest space objects that has been given a permanent name. But with 525 feet (160) kilometers in diameter, the known planets have the same size as conventional planets.

These planets are the remnants of debris that formed 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was formed. Scientists chose the Dedimos system because it is relatively close to Earth and because it is part of a double system that makes it suitable for observing the consequences of a collision.

Lindley Johnson, NASA's defense officer for the Earth, told the media this month that the only way to avoid killer asteroids is to identify them well in advance and find ways to divert them.

"We would not want to be in a situation where an asteroid is moving towards the earth, then we are experiencing this kind of capability," he said.

The report includes additional reporting by Reuters