NASA WANTS TO SHOOT AN ASTEROID

What better way to understand how to deflect an incoming asteroid than to smash into one to see what happens?

Like for real? Lol it looks like NASA is watching too many sci fy movies oo...

This may sound like the storyline to a certain science fiction movie involving a team of oil drillers, but this is science fact, and Europe has started planning a mission to map a small target asteroid that NASA will attempt to shoot with a speeding spacecraft, no nukes required.

Yes, this will be the mother of all asteroid missions that will see the collaboration of international space agencies unite to tackle an ever-present global threat.

As the first half of the joint Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment mission, the European Space Agency this month has started planning for the launch of its Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) in October 2020.

AIM’s target will be the binary asteroid system of Didymos, which is composed of a main 800 meter-wide hunk of space rock circled by a smaller 170 meter-wide asteroid informally known as “Didymoon.” It’s the smaller asteroid that the joint NASA/ESA mission is interested in bullying.

Once AIM arrives at Didymoon, it will carry out an impressive array of mapping and surveying tasks, utilizing small cubesats that will be launched from the main satellites to gather data from the asteroid’s vicinity. ESA also hopes to land a small lander on Didymoon to complete the work. AIM will utilize a high-bandwidth laser communications system, the Optical Ground Station, based on Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands (located off the coast of Morocco) to relay data throughout, producing high-resolution optical and thermal maps.

Hmmm issoke.. Carry on...

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