NASA’s DART mission will be eyeing the ‘Didymoon.’ Didymoon itself is big enough to demolish large cities. However, Didymos will not be on NASA radar. Read | Two Asteroids, the size of an airplane, to fly by close to Earth on September 23 The refrigerator-sized spacecraft will approach Didymos. Hence, the space agency has planned to take its asteroid shattering spacecraft, seven million miles from Earth. The mission will test NASA’s strategy of slamming a half-ton spacecraft built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) into the approaching killer asteroid. NASA has scheduled its DART mission, for a July 2021 launch. Read | School-bus sized Asteroid 2020 SW to pass close to Earth on September 24 What does NASA plan to do with the killer asteroid? They will also be able to detect the durational changes in its orbit around the larger asteroid to measure the effects of the impact. Given the huge size of Didymos and its moon, ground-based telescopes will be able to detect the asteroid very soon. The killer asteroid will be accompanied by its 500-foot-wide moon, which will be orbiting it. In October 2022, a half-mile-wide asteroid called Didymos will approach Earth. Johnson revealed that so far, there are 2,078 potentially hazardous asteroids in NASA’s catalogue. There are literally hundreds of thousands of asteroids out there, and we want to separate out those we should keep a closer watch on and monitor over time.” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defence officer said in a statement on its official website, “The first step to stopping a killer asteroid is finding it. Read | China all set to launch an asteroid mining robot in November Killer Asteroid hitting Earth in 2022

Read on to find out about the killer asteroid which could potentially hit Earth. The space agency also maintains a record of their movement with the help of NASA Asteroid watch data on its official website.

Currently, NASA is tracking the course of several hundreds of asteroids that could potentially be hazardous to human life on Earth.įor this exact same purpose, NASA has deployed multiple Asteroid watching satellites. An asteroid impact has the potential to destroy life on an entire planet, hence asteroids have been an object of fear for humans. Since its early days, NASA has been watching over and tracking the movement of Asteroids.

Meteoroid that strikes earth