While we were all busy on Thanksgiving enjoying turkey and all the trimmings, NASA was busy kickin’ some ass — ASTEROID, that is!
Science
Last week, NASA initiated a special test mission to prevent what it called the ‘very unlikely event’ of a huge space rock crashing into earth and destroying all life as we know it. Dubbed the Double Asteroid Redirection Test probe, or DART, the mission launched a missile toward a tiny rock millions of miles from Earth and collided with it for the purpose of altering its trajectory. NASA wanted assurance that DART could nudge an asteroid off course and the space agency succeeded in learning all it needed to know if such an event were to ever occur.
NASA was quick to alert the public that this was “only a test” and that no deadly asteroid was actually spiraling toward the earth.
Too bad those words didn’t age well.
According to ABC News, an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building is expected to enter earth’s orbit sometime in late December. Scientists say the space rock could pack as much power as a nuclear bomb if it were to actually hit the earth.
However, officials have since tripped over each other to reassure the public that space rocks are a very common occurrence and that this particular asteroid will pass so far from earth, it will present no legitimate threat to the planet.
“Astronomically, these are coming close to the Earth. But in human terms, they are millions of miles away and can get no closer than millions of miles away,” Paul Chodas, the director of the CNEOS at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said.
“Over the last 20 years of doing this, we’ve had a total of four asteroids — tiny, tiny asteroids — that have been observed in space and headed for the Earth, and have impacted the atmosphere and burned up. They became a bright fireball in each case,” Chodas continued. “In two of the cases, we’ve predicted where they would hit ahead of time and predicted where to find the meteorites. Expeditions have gone out and found the meteorites. So our mathematics work pretty well.”
Still, it’s quite a coincidence that NASA just happened to be testing how to push an asteroid off course during the Thanksgiving holiday (when nobody was really paying attention to the news) and while a deadly asteroid was actually heading toward the earth. It’s also a coincidence that NASA has plans to build a nuclear power plant on the moon within this decade. Also, let’s not forget the US plans to build a colony on Mars where humans could one day live (but, why?).
Are we sure our science and space officials are truly telling us everything? Hmmm…
