Europe Signs On To Help Save Planet By Smashing Asteroids
One day while you're ordering your latte while swiping left on Tinder hopefuls, you'll feel the earth tremble beneath your feet as a massive asteroid collides with our planet — assuming it doesn't instantly vaporize you. You may chuckle and continue about your syrup spurts and cyber rejections — and that's fair, because there's not really much any one of us can do. But scientists agree that together, humanity has to do something, because it's not a matter of if a catastrophic asteroid impact will happen on Earth, but when. Just ask the dinosaurs.
In fact, NASA has warned that we might get a rude awakening on May 6, 2022, when an asteroid the size of The Great Pyramid of Giza has been projected to collide with Earth, according to Sputnik News. Odds aren't 100 percent, but if it does happen it will likely cause "devastating consequences by wiping out an entire city just in seconds and causing millions of deaths." So there's that.
Asteroids will rock our world
And that knowledge is scary enough that humanity is actually doing something about it, on a huge, sci-fi level. Space.com says NASA and the European Space Agency have teamed up to practice smashing these potential planet-wrecking asteroids. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is "scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in July 2021 and reach the Didymos two-asteroid system in October 2022. The NASA probe will then slam into 'Didymoon,' the 540-foot-wide (165 meters) satellite of the 2,540-foot-wide (775 m) space rock Didymos." The ESA will operate the Hera mission, designed to assess the results of DART through a combination of planetary telescopes and spacecraft which will get up close and personal to the rock carnage.
It's the first time humanity will have attempted to defend itself against interstellar interlopers, and hopefully won't be the last, because the mission won't be complete until after the "Giza" asteroid is projected to hit Earth. So keep your Tinder-swiping fingers crossed that NASA, ESA and SpaceX can come together to do the planet a solid by disintegrating one of our most imminent threats of destruction.