Today, NASA is gearing up for something very special and detrimental to the future of science and safety, and you, yes, you can look to the skies to see it.  

According to Reuters, 10 months ago NASA launched a spacecraft with one mission, to test for the first time ever an interplanetary defense system to guard against asteroid collisions with Earth.  

This “Impactor” vehicle which according to Reuters is about the size of a vending machine, will fly into Dimorphos and Didymos, an asteroid system in an area about the size of a football field with only kinetic energy to test if it can deflect a smaller asteroid within its orbit, to knock it out of a potential trajectory like Earth. This will all happen from a distance of about 6 million miles from Earth. Fairly close, but at a safe distance and completely out of the trajectory of Earth itself, Whew! Am I right?

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NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART’s target will be a little asteroid called Moonlet, traveling at 15,000 miles per hour effectively destroying itself to move the asteroid from its current trajectory forever.  

According to Reuters, DART’s camera will be recording everything up to impact, taking pictures at the rate of one image per second right up to impact sending them back to earth for NASA to stream them live on NASA TV this evening.  

As I motioned before, yes you will be able to see it this evening live streamed. The impact will happen around 7pm Eastern Daylight Time and be monitored from The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

Here is the YouTube link right to the double asteroid space action.

 

 

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