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Journalism of Courage
NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully completed its planned collision with the asteroid Dimorphos at 4.44 AM IST on September 27 in what is humanity’s first planetary defence test. To celebrate the success of the mission, Google Search has introduced an easter egg. If you search for “NASA DART” on Google, the search engine will display a small animation of the DART spacecraft crashing into the search page.
Once you search for “NASA DART,” your Google Search results page will show a representation of the DART spacecraft flying across the page until it disappears in an animated crash that will leave the page askew.
The purpose of the DART mission is to test a planetary defence technique called the “kinetic impactor” method where a high-speed spacecraft will make a controlled collision with an asteroid that poses a threat to Earth. This is intended to give the asteroid a small nudge that will ever so slightly shift its trajectory.
The asteroid Dimorphos does not present a threat to the Earth but scientists will use data from the crash to ascertain whether the kinetic impactor method is viable in such a scenario. In the event of an asteroid that actually poses a threat to our planet, a kinetic impact will only need to delay or hasten the asteroid’s trajectory by about 7 minutes in order to save the Earth. This is because the Earth takes about 7 minutes to travel a distance equal to its diameter. If an asteroid on course to crash into the earth were delayed or hastened by seven minutes, it will miss the Earth when the two celestial bodies’ trajectories intersect.
