The importance of the Dart Mission.

On September 26, the impact of the Dart mission ship against the dimorphic asteroid occurred almost 11 million kilometers from Earth, an asteroid that is between 160 - 170 meters in diameter and that orbits like a Moon to another largest called Didimos about 780 meters in diameter.

The objective of the mission was to deflect the Dimorphos asteroid a little bit, the ship was not loaded with explosives, what it would be is to apply a technique known as kinetic impact (impact by movement), which is basically the same thing we do when we give a hammer or a punch, we hit something with the energy product of the speed and mass of an object in the case of the Hammer, the metallic head and in the case of the punch, the mass of our fist.

With the impact, what was exactly intended was to shorten the orbit of dimorphs by approximately 1% or 10 minutes, in this way the movement of the asteroid would be altered, but it would continue to orbit Didimos and both would continue to revolve around the sun without posing a risk to our planet, because it must be clarified that neither of the two asteroids posed a risk, they were just a target that had the ideal characteristics to carry out this test.

The risk of an asteroid colliding with the earth is real, it is only a matter of time before an object with a diameter of just over 100 m like the one that hit Tunguska Siberia, on the morning of June 30, will hit again. 1908, devastating 2,150 square kilometers, with the power of 185 atomic bombs like the one on Hiroshima.

If it occurs over the ocean or the desert, it would not be very problematic, but if a similar object hits a populated area, the disaster could be colossal and here we have a very serious problem, because the human population has multiplied, if at the beginning of the 20th century when the Tunguska event occurred we were about 1700 million humans today according to the UN the world population will reach 8 billion humans on November 15, 2022.

There are 95 cities that have an area of ​​more than 1000 square kilometers, some metropolitan areas like the greater Los Angeles with 91,000 square kilometers are larger than a country like Austria and almost as big as Portugal, the number of asteroid impacts is not increased, but what did increase is the Diana, the area where an impact can cause damage, that is, our homes and our infrastructure.

To avoid disaster there are many plans on paper and in the movies, but we need real data, we need engineers, astronomers, technicians who know what to do, who have experienced it and who have the right tools to carry out the planetary defense effectively, we must have a contingency plan, something that the dinosaurs did not have but neither did they have in Tunguska, nor in Chelyabinsk in 2013 and therefore it was necessary to carry out the Dart mission and other missions to come.

There are many asteroids out there..

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