SpaceX launched on Tuesday night (Wednesday in GMT zone) from the United States, its Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA's first-of-its-kind Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which is supposed to test planetary defense against potentially dangerous space objects.
The rocket was launched from Space Launch Complex 4 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 22:21 (GMT-8). DART is scheduled to separate from Falcon 9 after reaching outer space, and travel towards the binary Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid.
DART is expected to collide with the smaller Dimorphos asteroid by the end of 2022, at a speed of 24,000 kilometers per hour. According to NASA's Planetary Science Division Lori Glaze, this is a difficult task for specialists to carry out.
It is so because "the asteroid we are trying to hit is about the size of a football stadium. And we're going to try and hit it with something the size of a refrigerator," Lori Glaze explained earlier.
Didymos, a binary asteroid discovered in 1996, passed within 0.05 AU (less than 7.5 million kilometers) of the Earth on November 13, 2003. It has a satellite, Dimorphos, which orbits with a period of 11.9 hours, hence the name 'Didymos', meaning 'twin' in ancient Greek.
