Stop Armageddon in reality… Asteroid Intercept Project

What if the movie Armageddon becomes reality? Brian May, guitarist of the British rock band Queen, is also a PhD in space engineering. He paused his research for a band activity, but resumed his research in 2007 and obtained his doctorate by writing a thesis. He is a rare scholar in the rock music industry.

This Brian May talks about the possibility and danger of a double asteroid Didimos colliding with Earth. He says that Didimos is made up of two asteroids, and the smaller one is 750m in diameter and 160m in width. About Didimos, scholars around the world have been proposing several theories after several years of research. The mission to deflect orbit is called AIDA (Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment), and it attempts to test whether or not the asteroid orbit will change by hitting a satellite.

To do this, NASA first collides the satellite DART on DDIMOS at a speed of 6 km or more per second. The European Space Agency’s ESA’s HERA then maps the craters created after the DART collision to measure the celestial mass, and then sends a small box-shaped satellite to see if the orbit has changed.

DART, which will hit the asteroid, will be launched at the end of July 2021 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and will arrive at the end of September 2022 when Didimos arrives at 11 million kilometers from Earth.

According to the ESA, the HERA, which will map the crater, will arrive in Didimos by 2026. Didimos is a celestial body that rotates at high speed and is said to rotate once every two hours. It may affect this rotation as well as the trajectory after a DART collision.

Even tens of meters of meteorites that fell in Celabinsk, Russia in 2013, caused damage, including damage to buildings and many injuries. Considering this, even if there is some burning in the atmosphere, if a 160m celestial body falls on the earth, it may be damaging enough to destroy a city. This kind of effort is being made in a place we do not know even now so that the actual version of Armageddon does not occur through repeated verification. Related information can be found here .