NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission

Sony A6500 | Sigma 16mm | f/3.2 | Shutter: 30s | ISO: 2000 Location: Soberanes Point, California, United States

About the mission

On November 23 at 10:21 PM PST, NASA launched their Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission aboard one of SpaceX's Falcon9 rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base. NASA's goal with this mission is to test whether impacting a spacecraft into an asteroid could effectively deviate it and change its course by impact force. This would serve sort of as a "proof of concept" as a defense mechanism against asteroid threats. There are currently no known threat (that we know of). However, NASA wants to be prepared and the idea is simple (but execution isn't). Scientist or anyone really, detects an asteroid in collision course with Earth. Hopefully, it is detected with enough time, so scientist fabricate a spacecraft, and do what they did here, launch and crash it into the asteroid. The impact will hopefully steer the asteroid enough to deviate it away from Earth.

About the shot