To protect humanity, NASA will deviate the trajectory of an asteroid

It is a scenario worthy of Hollywood, and yet very real. NASA is preparing to take off on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday an unprecedented mission: by projecting a spacecraft at 24,000 km / h against an asteroid, it hopes to modify its trajectory and thus help humanity to protect itself from a potential collision in the future. This test "will be historic", declared during a press conference Tom Statler, NASA scientist participating in this mission. "For the first time, mankind will change the motion of a natural celestial body in space." This is only a general rehearsal, the asteroid in question representing in no way a threat to the Earth. But the objective is taken very seriously by the American space agency. It lists just over 27,500 near-Earth asteroids of all sizes, none of which pose a threat in the next hundred years. But experts estimate that they only know about 40% of asteroids measuring 140 meters or more, those capable of devastating an entire region.

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